‘A parrot raised by America’
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea called South Korea’s president “a parrot raised by America” on Tuesday, resuming its trademark derisive rhetoric against its rivals amid renewed animosities on the Korean Peninsula.
Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, issued the latest verbal salvo after South Korean President Moon Jae-in criticised the North’s ballistic missile launches last week.
She said Mr Moon’s “illogical and brazen-faced” comments echoed the US stance.
“We can hardly repress astonishment at his shamelessness,” Kim Yo Jong said in a statement carried by the North’s state media.
“He cannot feel sorry for being ‘praised’ as a parrot raised by America.”
The United States, South Korea and the United Nations all condemned the North’s missile launches, the first of their kind in a year, as a violation of UN Security Council resolutions.
On Saturday, Ri Pyong Chol, a top deputy to Kim Jong Un, called President Joe Biden’s criticism of the North’s missile tests a provocation and encroachment on the North’s right to self-defense.
Mr Ri said it was “gangster-like logic” for Washington to criticise the North’s launches while the US freely tested intercontinental ballistic missiles.
North Korea has a history of using colourfully harsh insults against rivals. Before entering now-stalled nuclear talks with the United States in 2018, Kim Jong Un called then president Donald Trump “the mentally deranged US dotard” after Mr Trump called him a “little rocket man”.
In 2019, North Korea called Mr Biden, then a presidential hopeful, a “rabid dog” and a “fool of low IQ” when it criticized his comments about its leadership.