Sorry for the lack of posting, but a flood in my area and the events in Virginia Tech has disrupted my week so far. I would like to make a brief statement about the shooting. By now, 33 people is dead and nothing we can do could bring them back. What we could have or should have done is not important. It’s time to look to the future. I think my blog has emphasized not dwelling in the past but to deal with the present and the future.

So I hope we learn that as free individuals we must stand up to the many faces of evil, whether it that is Kim Jong-Il or Cho Seung-Hui. Take it from defectors that voluntarily return to North Korea whether to help feed their families or spread the faith. If we must die, we must die knowing that evil men do not rule over us unchallenged.

Please pray for the victims and the obviously very sick shooter.

I’m reading the BBC report on the 7 women that arrived in Thailand and I have not felt so much anger since watching 9/11 unfold on the television. This passage got me the worst

Hanah is just 21. She described chronic stomach pain as a child when her family were reduced to eating dumplings made from tree-bark.

From the age of 15 she tried to escape seven times, her young age apparently saving her from severe punishment when she was caught and sent back.

During these escapes she was separated from her parents, who were also trying to flee.

21, that’s my age. While I’m typing in the comforts of a University computer lab, Hanah is in a Thai prison uncertain of her fate while a coup is going on in the rest of the country. While I spent my summer at home or at the beach, she is traversing across China and Laos, battling the elements and hiding in the shadows.

Worse, both countries are willing to send her back to North Korea to die without hesitation. All I could do was to get as many people to hear their story. Is that all I’m capable of doing?

There’s a lot of pent up rage from reading such stories. Frankly, writing on a blog does not alleviate that. My hope is that anyone reading this could do more for these refugees and thousands of others still hiding in China and Southeast Asia than I could. I hope one feels the same way as I do.

Christian Evangelicals , great preachers, terrible policymakers

When evangelical pastor and best-selling author Rick Warren announced he would undertake a preaching mission to North Korea next year, it raised a number of eyebrows in the conservative religious community.

North Korea, after all, is a keystone in President Bush’s “axis of evil” and, according to the State Department and human rights organizations, a gross violator of human rights and religious freedom.

Warren, author of the hugely popular Purpose-Driven Life books, cancelled a preliminary July 17 trip to Pyongyang in the wake of heightened tensions between the reclusive regime and the West over North Korea’s July 5 test of seven missiles.

But while Warren’s trip was canceled, he insisted his preaching visit would go on next year despite criticism from other evangelicals and the Bush administration’s efforts to totally isolate the country. “Regardless of politics, I will go anywhere I am invited to preach the gospel,” Warren said.

Warren’s stance is just one of a number of indications that, at least on foreign policy issues, the president can no longer automatically count on the support—or at least quiet acquiescence—of conservative and moderate evangelicals as he did in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Okay, evangelicals do not agree with the President. Who doesn’t? So what do they think the President should do?

On North Korea, evangelist Franklin Graham, head of the relief agency Samaritan’s Purse, has laid out evangelical differences with the administration most forcefully.

Graham, who has visited North Korea, recently told the PBS program Religion & Ethics Newsweekly that he wanted to encourage the administration and Congress to change the U.S. approach to the communist nation.

“We need to talk to the North Koreans face to face, period,” Graham told the program. “Eyeball to eyeball. And there is a lot that can be accomplished if we simply do that.”

“I think probably North Korea is the most dangerous place on the face of the Earth right now,” Graham said. “You’ve got a country that I feel is kind of backed up against a wall.”

North Korea has indicated it will not engage in talks with the United States until Washington ends its financial sanctions against the country. Graham took a dim view of the value of the sanctions.

“Whatever sanctions, what little we may be able to bring to bear on North Korea, it’s just going to end up hurting the people worse,” he told Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. “It’s not going to hurt the army, and I don’t think it’s going to hurt (North Korean leader) Kim Jong Il.”

Direct talks? About what? Persecution of Christians? Not a chance. If sanctions do not hurt Kim Jong-Il and the army, whose fault is that? It gets worse

Separately, two other leading conservative evangelicals—Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals—signed on to an effort pressing a joint humanitarian and human rights approach to North Korea rather than the administration’s single-minded focus on arms control.

The coalition includes such liberal groups as Americans for Democratic Action, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and the American Humanist Association.

“At the earliest practicable date, the United States should propose an unconditional humanitarian aid initiative to improve the health and lives of the people of North Korea, doing so in such form as will ensure that the benefits of the initiative will be provided on a needs basis,” according to the 18-point plan announced July 20.

Religious groups, of all things, ought to be social entrepreneurs and do things without the government. Why ask the government to do it for them?

Churches in South Korea—mostly associated with mainline Protestant denominations—are also pressing Bush to change U.S. policy toward North Korea. They, like Graham, want Washington to lift sanctions and move toward stabilizing diplomatic relations.

“It is generally understood (in South Korea) that the sanctions against North Korea since 1950 have been enforced by the USA in its own political interest,” the head of South Korea’s national Council of Churches told Bush in a July 7 letter.

“Experts indicate that the sanctions against North Korea have been one of the significant causes of the increasing suffering of the North Korean people,” Anglican Bishop Kyung Jo Park said in the letter.

Park urged the United States to look toward normalizing relations with North Korea.

“We believe that the (July 5) missile testing by North Korea contributes to the deterioration of relations between North Korea and the U.S., and between North Korea and Japan,” Park said.

“Therefore, we strongly assert that true peace in North-East Asia cannot be established without normalizing diplomatic relations between North Korea and the United States, and between North Korea and Japan,” the letter said.

In general, North Korea should have it all, regardless whether the average North Korean benefits or not. What is most disappointing is what isn’t in this article. Not one single person quoted addressed the issue of religious persecution in North Korea. Somehow, I got the sense that’s not as important as the need to normalize relations or direct talks. I think its a bunch of mixed up priorities. Obviously, this is not to say all Christian organizations are like that when I am a supporter of Tim Peter’s Helping Hand Korea. There are also many charitable foundations run by Christian groups and likely including the ones in this article that do good work. And I also do not deny they have good intentions. Now that that’s clear, here’s my problem.

One of the greatest fallacies I see today is the way people set standards on how regimes act. For western liberal societies, our standards are way high. That is not a problem until one see how people set standards for the North Korea’s and Hezbollah’s of the world, which is none at all. I think a lot of people have come to expect Kim Jong-Il’s regime as the scum of the earth. So it’s no longer appalling if the government were to starve its people again. But if the US is doing something about it, it stands accused of hurting North Koreans.

There are two things one can learn from this. One, if you want something changed, do it yourself. Second, if you want a place like North Korea to be a normal country with a stake in the world, you have to expect it to act like one. For instance, a normal country does not counterfeit other people’s currencies or export drugs. It’s internation relation’s version of “the bigotry of low expectations“. Ultimately, everyone is still human, so treat everyone as such.