I’m still in California, so I’m not making my regular checks of Korea-based sites, which is why I’m way behind on this one. But there’s no way I can miss the chance to pass this along.

This is the final paragraph of a Korea Beat translation of a Joongang Ilbo story concerning the tourism surrounding the burning of the Namdaemun/Sungnyemun landmark, which some Korean media has had the gall to dub the Korean 9/11:

Unlike trips made for recreation or tourism, these trips to the scene of a tragic disaster are made for self-reflection and edification. Representative examples of this kind of tourism are Ground Zero; the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland where Jews were slaughtered; the Killing Fields of Cambodia; and Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, the sites of atomic bombings.

This is so utterly offensive I don’t even want to editorialize on it. If you want to read a good in-depth analysis from Korea go here. The reaction speaks for itself and I can only hope some big mouth conservative talk radio host picks up on it and hammers the airwaves with it because this needs reach a large audience.

For the 99% of you who didn’t read us last Sept. 11 both Jackson and I lived in New York City during 9/11 and wrote essays about our relatively peripheral experiences here and here. My experience during Sept. 11 isn’t a card I play often, but this is over the top. And Sept. 11 is the least of these four events.

I realize the article concerns tourism and necessarily the events themselves. But of course by comparing the aftermath of these events the writer is exactly aligning them. Nobody died at Namdaemun. A drunken idiot burned down a landmark because he was angry at his own government. Aligning it with these genocides, each in which thousands upon thousands of people died, is in very poor taste.