North Korea called President Obama “a monkey” in the country’s latest lashing out against the United States, the country it blames for repeated disruptions of its Internet service over the past few days. North Korea’s very limited Internet and 3G mobile phone networks were down again Saturday evening, reports Reuters, citing China’s official Xinhua news agency. This latest outage came shortly after North Korea’s top governing body—the National Defense Commission—said Obama was personally to blame for the release of the movie.
“Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” an unnamed official said in a statement published by the official Korean Central News Agency, reports the BBC.
North Korea once again rejected accusations it was behind the hacking of Sony Pictures but blamed Obama for pressuring the studio to release The Interview, which it described as a “dishonest and reactionary movie hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership of the DPRK [North Korea] and agitating terrorism.” Pyongyang also accused the United States of acting like a bully, notes the New York Times. “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,” according to the statement.
This is hardly the first time North Korea has used insulting language to talk about foreign leaders. The Associated Press explains:
Earlier this year, the North called U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry a wolf with a “hideous” lantern jaw and South Korean President Park Geun-hye a prostitute. In May, the North’s official news agency published a dispatch saying Obama has the “shape of a monkey.”
