Obama in Seoul for nuclear summit

His major task will be reminding skeptical naysayers why it's okay for the United States to have nukes but not North Korea and Iran.

From CNN:

President Barack Obama arrived in South Korea on Sunday for a three-day trip centered on an international nuclear security summit in Seoul.

He flew into Seoul, where he is expected to hold a bilateral meeting with his South Korean counterpart Lee Myung-bak.

Top officials from 54 countries, including China and Russia, will attend the summit meeting on Monday and Tuesday.

But its message of international cooperation has been overshadowed by North Korea's announcement last week that it is planning to carry out a rocket-powered satellite launch in April.

South Korea has said it considers the satellite launch an attempt to develop a nuclear-armed missile, while the United States has warned the move would jeopardize a food-aid agreement reached with Pyongyang in early March.

President Lee has already said he will use the summit to drum up international support against the actions of his northern neighbor.

North Korea says it has a right to a peaceful space program and has invited international space experts and journalists to witness the launch.

Nuclear non-proliferation is a major reason (but by no means the sole reason) for continued US military support of South Korea and Japan, two countries which have foregone their building their own nuclear arsenal in exchange for a robust alliance with the United States.

Hemming in a virally expansionist China is another major reason, but even China doesn't want North Korea to get nukes because (a) it makes it more likely that historical adversary Japan will get them and (b) rogue nukes could end up in the hands of Muslim separatists along China's western frontier. Ditto with Russia on Pyongyang having nukes.

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The Kim Jong-nam story was all a ruse!

Really, I'm telling you
these are not pajamas!

Remember that story of Kim Jong-nam being booted out of his Macau luxury digs because little brother Kim Jong-un got angry at him for questioning his ability to lead, badmouthing the regime, condemning hereditary succession, and predicting the collapse of the entire country? We all assumed that, yes, even fraternal love has its limits and Big Brother Jong-nam should run for fear of his life.

Well, it turns out that the entire episode wasn't true at all, according to the Macau hotel that supposedly had kicked out their famed deadbeat guest. It was apparently a ruse from a Russian media outlet that was trying to punk the rest of the world.

From the New York Times:

But the story, which apparently originated in Argumenti i Fakti, a Russian newsweekly, was not true, according to a spokeswoman for the hotel in question, the five-star Grand Lapa Macao.

A spokeswoman for the hotel, part of the Mandarin Oriental chain, denied the story categorically to Rendezvous. She said Mr. Kim, 40, had never stayed at the Grand Lapa nor had he run up any charges there. She did say that he popped up in Macau “from time to time,’’ but not at her hotel.

The Russian magazine even had quotes from “an unnamed source” at the hotel who said: “He gave us his Visa Gold card but it ended up having no money on the account.”

Boy I guess everyone has kyeran on their face (really, that's kyeran).

Not sure what to make of this. One wonders if someone was running a systems analysis to see how various parties would react. For example, would Seoul's or Washington's or Tokyo's intelligence apparatus scramble to see if they could take KJN under their protective wing?

Anyway, my earlier plan (prior to this news story) is still intact: the next time I'm in Macau I'm going to see if I can track him down in one of the casino piano bars and do a Monster Island interview. That would be quite the coup (and probably the only coup we'll ever see associated with Kim Jong-nam).

UPDATE:
One prominent K-blogging figure responded to this story by saying, "There is such an intelligence black hole with North Korea that people are starting to make shit up."

To which I replied: "Starting?!" The Western, South Korean, Japanese, and lately even European media has long been making up stuff to fill the void of information they don't know.

Over at One Free Korea, commenter Spelunker referred to the "unreliable obscure source" as "bad news." And that has inspired me to refer to such questionable Russian information sources as the "bad news bears."

Questionable information sources from North Korea, especially those adding Kim Jong-un's name to the official hagiography, will continue to be called "grim fairy tales."

...

Kim and Medvedev want to lay some pipe; Will they get stopcock-blocked by Kim Jong-il?

Bedfellows. 

As I've previously noted, I've been rather busy lately. It's very time-consuming finding stories for the Los Angeles Times weeks or months before they appear in print. Like this one:

For newfound economic bedfellows South Korea and Russia, the biggest question over a proposed natural gas pipeline is a dark twist on the famous line from "Field of Dreams": If you build it, will North Korea mess with it?

