"As I read and listened to the details of the show trial, I was reminded of the fact that a bizarre number of progressive commentators seem to believe Warmbier had it coming, and that his “white privilege” led him to think he could steal."Lahav Harkov
"Thirty-three years ago, Soviet dissident Yuli Edelstein was arrested by the KGB and sent to the gulag for committing the “crime” of being a religious Jew and a Hebrew teacher. Last week, Edlestein, now the speaker of the Israeli Knesset, addressed the Russian parliament in Hebrew.
"It was a memorable reminder of the free world’s victory over Communism. And its timing was apt. Edelstein took the Israeli press on a brief tour of his life as a refusenik, and eventually we found ourselves in the courtroom in which Edelstein was convicted and sentenced.
"I couldn’t help but notice the important lessons Edelstein’s story holds for those trying to make sense of another totalitarian prisoner whose fate was much more tragic: Otto Warmbier, the American man sentenced in North Korea in 2016 to 15 years of hard labor under the pretense that he stole a poster. He was released while in a coma last month, and died days after reaching the United States.
"And for some reason, many commenting on the case are taking at face value the North Korean government’s version of events. Prisoners of totalitarian regimes, like Yuli Edelstein, could show them the folly of such credulity." . . .
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