North Korea in ‘monkey’ jibe at Barack Obama

NORTH Korea has blamed its recent internet outage on the US and hurled racially charged insults at Barack Obama

NORTH Korea has blamed its recent internet outage on the United States and hurled racially charged insults at President Barack Obama over the hacking row involving the movie “The Interview.”

North Korea’s powerful National Defence Commission, which is headed by country leader Kim Jong Un and is the nation’s top governing body, accused Mr Obama of being behind the release of the comedy that depicts Kim’s assassination. The commission described the movie as illegal, dishonest and reactionary.

“Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” an unidentified spokesman at the commission’s Policy Department said in a statement carried by the country’s official Korean Central News Agency.

The White House’s National Security Council declined to comment.

North Korea has denied involvement in a crippling cyberattack on Sony Pictures but has expressed fury over the comedy. Sony Pictures initially called off the release of the film, citing threats of terror attacks against US movie theatres. After widespread criticism, including from Mr Obama, and the movie opened last week to packed theatres.

It is not the first time North Korea has used crude insults against Mr Obama and other top US and South Korean officials. Earlier this year, North Korea called US Secretary of State John Kerry a wolf with a “hideous” lantern jaw and South Korean President Park Geun-hye a prostitute. In May, the North’s official news agency published a dispatch saying Obama has the “shape of a monkey.”

A State Department spokeswoman at the time called the North Korean dispatch “offensive and ridiculous and absurd.”

In the latest incident, the North Korean defence commission also blamed Washington for intermittent outages of North Korean websites this past week. The outages happened after Obama blamed the Sony hack on North Korea and promised to respond “in a place and time and manner that we choose.”

The US government has declined to say whether it was behind the internet shutdown in North Korea.

According to the North Korean commission’s spokesman, “the US, a big country, started disturbing the internet operation of major media of the DPRK, not knowing shame like children playing tag.”

AP