Abigail Disney and Gloria Steinem Trash North Korean Defector’s ‘Phony’ Warnings about Pro-Pyongyang Group
They serve on the board of a group that a South Korean lawmaker described as ‘pro-Pyongyang’ extremists.
They serve on the board of a group that a South Korean lawmaker described as ‘pro-Pyongyang’ extremists.
A bigail Disney and Gloria Steinem took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to slam a North Korean defector’s treatment of an activist group that has advocated the end of U.S. sanctions on North Korea while ignoring its human-rights abuses.
The Disney heiress and the feminist figure serve on the board of Women Cross DMZ, an activist group that in 2015 organized a march across the demilitarized zone into North Korea to hold conversations with women there. While Women Cross DMZ billed that initiative as a bid for peace and international understanding, critics alleged that they were only helping to ameliorate the regime’s international reputation.
This long-running controversy picked up again last month, amid the 70th anniversary of the July 27 signing of the Korean War armistice. Last week, Ji Seong-ho, a member of South Korea’s National Assembly, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal characterizing Women Cross DMZ as “pro-Pyongyang extremists.” Ji, who lost his left leg and hand during his childhood in North Korea, escaped the country for the south in 2006, and he was honored by President Trump during his State of the Union address in 2017 as “an inspiration to us all.”
Ji wrote the op-ed to coincide with a rally, march, and lobbying blitz organized in July by Women Cross DMZ in Washington, D.C., to mark the armistice. He specifically cited the group’s support of a bill by Representative Brad Sherman that would encourage the secretary of state to pursue a formal end to the Korean War.
“Both the mobilization and the legislation promote the North’s demand that the U.S. sign an unconditional peace agreement. Pro-Pyongyang groups are parroting the regime’s ‘hostile policy’ refrain—that tensions on the Korean Peninsula result from U.S.-South Korean military exercises, the presence of U.S. troops in Korea, and U.S. economic sanctions,” he wrote in the op-ed.
The South Korean lawmaker also noted that the group’s advisory board is stacked with prominent activists, including Disney, Steinem, and Alice Walker.
Disney and Steinem, in response, wrote a letter to the editor that was published over the weekend, defending their 2015 trip to North Korea as an enlightening experience: “We met with women’s groups in North and South Korea and learned about the devastating consequences of the continuing Korean War on their lives.”
They also hit back against Ji’s characterization of the group as supportive of the North Korean regime. “There is nothing ‘phony’ about a peace-first approach to diplomacy. What is phony is the accusation that calling for peace is ‘pro-Pyongyang’—a tired red herring critics often use to discredit the peace movement,” they wrote, adding that a formal peace agreement between the U.S. and North Korea is a first step toward “reducing tensions and establishing the trust needed to address thorny issues such as denuclearization and human rights.”
Their letter, however, made no criticism of North Korea’s nuclear program, the Kim family’s dictatorial control of the country, the pervasive role of slave labor there, or the regime’s many crimes against women, which include the systematic rape of women by soldiers and prison guards.
That seems to contradict their political stances in the U.S. Disney, the granddaughter of Walt Disney, has made news in recent years for her progressive political activism, criticizing the Walt Disney Company for the high compensation its top executives receive amid what she characterized as extreme wealth inequality in America. Steinem rose to prominence as the feminist activist who founded Ms. magazine in the 1970s.
Women Cross DMZ describes its work as supportive of “peace”-focused efforts, even though its preferred policies would almost certainly empower a regime that has imprisoned millions of its citizens, subjecting them to extreme poverty and brutal repression.
The group and its founder, Christine Ahn, have long called on the U.S. to strike a considerably less confrontational stance toward the North, which is the subject of a U.N. Commission of Inquiry investigating the regime’s “systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights.”
Before starting Women Cross DMZ, Ahn wrote that the U.S. should roll back its military presence in South Korea and stop holding war games there. More recently, in 2020, Women Cross DMZ called on the U.S. to lift all of its sanctions on North Korea, in addition to Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and other countries, and it has also said that Washington should refrain from imposing further sanctions, carrying out new military exercises, and generally “engaging in hostile rhetoric.”