Ex-NBA star and self-appointed ambassador of hoops diplomacy, Dennis Rodman has high hopes for his latest project ~ Rodman holds basketball trials for allstar match in North Korea ~

… the former basketball star, held trials on Friday for a North Korean team to face a dozen NBA veterans in an exhibition game on leader Kim Jong Un’s birthday next month.
 

Now remember, this is the country that just “detained” an 85 year-old American Korean war veteran for six weeks. A dictatorship that announced on December 12th Kim Jong Un’s uncle had been executed as “a traitor to the nation” and “worse than a dog.”
 
Doesn’t phase Dennis. Nor did this plea from a North Korean refugee…
 
Before Rodman left last week, Shin Dong-hyuk, who barely managed to escape with his life from a North Korean prison camp, publicly appealed to him to reconsider the visit ~

I want to tell you about myself. I was born in 1982 in Camp 14, a political prison in the mountains of North Korea. For more than 50 years, Kim Jong Un, his father and his grandfather have used prisons such as Camp 14 to punish, starve and work to death people who the regime decides are a threat. Prisoners are sent to places like Camp 14 without trial and in secret.
 
A prisoner’s “crime” can be his relation by blood to someone the regime believes is a wrongdoer or wrong-thinker. My crime was to be born as the son of a man whose brother fled to South Korea in the 1950s.
 
You can see satellite pictures of Camp 14 and four other labor camps on your smartphone. At this very moment, people are starving in these camps. Others are being beaten, and someone soon will be publicly executed as a lesson to other prisoners to work hard and obey the rules. I grew up watching these executions, including the hanging of my mother.
 
On orders of the guards in Camp 14, inmates are forced to marry and create children to be raised by guards to be disposable slaves. Until I escaped in 2005, I was one of those slaves. My body is covered with scars from torture I endured in the camp […]
 
Mr. Rodman, I cannot presume to tell you to cancel your trip to North Korea. It is your right as an American to travel wherever you wish and to say whatever you want. It is your right to drink fancy wines and enjoy yourself in luxurious parties, as you reportedly did in your previous trips to Pyongyang. But as you have a fun time with the dictator, please try to think about what he and his family have done and continue to do.

[Shin Dong-hyuk’s entire letter was published in the Washington Post.]
 
Unfortunately, Rodman seems to prefer his personal reality-free world. ➡
 
Responding to the reluctance of some U.S. players to visit the communist dictatorship, he had this to say ~

“You know, they’re still afraid to come here, but I’m just telling them, you know, don’t be afraid man, it’s all love, it’s all love here,” Rodman said after the tryouts at the Pyongyang Indoor Gymnasium. “I understand what’s going on with the political stuff, and I say, I don’t go into that venture, I’m just doing one thing for these kids here, and for this country, and for my country, and for the world pretty much.”

Hey Dennis! What about the people who are truly suffering in dehumanizing North Korean prison camps??!
 
What a tool.