South Korea President Lee Myung-bak this week met with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in St. Petersburg to discuss a project to pipe Siberian natural gas to the Korean peninsula.

The project faces numerous barriers beyond the region’s frigid cold, namely that North Korean strongman Kim Jong Il — whose regime would also be served by the pipeline that runs the length of the nation — could decide to use the project for political leverage, shutting down the flow of gas just to mess with Seoul.

South Korea has good reason to worry. In recent years, it has taken a harder line on sending aid to the starving masses in North Korea until that country ceases provocative acts such as two recent attacks against the South.

Kim, always the political chess player, could use the pipeline for payback of old scores with South Korea. "Look, the gas is flowing. Oops, now it’s not!"

If this all sounds familiar, I said as much over two months ago...

Pyongyang notes that the high-tech pipeline would come equipped with a money spigot that will channel cash directly into Pyongyang vaults whenever the mainline is shut off.

... and again six weeks ago when I described the pipeline as a "win-win" situation:

And by that he means that the Pyongyang regime wins if they cooperate and keep it running, and they win if they go all high-jinks brinksmanship on Seoul by shutting it off.

But seriously, it is good to know that President Lee is soberly considering what all this means. A natural gas pipeline held hostage by the North could be a disaster for the South, causing Seoul to be held hostage to the whims of Kim Jong-il or his son (Ha! Like that will ever happen!) or the ruling junta that takes over after the Dear Leader kicks the bucket.

Is this a good idea? Do we really need a pipeline through frènemy* territory? South Korea makes loads of ships that could make regular runs of natural gas from Vladivostok to Pusan, so why not ship it through the East Sea (Sea of Japan) instead?

* Frènemy: In this case, not friend+enemy, but a portmanteau of frère and enemy, with that italicized word meaning brother. Hence the accent grave [`] in frènemy. Maybe I should write it frèrnemy to avoid any confusion. 

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Is Sochi still a good choice for the 2014 Winter Olympics?

I'm going to sound like an insensitive jackass for saying this so soon after the horrible incident that left dozens dead, but the bombing at Domodedovo International Airport on the outskirts of Moscow has underscored concerns I've previously expressed that the Sochi venue for the 2014 Winter Olympics may have been a poor choice. In 2007, when the IOC met, the South Korean mountainous county of P'yŏngch'ang (Pyeongchang) lost out to the summer resort city of Sochi, Russia, when then-President Vladimir Putin showed up and tacitly threatened the European members of the IOC that there would be dire consequences if Russia was not awarded the games.

In addition to concerns about the weather in the palm-lined Russian resort city (which became an issue at the 2010 games in Vancouver, a venue that beat out Pyongchang four years earlier), I wrote about concerns that Sochi was just "a few hundred miles from Chechnya, a major producer of counterfeit American dollars and angry Muslim separatist suicide bombers with a serious score to settle with Moscow." Almost exactly a year after that post, the bombing at the airport has become the latest in a series of terror attacks that should make us seriously question (a) whether Chechen separatists will use the high-profile games or the FIFA World Cup four years later as a prime target and (b) whether Russian authorities are even capable of stopping that.

And I'm certainly not the only one thinking this. It's certainly on the IOC's mind enough that they issued a statement about it:

The International Olympic Committee has "no doubt" that Russia will deliver a safe Winter Games in Sochi in 2014 despite security concerns raised by the suicide bombing attack at Moscow's main airport.

"Unfortunately, terrorism is a global phenomenon and no region is exempt, which is why security at the games is a top priority for the IOC," the Olympic body told The Associated Press in a statement Tuesday. "At the Olympics, security is the responsibility of the local authorities, and we have no doubt that the Russian authorities will be up to the task."

FIFA also expressed support for Russia, which will host the 2018 World Cup in 13 cities. It will host the Confederations Cup as a test event in 2017.

"FIFA is confident that Russian authorities will ensure adequate security plans are in place," soccer's governing body said in a statement.

To be fair, the downing of Korean Airlines flight 858, an apparent terror attack planned by Kim Jong-il himself ten months before the 1988 Seoul Olympics, was no reason to change the venue of South Korea's showcase event, but South Korea was not the victim of repeated and seemingly constant terror attacks. Russia, on the other hand, seems unable to escape such events thanks to its on-going separatist war. The Guardian has a list of major terror attacks in the post-Soviet era.

