GOODY TWO SHOES: Jimmy Carter Scolds South Koreans On Human Rights
The people of North Korea are starving because Kim Jong-il diverts food aid to the military and to his cronies so as to keep his totalitarian regime in power. South Korean President Lee Myung-bak stopped food donations last year after Pyongyang lobbed shells at a South Korean island and sank a warship. To former president Jimmy Carter, the villain in this story is not Kim but Lee. Huh? The Washington Times attempts to explain how the senile liberal mind works:
During a visit to South Korea in April, Mr. Carter declared food as basic human right.
"For the South Koreans and the Americans and others to deliberately withhold food aid to the North Korean people because of political or military issues not related is really a human rights violation," he said.
Even Mr. Carter's sympathizers here have bristled at the comment, in which many saw a hideous moral equivalence - that President Obama and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak bear greater responsibility for North Korean suffering than Mr. Kim.
"I think many people are very cynical about him because he talks about human rights and he used to talk about human rights abuses in South Korea, but he never mentions North Korean human rights problems," said Nam Jeongho, foreign editor for the JoongAng Ilbo, one of South Korea's biggest newspapers. "He seems to be trying to help North Korean regime."
Kim Young-hee, the paper's editor-at-large, calls Mr. Carter's rhetoric "unbalanced."
"He thinks, unjustly, that the serious food shortage in North Korea and suffering of the people are mainly caused by South Korea stopping the aid," Kim Young-hee said. "But he doesn't go deeper to the cause - why we stopped it."
It’s not just Carter’s rhetoric that’s unbalanced.
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