North Korea Calls Obama ‘Monkey,’ Blames U.S. For Internet Outage

North Korea called President Barack Obama a “monkey” in a statement Saturday blaming the U.S. for an Internet outage this week.

The accusation comes after weeks of ratcheting tensions over The Interview, a comedy film about an assassination plot targeting North Korea leader Kim Jong Un. A group calling themselves the “Guardians of Peace” launched a massive hack of Sony Pictures’ computers that nearly stopped the film’s release. But Sony began selling it online Christmas Eve and showing it in independent theaters on Christmas Day, its original opening date.

Reuters reports that North Korea’s ruling National Defence Commission accused Obama of pushing Sony to release the film, in a statement on state-run KCNA News agency.

The KCNA web site, which carried the statement, appeared to be down early Saturday morning but Reuters quoted a government spokesman as saying that “Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest.”

And The Wall Street Journal said the statement threatened the U.S. for allowing the film to be released: “With no rhetoric can the U.S. justify the screening and distribution of the movie.”

When The Interview release was first cancelled, Obama joined a chorus of critics who said that Sony’s decision was ill-advised. The film studio reversed course this week. The president also named North Korea as the culprit for the Sony hacks, saying that the U.S. would respond “proportionally.” Days later, North Korea’s Internet access – which is severely limited – suffered a nine-hour outage on Monday and disruptions throughout the week.

The New York Times also quoted the statement as saying “[t]he 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 echoed earlier denials by the North that it was behind the Sony hack, and once again pressed Washington for proof, offering to jointly investigate the case. But it marked the first official acknowledgement of this week’s Internet outage.

Saturday’s outlandish rhetoric is not the first such crude attack by Pyongyang on a foreign leader. Just this year, North Korea has said that Obama has the “shape of a monkey” and called South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye a prostitute, according to the Associated Press.

[photo credit: Prachatai]

North Korea Calls Obama ‘Monkey,’ Blames U.S. For Internet Outage