And if the separatists are able to pull off such attacks in Moscow, at a place like an airport that is supposed to be relatively secure, imagine how easy it would be to visit such assaults in Sochi, which is only a few hundred miles away from Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. Moreover, the separatists who are remind the world of the carnage in Chechnya would want to strike at such a time when the entire world is watching. Sure, lots of innocent people would die, but these folks have shown that even killing schoolchildren is acceptable to them.

Now, don't get me wrong: this is not sour grapes and I certainly don't think that Pyongchang should be retroactively awarded the games. In fact, if a venue change were to come, it should not be now, but sometime later, with something else as a pretext. The terrorists should not score a victory this way. But I do think the IOC should come up with a plan whereby they declare the summer resort of Sochi just not on schedule or some such, and then have Vancouver or Nagano or Lillehammer or some other prior venue host the games. (Frankly, even if Pyongchang is awarded the 2018 games, I don't think its on-going preparations make it ready to host four years ahead of time.)

Switching already-chosen venues for world events is not so unusual. Or, at least, thinking about switching venues is not so unusual. Civil unrest in South Korea in the spring and summer of 1987 led then-mayor of Los Angeles Tom Bradley to suggest that L.A. would be willing to host the Olympics for a second time in a row if the IOC decided Seoul was too dangerous.

In 2002 and 2003, as it became clear Athens was way behind schedule for construction of venues for the 2004 games, some suggested moving the games to Seoul or Los Angeles, which had the infrastructure ready to go. Indeed, had that happened, perhaps Greece might not be in the debt crisis it now finds itself in.

More recently, some have considered whether or not Qatar should remain as the host of the 2022 FIFA World Cup if doing so would require a calendar change to January (which would interfere with regular soccer and the Winter Olympics), as FIFA head Sepp Blatter has suggested, to keep the players from dropping dead in the 45°C desert heat. Indeed, that last one underscores that Pyongchang and South Korea keeps losing out to places that probably should not have won the hosting rights for these events at all.

But let's be realistic: On February 7, 2014, we will almost certainly be watching the opening of the winter Olympics in Sochi. And I hope and pray that everything goes off without a hitch. Despite worries about attacks in 1988 and again during the Korea/Japan World Cup in 2002, the games were safe and secure (it was the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, I believe, that last saw a terror attack), although North Korea did try something out in the Yellow Sea just as the games were ending.

I do think Russia, if it sets its mind to it and takes this seriously, can do the same. But next time, IOC and FIFA, take this kind of thing a bit more seriously.

Holy Moses! A mass exodus of North Korea workers from Russia!

The Independent is talking up the return of some twenty thousand North Korean workers in the Russian Far East back to North Korea as a sign that the North may be preparing for war:

A mass exodus of North Korean workers from the Far East of Russia is under way, according to reports coming out of the region. As the two Koreas edged towards the brink of war this week, it appears that the workers in Russia have been called back to aid potential military operations.

Vladnews agency, based in Vladivostok, reported that North Korean workers had left the town of Nakhodka en masse shortly after the escalation of tension on the Korean peninsula earlier this week. "Traders have left the kiosks and markets, workers have abandoned building sites, and North Korean secret service employees working in the region have joined them and left," the agency reported.

The workers are largely employed in construction, they are strictly controlled by Nork handlers who keep a close eye on all their activities, and most of their money is believed to go back to North Korea through government accounts.

Now what this all means is anyone's guess. I'd start by asking, Is this rare? I recall back in the mid-1990s, when the peninsula seemed on the brink of war over North Korea's nuclear program, several Western media outlets reported that things were so tense in South Korea that the authorities were conducting air raid drills. Yep, the turista journalistas who knew little about South Korea except that it was below North Korea were reporting that monthly air raid drills were a new response to all the tension. It would not be outside the realm of possibility that a routine or coincidental return of workers is being seen as a sign of something it's not.

But what if it is a deliberate response to the North-engineered crisis, Does this mean the DPRK military needs all the bodies it can get? I would think construction workers who can't even be trusted not to defect would make lousy soldiers (also because they lack recent military training). Surely a donnybrook in the Yellow Sea would warrant the deployment of actual soldiers.

