Speaking as a secular American half-Jew who once had enough sympathy for the Palestinians to visit East Jerusalem and endure a three-hour Shin Bet interrogation for my trouble, who has serious reservations about the IDF’s targeting and choice of weapons, and who firmly opposes Israeli settlements and extremist rhetoric about annexing and resettling Gaza, I’ve never been more anti-anti-Israeli or more anti-Hamas than I am today, and the “pro-Palestinian” movement is the reason for it. Its appeal is to those who hate. It cannot disguise its lack of reasonable or humane objectives. It has repelle ..read more

In 1997, a Washington Post reporter was allowed into the city of Hamheung, in the mountains that ring North Korea’s east coast, to investigate reports of a famine in the isolated country. There, he interviewed the director of a local orphanage, who told him that some parents who could no longer feed their children had begun to abandon them “to nature.” Some of these children died where their parents left them. In other cases, people would bring them to the orphanage, which was “surrounded by high hills covered with graves and stone markers.” The orphanage director told the reporter that he was ..read more

How many things do you own that were made by slaves—specifically, enslaved North Koreans or Uygurs? The bad news is that no one knows, because most of it is hidden deep within the supply chains. The good news is that this may be changing just enough to make the use of slave labor unprofitable for the retailers you buy from and the sweatshops in China that employ it. “Royal Blood-Fresh” Chinese manufacturers have a long history of sourcing their goods from North Korean state-owned sweatshops that sew “Made in China” tags onto the wares. It’s up to 75 percent cheaper for Chinese manufacturers to ..read more

Documents filed with the Justice Department in July show that a group of South Korean investors hired a San Francisco law firm and a South Korean consulting firm to lobby the U.S. government to support reopening a shuttered, looted, and partially exploded manufacturing complex near Kaesong, North Korea. The documents were required to be filed with the Justice Department and made public under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA), a law designed to expose foreign propaganda and influence in the United States. The FARA filing includes an agreement between the Kaesong Investors, the ..read more

Today, the Justice Department announced that for the first time, it has extradited a North Korean national to the United States. Mun Chol Myong, who was based in Malaysia, and whom DOJ claims to be an agent of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, allegedly laundered money through the United States to do deals between the Foreign Trade Bank of North Korea (designated in 2013 for WMD proliferation financing), the military electronics manufacturer, Glocom, and other wholesome types. Funny, no mention of TB medicine or baby formula. You can read the indictment here: Mun Chol Myong indictment Mun und ..read more

Yesterday morning, I was surprised to learn that my tweets about Lee In-young’s master plan to get around sanctions and bail out Kim Jong-un made the Chosun Ilbo and are spreading around Korean YouTube. Because you hate reading long posts—even long posts that you really should read—I decided to hold back for today my examination of why Lee and his colleagues are so motivated to aid and abet Pyongyang’s sanctions-busting, and all of its plans for Seoul’s money. We might also ask why the North Korean government-controlled Uriminzokki recently quoted another North Korean-controlled outlet that sa ..read more

I really think South Korean President Moon Jae-in wants to bail Kim Jong-un out more than I want my next breath. Even before he was sworn in, he called for the reopening of Kaesong and other joint projects to ease the burden of U.S.-led sanctions. Once in office, he called for major investments in North Korea until a call from the Treasury Department scared his bankers away. He turned a blind eye to purchases of North Korean coal, and probably to the smuggling of luxury goods, into and through South Korean ports, and failed to seize the ships involved (as man ..read more

In the Washington suburbs, $665,112 will buy you a nice house, but not a mansion. A settlement with the Treasury Department for a civil penalty in that amount isn’t going to bankrupt a large multinational corporation. Its main impact on Essentra FZE, a UAE-based subsidiary of a British corporation that makes cigarette filters, may be in its access to financial services and legal fees, which would still be worth every penny if they exceeded the penalty. You could argue back at me that under Treasury’s penalty enforcement guidelines, the Office of Foreign Assets Control imposed the maximum allow ..read more

Last Friday, I appeared alongside Scott Snyder of the Brookings Institution on the Voice of America’s Washington Talk, hosted by Connie Kim. You can watch the edited interview here (it’s in English, with Korean subtitles): N. Korea rejects the idea of another summit as Pres. Trump said he could meet with KJU if it was helpful. How significant was a S. Korean court’s ruling that ordered KJU to compensate former POWs for forced labor?@snydersas @CFR_Asia @freekorea_us join us https://t.co/iEY4zMXvhU — ConnieKim (@ConnieKimJ) July 11, 2020 To prepare for the interview, Ms. Kim asked me some pre ..read more

Warning: This one is a long read. There are a lot of threads to pull together. In the end, I believe the implications for South Korea’s democracy, the human rights of North Koreans, and the accuracy of the news you read are grave enough to justify the effort to write (and hopefully, to read) it. ~   ~   ~ Since the announcement of their group defection in April 2016, this blog has paid close attention to the case of the Ningpo 12—the 12 young North Korean waitresses who defected from a North Korean government-run restaurant in Ningpo, China, along with their manager. Imme ..read more