Who will pull young Koreans' heads out of the sand? Gyopo are rising to the challenge.

As I reported on May 7, more and more Gyopo (Korean-Americans) are rising up and questioning the human rights situation in North Korea. A National Review article from May 19 also discusses this movement led by young Korean-Americans and provides a host of links on this hopeful development:

Call it a trend: Across the country, students are beginning to take steps to increase awareness on their campuses about conditions — i.e., starvation, isolation from the outside world, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and mass death — in the Democratic People's Republic.

This wouldn't have been possible a decade ago. Although our knowledge of what goes on in North Korea — by most accounts the world's most secretive regime — remains incomplete, over the past several years increasing numbers of defectors and humanitarian organizations inside the country have enabled experts to start piecing together a picture of daily life there. The details are horrific: According to the recent congressional testimony of Suzanne Scholte, president of the Defense Forum Foundation, the regime "daily murders at least 42 people in [its] political prison camps and 391 through starvation." The North Korean government holds an estimated 200,000 political prisoners, and at least one million North Korean citizens have died of starvation since the mid-1990s.

Go read the rest.

There are a couple groups of note:

-LiNK (Liberation in North Korea) is only three months old but already has chapters on 33 campuses. To see some of what they have been doing, click here.

-The US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) has also been active on campuses across America.

One of the main things that both groups have been doing is educating people on the situation in North Korea, including stories from those who managed to escape:

According to (HRNK vice chair, Jack) Rendler, students in the IU crowd who didn't know much about North Korea were blown away by the defectors' stories. Some of those who asked questions "were stunned by people having to live on grass for ten or twelve years, competing with one another for a frog or rat — and by the beatings, and the torture." Some couldn't believe that a regime "could be so repressive that there would be no alternate political beliefs, no opposition, no freedom of thought."

With efforts by some leftist groups to silence North Korean defectors who do manage to escape to the South, the efforts of human rights groups in the US, often led by Korean-Americans, becomes even more important.

Comments

[jtb]

from the article:

Some couldn't believe that a regime "could be so repressive that there would be no alternate political beliefs, no opposition, no freedom of thought."

but they can apparently swallow the crap put out by George Soros/MoveOn.org...

We *are* well and truly doomed...