If there is a connection with the Yellow Sea crisis, Could it be that Pyongyang fears these expat workers will flee if chaos erupts back in the Homeland? To me, this feels like a better explanation. Maybe things back inside the DPRK are shakier than we realize (which could be the reason for the Yŏnpyŏng-do shelling in the first place). If I were in charge of North Korea and I thought a war was going to break out, I'd want twenty thousand potential guerrilla fighters to stay outside the country until they're needed. But that's me. (Actually, I'd sign over the DPRK into some kind of confederation, and then I'd run for president.)

Another question to ask is, Is North Korea just messing with our heads? Though they do lose some hard currency by bringing the construction workers home, there may be some value in making the outside world think they're bringing back the workers for some military purpose. And as an added fringe benefit, it forces people like me to waste mental energy trying to figure out what they're up to.

UPDATE:
Joshua Stanton, citing this link from NK Economy Watch, suggests there may be something to my idea that the North Korean workers in Russia might take off if there is chaos on the Peninsula.

North Korean workers in Vladivostok during happier (and warmer) times. 
[source]

Yeah, you go stand next to them, Governor.

It was obviously a slip, but Sarah Palin, who could easily gain her party's nomination in 2012, said when asked what we should do about the situation on the Korean peninsula that "we've gotta stand with our North Korean allies."



Now if I'm going to give President Obama a pass for thinking he visited fifty-seven states* then I'll cut Palin some slack on this one. After all, actor John Cusack made the same mistake, while in South Korea even... so I'll give Sarah Palin a pass since she can only see the Koreas from her house**.

But the pass is just for this one. Rack up too many slips like this and I start to wonder if you really know about the stuff you're supposed to know about.

My real beef is with the bogus image of President Obama she's putting forth with this quote in the same interview:

... We're not having a lot of faith that the White House is coming out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea is gonna do, so this speaks to a bigger picture that certainly scares me.

That is nothing but mindless pandering to an old idea that the Democrats look weak to our enemies (while the Republicans inspire fear, I guess). Clearly Sarah Palin is unfamiliar with One Free Korea's Joshua Stanton and his Plan B, a get-tough set of sanctions and actions with real teeth to them that even he admits Obama is clearly implementing, unlike his Republican predecessor or President Clinton.

Sarah Palin simply does not know what she's talking about. She is a good candidate, demographics-wise, and she is being coached and fed policy memos to turn her into less of a paper tiger. Surely the Republicans have someone better to offer than that.

*Which he doesn't. It's clear from the video that a groggy Senator Obama was thinking "fifty" in his head — our total number of states — when he started counting backwards to arrive at the answer "forty-seven," which came out "fifty-seven." I cannot excuse him, however, for mispronouncing espouse.

**Sarah Palin never said she could see Russia from her house. She said it was possible to see Russia from an island in Alaska (which is true), but the "I can see Russia from my house" was a line from Tina Fey's impression of her. And while we're at it, Al Gore never said he invented the Internet.

Russia halts international adoptions to US

As we've often seen in Korea, international adoption can be a touchy issue, fraught with emotion (though cooler heads ultimately prevail, usually). I can only imagine how badly this would have played out in the some parts of the South Korean media had this been a Korean adoptee instead of a Russian:

Russia has frozen all adoptions to the United States, the foreign ministry announced Thursday as national outrage simmered over a towheaded 7-year-old Russian orphan sent alone on a plane back to Moscow by his adoptive mother.

A U.S. delegation is due in Moscow in coming days to discuss the crisis with Russian officials. Russia is pressing the United States to sign an agreement that would more carefully screen would-be parents and monitor the families upon their return to the United States, foreign ministry officials have said.

"Russia believes that only an agreement which will contain effective tools for Russian and U.S. officials to monitor the living conditions of adopted Russian children will ensure that recent tragedies in the United States will not be repeated," foreign ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko said at a briefing Thursday. ...

Ever since the child turned up waiflike in the Moscow airport with nothing to explain himself but a letter from his adoptive mother calling him "mentally unstable," anger has boiled in Russia.

