NK’s support of Hamas transcends purely transactional ties

The savage Oct. 7 Hamas incursion and genocidal attack on Israeli civilians has spawned revulsion from U.S. President Joe Biden and top European leaders. Yet these crimes against humanity have earned accolades and support from Hamas’ puppet master Iran, Tehran’s lackeys in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq, and calls for declarations of war against Israel from as far away as Algeria. As pundits and media dig deeper they have discovered another distant player: North Korea.

It was hard not to notice North Korea’s supply of rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons deployed by Hamas. Quoting South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, Korea Broadcasting System reported: “North Korean leader Kim Jong-un instructed various agencies to find ways to comprehensively support Palestine in the war between Israel and Hamas.” U.S.-based self-declared “pacifist” or “feminist” organizations sympathetic to the Kim regime were quick to react. Hyun-sook Cho, Cathi Choi and Kathleen Richards, senior operatives for Women Cross DMZ/Korea Peace Now, co-signed a statement by Nodutdol, condemning Israel and legitimizing Hamas. Nodutdol is a U.S.-based pro-North Korean organization that is also rabidly antisemitic, having condemned U.S. and South Korean support of Israel and called for “an end to the Zionist occupation of Palestine, once and for all.”

North Korea’s relationship with Hamas has been long established. In his 2018 book “North Korea’s Military Proliferation in the Middle East and Africa,” Dr. Bruce Bechtol provided a thorough record of North Korea’s proliferation to Iran, Syria and terrorist groups including Hamas and Hezbollah.

Bechtol identifies four categories of North Korean assistance to Iran: weapons of mass destruction and the platforms that carry them; conventional weapons sales; refurbishment of Soviet-era weapons and military advising. Hamas has been the destination of proliferation across all categories, mostly through Iranian facilitation.

North Korea’s support of Hamas is not a purely transactional matter. There are strong ideological overtones behind North Korea’s assistance to anti-Israel, antisemitic groups. Kim Jong-un’s criminal

rule is grounded in grandfather Kim Il-sung’s fundamental ideological tenets. “Kimilsungism” is essential to Kim regime preservation.

In “Under the Banner of Marxist-Leninist Proletarian Internationalism, While Holding High the Standard of the Anti-Imperialist, Anti-American Struggle, Let Us Accelerate World Revolution,” Kim Il-sung states: “Israel is a Middle Eastern outpost of Anglo-American aggression, which opposes the Arab people, obstructs their progress, and threatens their safety.” In “Answers to the Questions Raised by Foreign Journalists,” Kim Il-sung affirms: “The Middle East crisis is the result of aggressive machinations by imperialists and their American masterminds, who have set up Jewish restorationists as shock troops to crush the rising Arab people’s liberation struggle.” Kim Il-sung blames tensions in the region on “Israeli aggression” and Israel’s “American imperialist manipulators.”

In 1967, North Koreans flew alongside Syrian pilots during the SixDay War against Israel. North Korea trained Egyptian and Syrian pilots to fight against Israel. In an October 16, 1986, interview with Egyptian newspaper Al Massa, Kim Il-sung states: “Whenever the imperialists and the Zionists provoked an aggressive war in the Middle East, the [North] Korean

people stood firmly on the side of justice. […] During the [Yom Kippur] war in October 1973, our airmen fought shoulder to shoulder with the Egyptian brothers on the same front.”

Through Iran’s abetment, North Korean weapons are in the hands of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen. Iran’s “indigenous” weapons systems are engineered and produced by over 1,000 Iran-based North Korean personnel. According to a May 24, 1984, declassified CIA document, North Korean “training officers” were delivering military training to “foreign nationals” in Iran, alongside “Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen, previously trained foreigners, [and] Palestinians.”

North Korea proliferates instability and violence. None of the profits go to its people. The regime runs five gulags. 120,000 men, women, and children face forced labor, malnutrition and brutality. To dare be a Christian is to declare yourself an enemy of the state.

Besides proliferation, the Kim regime oppresses and exploits its people at home and abroad to procure the funds needed to build its arsenal of terror. Pre-COVID, 100,000 workers were dispatched to 40 countries, one-third as construction workers in Qatar and the UAE. Most of their wages are confiscated by the regime.

Embedded in Kim Il-sung thought, North Korean support of Hamas, Hezbollah, and regimes determined to extinguish Israel transcends a purely transactional relationship. Tunnel construction, the transfer of North Korean weapons and tactical training to Hamas is, in the worldview of the Kim regime, a way of bringing its anti-American, “anti-imperialist struggle” to the greatest U.S. ally in the Middle East. Antisemitism is not merely a side effect of North Korea’s proliferation. Antisemitism and hatred of Israel and her people lie at the core of North Korea’s ideology.

Just as anti-Semitic hate crimes and invective soar to unprecedented heights in the U.S., the Kim regime through its loyal followers here are adding their hatred online and on American streets.

North Korea proliferates instability and violence. None of the profits go to its people.