Author: GIKorea

According to the article President Moon is only doing this to try and promote his North Korea engagement policies during the Summer Olympics like he did during the last Winter Olympics:

President Moon Jae-in’s rush to resolute serious issues with Japan before the Tokyo Olympic Games is not going as well as Cheong Wa Dae had hoped. 

Moon named former four-term ruling party lawmaker Kang Chang-il as the next ambassador to Japan last month. It was the first time he had named a politician to the post, after first appointing Lee Su-hoon, an international relations professor, and then Nam Kwan-pyo, a career diplomat and one of the foremost experts on Japan at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

Nam has served as the Korean ambassador to Japan since May 2019. It is considered rare for the envoy to Japan to be replaced less than two years after being appointed. Cheong Wa Dae said that sending a politician to the post has a particular meaning amid the deadlock in bilateral relations. 
“With the launch of the new Cabinet in Japan, it reflects the President’s determination to find a resolution to the problems in bilateral relations,” a senior presidential aide said. “Kang served as head of the Korea-Japan Parliamentarians’ Union and has built an extensive network in Japan. Based on this, we determined it would be more suitable to send a politician rather than a career diplomat.”  (……..)

“One major factor in the Moon administration’s renewed push to improve relations with Japan is the possibility that doing so will allow the Tokyo Olympics to serve as a potential showplace for a breakthrough with North Korea,” Mason Richey, associate professor of international politics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, told The Korea Times. 

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but I don’t see the Japanese wanting to do the Moon administration any favors considering all the anti-Japanese policies and rhetoric they have pushed the past few years.

Please leave anything you want to discuss in the comments section.

Yet former President Park was confined before her trial for something far less serious than what this mayor is accused of and in the case of the sexual assault already admitted to doing:

Oh, who was elected in 2018 as a member of the ruling Democratic Party, stepped down as Busan mayor in April after admitting during a live press conference he had sexually assaulted a City Hall employee in his office.  
   
Earlier this week, prosecutors filed a second arrest warrant for Oh after the first request was turned down in June. Prosecutors said they had found new evidence Oh had inappropriate contact with another woman by touching her chin, and attempting to touch other areas of her body on multiple occasions in November and December 2018.    
   
Oh admitted in April to the sexual assault that led to his resignation. At his court hearing Friday, he admitted to the additional assaults, saying “the words of the women are all correct.” The ex-mayor added he did not remember the incidents, but that he apologizes for them.  
   
The presiding judge of the Busan District Court who reviewed Oh’s warrant hearing said there was no reason to put him under pretrial detention as he has accepted the charges and does not pose a flight risk. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but this is why the Moon administration had to suspend the Prosecutor General, to assist his political cronies.

Pyongyang has mobilized their useful idiots in South Korea to condemn groups in the U.S. critical of South Korea’s decision to criminalize the human rights activists sending leaflets to North Korea. What is ironic is that many of these so called civic groups claim to be human rights organizations as well.

A group of 17 civic organizations on Friday issued a joint statement decrying criticism from some quarters of the United States of a recently legislated ban on sending anti-Pyongyang leaflets into North Korea as “interference in internal affairs.”

The group, including the Korean Council for Reconciliation and Cooperation, stressed that flying propaganda leaflets has nothing to do with freedom of expression but is an “act that foments conflict.”

“The interference in internal affairs by related U.S. organizations and politicians, which financially and politically sponsored the sending of leaflets to the North, is going too far, as they joined hands and criticized the passage of the bill,” the joint statement read.

“They should stop the interference that undermines the vision for peace on the Korean Peninsula and inter-Korean reconciliation and cooperation,” it added.

On Monday, the National Assembly, controlled by the ruling Democratic Party, passed the bill penalizing the sending of propaganda leaflets despite strong objections by conservative opposition lawmakers.

The ruling party has defended the legislation as necessary to enhance the security of residents in border regions and prevent needless political tensions with the North.

U.S. politicians and others have rebuked the legislation, claiming it could erode freedom of expression and block one crucial avenue for sending free-world information into the reclusive country.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Here is the ROK Foreign Minister defending the criminalizing of human rights activists that have been sending leaflets to North Korea:

Earlier this week, the National Assembly passed the bill that prevents mainly North Korean defectors and human rights activists from flying propaganda leaflets or other materials critical of the Kim Jong-un regime over the border into the North. The government and the ruling Democratic Party of Korea claim the new law will help protect residents in border regions and ease cross-border tension.

“Because this is happening in a very sensitive area, the most militarized zone in the whole world with people living right next to the border area,” Kang said in an interview with CNN.

Citing a 2014 cross-border gunfire exchange and the demolition of an inter-Korean liaison office in June, which she claimed were due to the leaflets, she added, “So in an area, highly militarily tense area, anything can go wrong and lead to even bigger clashes. And the people living near the border have been asking that these activities stop for years.” 

The foreign minister admitted that there was an argument denouncing the law as restricting freedom of expression, but she also said this could be limited in certain cases.

“Freedom of expression, I think, is absolutely a vital human right. But it’s not absolute. It can be limited according to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). But it has to be by law. It has to be limited in scope. And it is limited in scope. It is only used when these acts pose harm or pose danger to the life and the security of our people,” Kang said.

Korea Times

Kang brings up the 2014 incident when the North Koreans have had far worse cross border incidents that had nothing to do with the human rights activists sending leaflets to North Korea. For example the Kim regime shelled a South Korea island in 2010 with an artillery strike that killed both military personnel and civilians. To think that criminalizing the human rights activists is going to improve border security is a fallacy.

The only reason there hasn’t been a major border incident in recent years is because the Kim regime thinks they are close to getting their confederation idea implemented by the Moon administration and with it the beginning of the end of the US-ROK alliance as we currently know it.

The media should stop publishing every wacky claim on the Internet. Who besides wack jobs would believe the Chinese military is massing on the Maine border?:

It may seem like an updated version of the 1966 comedy “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians are Coming!” but there is nothing funny about conspiratorial ravings from the Twitterverse that Chinese troops massed along the border with Maine were schwacked in an airstrike.

Recent posts from a QAnon-backing Twitter handle with nearly 50,000 followers claimed that tens of thousands of Chinese troops had amassed along Maine’s border with Canada and that an F-16 fighter that crashed last week in Michigan was actually shot down — presumably by the Chinese.

Military Times

I know ROK Heads are smart enough to know this is a bunch of rubbish. However, the media continues to have their fascination with the QAnon site and amplifies all their wild claims by publishing them. Before the Internet, newspapers did not amplify the rantings of every village idiot and that is basically what anyone that believes the Chinese Army is massing in Canada is.

It seems the media highlights the rantings of our modern day village idiots as an act of sensationalism to get page clicks. That is why I did not put the link to this article on this posting. I think the rantings of QAnon says more about the state of the modern American media than it does them.