Substitute Russia and Moscow for Korea and Seoul and I think we have our answer (and yes, I recognize the inherent unfairness of knocking Korea for something that is purely hypothetical and hasn't happened, but it's not like I'm always engaged in this kind of practice).

Peray says "nobody was fired at the Korea Times"

In relation to this post and this post on the controversy surrounding Russian complaints about the syndicated political cartoons that appear in the Korea Times, Monsieur Stephane Peray (the cartoonist in question) wrote a second email to me:

By the way Kushido , if you want to have a scoop and be the first blog to give reliable informations – here’s one : NOBODY was fired at the Korea Times – this information was written in Russian papers without any check and blogs in SK have relayed the information. Of course if someone has to be fired – I should be the one ( I even offer to give my demission instead of apologizing ), nobody has to lose his job because of my cartoons but me – I wouldn’t accept that . But they are still publishing my cartoons.

Thank you for the update, sir.

We're still wondering if there was a shake-up (a lot of anglophones in Korea aren't fond of the quality of journalism at the KT), but any shake-up would not necessarily have anything to do with the cartoons.

Peray fires back

Rather than attach this to my already overly long post on the "firing" of Stephane Peray from the Korea Times, I will just make this a post in and of itself.

As when the controversy came up about his cartoons on the Australian bush fire, I decided it only fair to get his own input on the matter, so I emailed him. And he responded.

Here's what I wrote today:

Right now the Korea-related blogs are discussing (see here, here, and here) your apparent firing from the KT (according to Pravda).

I wonder if you'd like to share your thoughts on that.

And here's how he responded:

Well, I have already answered 2 interviews so far and another 2 interviews are coming and I have very little time these past 2 days to do my work. These Russian are crazy and they are trying to export their standard of low-freedom of press outside Russia. I have the support of many newspapers and colleague journalists – reporters without borders has been noticed. BUT I am not very happy with various blogs who are unprofessionally taking advantage of the situation to drag me in the mud. Just because they hate my cartoons , they – as americains – shouldn’t stand side by side with The Russians who do not support Freedom of the press. That’s sad , it shows that people like freedom of the press EXCEPT when it’s an opinion contrary to them . It’s called ‘ having no principle ! ‘ …

Shot some questions and I’ll try to answer it quickly but excuse my lack of time… Best, Stephff

It should be clear that by "these Russians are crazy" he means those Russians who are going after those who have printed his cartoons, and not necessarily Russians in general.

At any rate, I look forward to reading those interviews.

UPDATE (5:32 p.m. KST):
Monsieur Peray has written me a second email telling me "nobody was fired at the Korea Times."

The devil's advocate fears Pravda (Or, Why the Korea Times's Thailand-based French cartoonist, who should have been fired long ago, should not be fired now)

I'm no fan of the work of Korea Times's Monsieur Stephane Peray, an internationally syndicated political cartoonist who is based in Thailand. In fact, I've been critical of his work a number of times (e.g., "Oh, dear God" and "Exhibit 62 why you shouldn't choose your cartoonist through contests involving submissions of box tops from Froot Loops packages"), and I mockingly commended him for pushing the envelope by inadvertently getting the Korea Times to print the P-word, a no-no even in places less conservative than Korea.

Here's what I wrote last year:

Sometimes you look at a cartoon and you have to look long and hard to figure it out, because it’s so subtle or its meaning so complex.

But the KT guy’s cartoons seem the opposite. Looking at them to discern their message reminds me of my nephew coming back from preschool and showing me his fingerpainting. As he says, “Look! Look!” I am in a panic because I can’t figure it out and I don’t want to upset him… I scan for clues, but what looks like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon turns out to actually be, according to my nephew, a dinosaur devouring a cow.

In other words, our (the Korea Times readership) inability to “get” his cartoons may not suggest anything bad about us. Rather, it may mean that the cartoons themselves are simply lame, stupid, childish, and/or just plain unfunny. In some ways this lack of talent by someone in a rarefied journalistic position who is held onto despite such universal opposition is so… well… Sheltonesque.

I have long thought the guy's work did not belong in the KT, and now I may have gotten my wish. According to Pravda, the KT has fired Monsieur Peray. This is being talked about at Chosun Bimbo, Brian's site, and The Marmot's Hole (the latter has a long list of links to past K-blog complaints about Monsieur Peray).

