Monkey slur in bitter war of words

As North Korea's leaders saw their country's own internet shut down by American hackers, the ruling National Defence Commission, chaired by Kim Jong Un himself, lashed out in frustration, comparing Barack Obama to a monkey. photo / AP

Even by the outrageous standards of North Korean propaganda chiefs, it was an unusually vulgar slur, a dramatic escalation in the two-week-long war of words between Pyongyang and Washington.

As North Korea's leaders saw their country's own internet shut down by American hackers, the ruling National Defence Commission, chaired by Kim Jong Un himself, lashed out in frustration, comparing Barack Obama to a monkey.

"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.

"The United States, with its large physical size and oblivious to the shame of playing hide and seek as children with runny noses would, has begun disrupting the internet operations of the main media outlets of our republic," the statement said, as North Korea's internet and 3G networks continued to be disrupted.

The commission lambasted the US President for playing a key role in the release, on Christmas Day, of The Interview, a film from Sony sending up the North Korean regime.

The comedy, North Korea said, was "illegal, dishonest and reactionary". Washington should, it warned, prepare for the "inescapable deadly blows" that the decision would incur.

Obama, they said, was the "chief culprit" who shamed Sony into releasing the film, after he directly criticised the studio for caving in to pressure from North Korea to drop it.

For all the sound and fury emanating from Pyongyang, Obama himself remained unperturbed - continuing his holiday in Hawaii, whiling away time on the golf course.

In the American capital, diplomats and politicians also decided that a dignified silence was the only suitable response to the bizarre attack.

And racial slurs are not a new addition to the verbal armoury of Pyongyang's propagandists, who have previously attacked Obama as "a crossbreed with unclear blood", "a wicked black monkey" and even "a monkey with a red bum".

The film's writers were equally well prepared for the backlash.

"We have a file in the building somewhere of all the insane shit they say," Evan Goldberg, a co-writer of The Interview, told Rolling Stone magazine this month.

"They called Obama, like, 'an evil monkey' - you have to look up the exact wording, because whatever I say won't be as crazy as what it actually was." (It was actually "wicked black monkey".)

Despite its fury at the film, North Korea has insisted that it has nothing to do with the hacking of Sony by a shadowy group of hackers calling itself "Guardians of Peace".

A group of the world's leading cybersecurity experts came out in support of the North Korean denials, saying that the evidence pointing to Pyongyang is far from conclusive.

"The facts simply don't fit," said Kurt Stammberger of Norse, a Californian cyber security firm.