It’s a tragic story of North Korean brutality that should bring all Americans together in solidarity to pray for 22-year-old Otto Warmbier, an American college student who died at the hands of the North Korean regime just days after they released him from detention in a coma.
But one year ago, the liberal media chose to use the mourning family to fit their agenda, twisting the story to make it about male white privilege.
HuffPo writer La Sha published an article in March of 2016, blaming Warmbier’s expectations of being a privileged, white male for his arrest and subsequent brutal torture in North Korea.
In the article, titled, “North Korea Proves Your White Male Privilege is Not Universal,” Sha blames Warmbier’s punishment on “the unfortunate side effect of being socialized first as a white boy, and then as a white man in this country.”
She ironically blames his ignorance, while ignorantly ignoring the true evil in the situation — the bloody dictatorship of Kim Jong Un.
Warmbier allegedly tried to steal a propaganda banner, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison with hard labor.
“The treatment of Otto Warmbier is beyond the pale of North Korea’s usual standards,” said John Delury, an Asia expert at Seoul’s Yonsei University.
But Sha isn’t as shocked by the unprecedented punishment as she is “shocked that a grown man, an American citizen, would not only voluntarily enter North Korea but also commit what’s been described as a ‘college-style prank.'”
And while yes, it’s not the smartest thing to go to North Korea, the liberal media has somehow lost any shred of empathy for the 22-year-old fellow American who lost his life for an alleged petty crime.
She likens Warmbier to an addict, calling privilege “a hell of a drug,” that landed him in North Korean prison.
It gets worse.
She compares his mindset to that of racist murderer Dylann Roof, who killed nine African Americans in a church. She also relates him to James Holmes, who shot and killed 12 people and wounded 59 others in a Colorado movie theater.
In an aggressive generalization of an entire race, Sha claims the same thoughts that led those madmen on murderous rampages are to blame for Warmbier’s alleged “college-style prank.”
Sha believes that she understands the fear Warmbier felt in the North Korean prison… because she’s a female, African-American living in the U.S.
“The hopeless fear Warmbier is now experiencing is my daily reality living in a country where white men like him are willfully oblivious to my suffering even as they are complicit in maintaining the power structures which ensure their supremacy at my expense. He is now an outsider at the mercy of a government unfazed by his cries for help. I get it.”
But now Sha should be second-guessing that claim, as she remains writing away peacefully in America — while Warmbier’s family mourns a tragic loss at the hands of a thuggish dictator.
-The Horn editorial team