Apparently the straw that broke the camel's back was this one:

But the thing is, I didn't really get my wish. My hope was that the KT would wake up and realize that Monsieur Peray's presentation was often too lame or too opaque for the audience to get it, much less be challenged by it or gain an appreciation of his style, but instead he got canned for pissing off the Russians. Got that? He got kicked to the curb because he offended Moscow.

Am I the only one who finds that the least bit disturbing?

As I wrote at Korean Rum Diary, my interpretation of the above cartoon is that the bear represents Russian imperialism, not merely Russia, and the ongoing separatist battles inside the Caucasus are a direct result of that imperialism, so this seems to be suggesting that the Russian bear is crying over something that is — to some degree — of its own making.

Now, if I'm right, is that not a legitimate point to be making in a political cartoon? Let me make clear that I'm playing devil's advocate, but it admittedly is not very hard. In the Caucasus, tens of thousands of Chechen civilians have died — estimates of 25,000 to 50,000, including the "disappeared." In some Battlestar Galactica-type world, some do see such terror as perhaps the only means to get an imperial power to back the fu¢k off. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and all that.

I'm not of that belief, but in such a world, is it not reasonable to point out that the terror inflicted on the Russian bear's cave is a direct result of prior actions of the Russian bear?

Okay, I can play double-devil here and point out that Monsieur Peray's depiction of the dead is crude and disrespectful, in the above cartoon and in others, such as the one below (about the execution of the Bali bombers):

Could the above cartoon have had the same message but without the strewn body parts? Perhaps, but maybe he felt it was important to depict the carnage created by these terrorists to show what they were doing in the name of their brand of Islam. I don't know; I'm not in his head.

Indeed, maybe that's Monsieur Peray's problem: we're not in his head. I sometimes think I see what he's getting at with some of his more controversial cartoons (like the one above), but I'm never entirely sure, and I've even written to him in the past for clarification. I asked him about the Australian cartoon dealing with the bush fires:

Can you explain the point of cartoon with the heads on fire in Australia? Your message seems a tad muddled and I didn't really get it.

And he replied:

Yep apparently some readers didn't get it too and think it is insensitive. I tried to point out the fact that Global Warming is most certainly the cause behind those heat waves so the fire on the little people is symbolizing human madness and greed and consumption that created this Global Warming. Nothing to do with the poor victims of the fire (but some people tend to look a cartoon on the first degree...

Nothing to do with the poor victims of the fire... who burned to death. Okay, like I said, the guy is somewhat misunderstood, but it's largely his own fault for drawing sensitive subjects in a crude and and gory way. Anyway, if an emailed explanation is the only way to really get it, then something is clearly wrong.

But...

How this has gone down is all wrong. If the guy's unfunny, then fine, go make a complaint (as many did). If the guy's presentation is too opaque, childish, or "out there" for people to get it, then fine, go make a complaint (as many did). But if you're complaining you don't like the message — and he does take some harsh digs at the US and apparently the Russians for imperialism and war-mongering, not to mention his dislike of neo-Nazis — then this is where some red flags pop up with me.

Again, to recap, this guy was apparently canned because he offended the Russians. The Russians whose pendulum has swung away from the precipice of democratic rule, back toward the loving embrace of totalitarianism. Hey, if that's the way the Russian people want to live, I can't do much to stop them, but when they start wielding that hammer against a newspaper in my 'hood, I take issue. This is almost — though not quite — as troubling to me as Chinese students waving their flags downtown and assaulting those exercising the right in South Korea to free speech.

Indeed, I am a bit alarmed that so many in the K-blogosphere are celebrating this move. Is free speech valued only when it's our own or something we agree with?

In some ways, this reminds me of the controversy over the Dutch cartoons depicting Mohammed. On the one hand, I am appalled that anyone would kill or plot to kill someone over such things. But on the other hand, I always found the justification for printing them in the first place to have been rather bogus: What it boiled down to was deliberately offending hundreds of millions of people — and I'm talking about the vast, vast, vast majority of Muslims who did not engage in any violence over the cartoons — just for the sake of offending them. It was childish eye-poking gussied up as an exercise in free speech.

