Earlier I posted a translation of a February 5, 2010 Dong-A Ilbo interview with Anti-English Spectrum’s Lee Eun-ung. A response to the claims made in the article follows. Here are links to the original foreign media articles (National Post, Vancouver Sun, LA Times (Feb. 2009, Jan. 2010)) referred to in the Dong-A Ilbo article.
At the beginning of the article, it asks “Why are foreign media ‘attacking the citizen’s group?’” and “attacking” is in quotes; not so a few sentences later: “Why are you receiving such attacks?” The reporter decided to turn the debate into “us vs. them” – “malicious foreign press reports are distorting things Korean.” This is amusing when you realize that in reality, one of the most critical statements made about Anti-English Spectrum came from an ROK diplomat, Younggoog Park, Minister-Counsellor of Public Affairs at the Korea Embassy in Ottawa:
“Their reactionary views and opinions do not represent the sentiment of Koreans toward Canadians or other foreign teachers,” Park told the CBC’s The Current.
Lee then takes the chance to once again reiterate the reason for forming AES – the English Spectrum incident: “During this incident, postings like ‘Picking up Korean women is easy… I had sex with a middle school girl’ enraged Koreans.” He fails to mention, as always, that the “How to mollest[sic] your students” post on Korean ESL (from which the “I had sex with a middle school girl” quote came) also enraged the foreign English teachers who read it when it was first posted a year and a half before it was discovered by Koreans. For once, due only to the criticism brought up in foreign media reports, Lee does actually admit something he never has before: “[A]mong the people who first joined our group, some concentrated only on attacking and degrading women who date foreigners.”
