Trump's New BBF

We've all heard this interview Trump did after his meeting with Kim Jong-Un, right? The one where he dismissed North Korea’s human rights violations and Kim Jong Un’s atrocities against his own people. Something like a quarter million North Koreans are political prisoners in concentration camps, subjected to forced labor, physical and psychological abuse and execution. North Korea has the worst human rights record in the world according to the UN, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. I wonder what American Trump-forever religious supporters will say when they start reading about the forced abortions and infanticide North Korea practices for racial purity. Fake news? James Brooke (NY Times):

On a cold March day, the bleak monotony of a North Korean prison work detail was broken when a squad of male guards arrived and herded new women prisoners together. One by one, they were asked if they were pregnant.

"They took them away in a car, and then forcibly gave them abortion shots," Song Myung Hak, 33, a former prisoner, recalled in a interview here about the day two years ago when six pregnant prisoners were taken from his work unit in the Shinuiju Provincial Detention Camp. "After the miscarriage shots, the women were forced back to work." More and more escapees from North Korea are asserting that forced abortions and infanticide are the norm in North Korean prisons, charges the country's official Korean Central News Agency has denounced as "a whopping lie."

In 2000 and 2001, China deported thousands of North Korean refugees, with many ending up in North Korean prison camps. People who later managed to escape again, to China and South Korea, say that prisoners discovered to be pregnant were routinely forced to have abortions. If babies were born alive, they say, guards forced prisoners to kill them.

Later David Hawk wrote in his book, The Hidden Gulag that abortions up to full term are induced by injection; live premature babies or full-term newborns are sometimes killed but more commonly simply discarded into a bucket or box and then buried. They may live several days in the disposal container.

In an interview with Fox News Trump had no interest in North Korea's systematic human rights atrocities. "Hey," he told the Fox audience about his new BBF, "he’s a tough guy. When you take over a country-- a tough country, tough people-- and you take it over from your father, I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have. If you can do that at 27 years old, I mean, that’s one in 10,000 that could do that. So he’s a very smart guy. He’s a great negotiator."

When pressed further, Trump responded: "Yeah, but so have other people done some really bad things. I could go through a lot of nations where a lot of bad things were done." Last year, the president made a similar argument when dismissing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s human rights violations. “What do you think, our country's so innocent?” he said at the time.

Dorothy Reik helped explain why it's so easy for Trump to ignore this kind of stuff? But what about his die-hard supporters from religionist communities? Of course, Trump has his own problems with core Christian precepts anyway, doesn't he?


My old pal-- a former evangelical leader-- Frank Schaefer, noted this morning that "Franklin Graham is Trump’s kind of evangelical. He just denounced separating children from parents at the border… then went on to blame all recent presidents and 'politicians.' Graham never mentioned Trump. This is why Graham's show of compassion rings hollow: Evangelical leaders aren’t willing to stand up to the source of their not-what-Jesus-would do Trump dilemma. Evangelicals may be afraid of public opinion that now sees them as haters and bigots and will forever see them as heartles-- but they are more afraid of crossing Trump. They lust not for godliness but for access to power, and revenge on liberal enemies. No wonder when it comes to Trump ignoring forced abortions in N. Korea, and tens of millions of cases of infanticide in China initiated by its leaders Trump loves evangelicals who are also silent."