Angry in the Great White North
Ben Chin defends himself
Wednesday, March 15, 2006 at 10:51 PM

Read other posts by Steve Janke published by the National Post
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Bloggers are getting beat up by Ben Chin, though it's not not just bloggers despite what the article says:

Toronto-Danforth Liberal candidate Ben Chin, angered by bloggers, has taken out a newspaper ad to defend his family history.

"I hope we can move past anonymous, mean-spirited smears," he said.

The ad ran in a community paper on Saturday.

Chin is going up against the NDP's Peter Tabuns in a byelection to fill the seat vacated by Marilyn Churley when she ran federally.

Bloggers questioned Chin's connection to the riding and whether his last name was Korean or Chinese. They also accused him of painting a false picture of himself as a poor refugee. Other entries suggested Chin's diplomat father was once linked to a fascist regime in South Korea.

As far as I know, the question of Chin's name was not brought up by bloggers, but by the rabble crowd on their message board.

However, it is true that bloggers were trying to sort out the question of Chin's family history (without any silly, perhaps even racist, nonsense about names).

I know because I participated. I plugged a story by Stephen Taylor. I assumed that if a Korean was a victim of political persecution, then he must be North Korean.

Of course, South Korea has not always been a proper democracy. Indeed, it went from an autocracy under Syngman Rhee until 1960, then a dictatorship under Park Chung-hee until 1978, when Park was assassinated. Another general took over, and the country is still shifting to a proper democracy.

Chin says in the newspaper ad that his father was incarcerated by the Korean CIA in 1975 and accused by military dictator President Park Chung Hee of being a communist.

Chin was sent at age 13 to live in East York after he was told he would not be allowed to continue his education in South Korea.

Goes to show that not everything is black and white. I knew South Korea had only recently become a democracy in our sense of the word, and that before that it was authoritarian country. I would have thought a high-level diplomat would have been in a safe, even privileged, position, but then you know what they say about tallest weeds being the ones cut first...

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