English Teachers Fight Naver Over Racial Blog

By Kang Shin-who
Staff Reporter

A group of native English teachers is picking a fight with a blog on Korea's largest portal service as part of an effort to improve their overall image.

In an unusual move, the Association for Teachers of English in Korea (ATEK) said Sunday that it is joining English lecturer Andrea Vandom against NHN, the operator of Naver.com, in a call for the portal to remove racist material.

ATEK is a group made up of 1,000 members, most of them native English teachers. The online cafe "Anti-English Spectrum" targets foreign teachers and their misbehavior.

"The online community members follow foreign English teachers; do you think it's legal? There are more than 1 million foreigners in Korea, but why are they focusing on English teachers? There are only some 20,000 E-2 visa English-teaching holders," Dann Gaymer, communications director for the group, told The Korea Times.

"They are trying to make every foreign English teacher look like a criminal," he added.

In particular, the group is taking issue with allegations that AIDS-infected foreign teachers are purposely spreading the disease, molesting children, raping women and consuming large quantities of narcotics. It also added that in some cases these accusations have been printed and distributed among the public.

"ATEK is pledging support to recent calls for NHN to take action against the online community of the Anti-English Spectrum, a race hate group that advocates vigilante tactics against foreign teachers that operates on Naver.com," ATEK said in its statement.

ATEK quoted Vandom as saying that postings on the Anti-English Spectrum violate the company's user agreement in a letter to the NHN.

She also pointed out that Article 4 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination states that the promotion of racial hatred, such as in posters used by the Anti-English Spectrum on their Naver page, is illegal.

ATEK President Greg Dolezal said, "ATEK cannot accept such harmful material relating to foreign teachers being spread in the public domain, especially when it could skew perceptions of foreign teachers and harm our members. Therefore, we wholeheartedly support these letters and urge the NHN Corporation to honor Naver's content policies and remove the offensive material from the group's page."

In the meantime, the NHN said that it has no plans to take immediate action in response to the calls by the foreign teachers' group. "As I understand it, there are no critical wrongdoings with the Anti-English Spectrum, so we cannot take any actions against the online community, although we will look into the letter if they sent it to us," said Won Yoo-sik, a spokesperson for the company.

kswho@koreatimes.co.kr

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