Even after a year of North Korean nuclear and missile tests, this year’s State Department “Country Reports on Terrorism” makes the risible claim that North Korea is “not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.” It would appear that State’s definition of “acts of terrorism” no longer includes international assassinations, threats against foreign media, or arms sales to terrorists—all of which North Korea has done during Barack Obama’s presidency.  Indeed, no one has refuted State’s assertion more convincingly than Obama himself. 

In 2005, the Illinois congressional delegation wrote to North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations to protest the abduction and probable murder of the Reverend Kim Dong-shik, a wheelchair-bound U.S. resident who lived in the Chicago suburbs until 1993, when he went to China to help North Korean child refugees. In 2000, North Korean agents abducted Rev. Kim in China and took him to North Korea.  Two of the agents later entered South Korea, where they were arrested, charged, and convicted of kidnapping Reverend Kim. After comparing Rev. Kim to Harriet Tubman and Raoul Wallenberg, the letter’s authors promised that they would “NOT support the removal of [North Korea] from the State Department list of State Sponsors of Terrorism” until Pyongyang gave the Kim family “a full accounting” of Rev. Kim’s fate (emphasis in original).  The letter bears the signatures of Henry Hyde, Ray LaHood, Rahm Emmanuel, Dick Durbin, and then-Senator Obama.