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Stalin Was A Winner Too

Trump praises Kim Jong Un as a national-leader prodigy
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Watch the clip. The President of the United States said this. When Bret Baier pressed the point, Trump said hey, a lot of people around the world have done bad things.

Let us remind ourselves of the man and the communist regime whose crimes Donald Trump just dismissed because that man, Kim Jong Un, is some kind of prodigy in Trump’s mind:

Many North Koreans live in fear. That is by design, and it is reinforced by the country’s ruthless police state.

People accused of political crimes are arrested and sentenced to prison camps without trials, while their families are often kept in the dark about their whereabouts. Up to 120,000 inmates were in the country’s four major political prisons in 2014 and were subjected to gruesome conditions, according to the United Nations report.

Prisoners are starved, forced to work, tortured and raped. Reproductive rights are denied through forced abortions and infanticide. Some are executed — sometimes in public. Hundreds of thousands of political prisoners have died in the camps over the past 50 years, the United Nations report found.

In addition to the political camps, North Korea also operates prisons for those accused of ordinary crimes. Some prisons are short-term labor camps. Others hold prisoners who face long-term torture, starvation and other suffering.

More:

North Korea considers the spread of most religions dangerous, but Christianity is considered a “particularly serious threat” because it “provides a platform for social and political organization and interaction outside the realm of the State,” according to the United Nations report.

Christians are barred from practicing their religion, and those caught doing so are “subject to severe punishments,” the report found. North Korean leaders also conflate Christians with those detained in prison camps, those who try to flee and “others considered to introduce subversive influences,” the report stated.

In interviews with The New York Times in 2012, four North Koreans said that they had been warned that the gulag awaited those who spoke to journalists or Christian missionaries. “If the government finds out I am reading the Bible, I’m dead,” one woman said.

In its 2018 World Watch List, the Christian group Open Doors ranked North Korea the worst nation in the world for Christians, and in a statement last week, the group called on Christians to take part in 24 hours of prayer and fasting on Monday ahead of the meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim.

Here is what Mike Pence, in a long paean to the greatness of Donald Trump, told Southern Baptists today:

And we once again, we have a President of the United States who stands without apology as leader of the free world. (Applause.)

We certainly saw that in high relief over the last several days, didn’t we? Just this morning, the President returned from a historic summit with Kim Jong Un of North Korea. The President went to this meeting as, in his words, “on a mission of peace,” but with eyes wide open. And I can report, the meeting that took place was direct and honest, provocative, and productive. It resulted in a bold first step where North Korea’s leader committed to the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. (Applause.)

That president, who, it is claimed, stands without apology as leader of the free world, just gave a pass to a mass murderer who has made his nation into a gulag, and who targets Christians particularly.

Look, diplomacy is hard. Sometimes you have to avoid saying things that you know to be true for the sake of the greater good. Nobody expects President Trump to trash Kim Jong Un right after the summit. But my God … this?!

What would Ronald Reagan have said? What would Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn have said? Trump was tougher on Justin Trudeau!

Watch the entire interview here. Bret Baier asks about human rights starting around 6:45.

UPDATE: Yep.

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