Anyway, I have trouble reconciling a reaction against Muslims offended by the Dutch cartoons with a movement to remove Monsieur Peray as the KT cartoonist. Not that I know of anyone who takes both positions (but I suspect there are some). For all his offensiveness, Monsieur Peray has been making valid points, regardless of how controversial they are.

And isn't that what political cartoonists are supposed to do?

So again, (and just so we're clear, this is my thesis) he should have been discontinued for doing his job badly, not for doing it controversially. This is not a cause for celebration.

But what do you expect? The controversy over Monsieur Peray gets into all kinds of silliness. Not just a few people have bashed his cartoons as a sign of Korean insensitivity, even to the point of calling for boycotts of Korean products (not French, not Thai, but Korean). But Monsieur Peray is not Korean nor is he in Korea. So should the KT be responsible for an internationally syndicated political cartoonist offending people, which is what even good political cartoonists do?

Many writers, like Korean Rum Diary, nevertheless consider the KT directly responsible responsible, since they reprint his stuff. Frankly, though, I don't see it that way. As I wrote at KRD:

Respectfully, I don't think they printed it because it's anti-Russian. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the editor might not even perceive it as anti-Russian at all.

I think it was printed because Monsieur Peray is their syndicated cartoonist, and he's almost certainly their syndicated cartoonist because they have a facile notion that international = globalized = better quality.

All of Monsieur Peray's cartoons appeared in the KT, apparently. Were they to have refused to print some of them on occasion out for fear of offending, I'd be a bit troubled by that.

But maybe that makes me an outlier.

I'm also a bit annoyed by the notion that "Koreans" (as in a monolithic, singular entity) can dish it out but not take it. From KRD:

Yesterday a South Korean oil tanker (with Filipino and Korean crew) was hi-jacked by pirates. Could you imagine the uproar if an internationally known newspaper ran a cartoon mocking the South Korean Navy in light of both this and the Cheonan sinking?

I seriously think Koreans would burn down the embassy of the country whose paper printed that cartoon.

Hmm... For eleven years, one of the most popular television shows in America was a comedy about a war in which perhaps a million Koreans were killed. Sure, many Korean-Americans and other Asian-Americans protested M*A*S*H and how it depicted Koreans and Asians, but in South Korea there were no embassy burnings during the eleven-year run of that show and its laugh track.

Anyway, I don't have high hopes for them finding a good replacement. I’ve been a newspaper cartoonist in college and I can tell you — from my own experience and from watching others — that it’s easy to run out of “funny” ideas very quickly. There are a lot of one-trick ponies in the comics, which is why I stopped reading the funnies. And when someone is bereft of clever or funny ideas, the results can be very weird if not downright disturbing. Offending for offense’s sake can easily become the preferred path, and we might end up with someone just as "edgy" or worse. (If they're going to go with a syndicated cartoonist, might I suggest Tom Tomorrow, even though it's heavily America-oriented?)

Sigh. Oh, and if you're wondering why I don't comment at Hub of Sparkle anymore, despite all the links here to past comments, it's because I was banned from there a year ago.

Free speech, yay!

UPDATE:
Monsieur Peray has responded to my email, which I made into its own post.

UPDATE 2:
Monsieur Peray has written me a second email, telling me "nobody was fired at the Korea Times."

Korea : Russia :: America : Mexico (?)

That's the kind of analogy it's starting to shape up to. From KBS Global:

A Korean student studying in Moscow remains in critical condition after being stabbed in an apparent hate crime.

The 29-year-old, identified by his surname Shim, was stabbed in the neck by a masked assailant outside a downtown store around 5 p.m. on Sunday, local time.

Shim, a junior at a state-run film school in the Russian capital, is undergoing surgery but is known to be in a critical state.

Russian police say the attack is similar to a number of other recent racist attacks that have targeted foreigners.

Shim has lived in Moscow for six years.

On February 15th, a 22-year-old Korean beaten by a group of local youths in the city of Barnaul in the Russian Far East died as a result of the injuries he sustained.

Arirang also has the story.

Are Koreans being targeted or is this just random violence? Either way it's bad, of course, and it makes me wonder if South Koreans shouldn't just write off (for the time being) Russia as a study destination. (HT to Brian, from whom I snagged the graphic below)