(Updated) Anti-English Spectrum’s leader admits to stalking “following” foreign teachers in the LA Times

The Los Angeles Times has an article about the group called Anti-English Spectrum, and its leader admits that he stalks foreign teachers. Well, he says it’s not “stalking” but “following.”

Sometimes, in his off hours, Yie Eun-woong does a bit of investigative work.

He uses the Internet and other means to track personal data and home addresses of foreign English teachers across South Korea.

Then he follows them, often for weeks at a time, staking out their apartments, taking notes on their contacts and habits.

He wants to know whether they’re doing drugs or molesting children.

Yie, a slender 40-year-old who owns a temporary employment agency, says he is only attempting to weed out troublemakers who have no business teaching students in South Korea, or anywhere else.

The volunteer manager of a controversial group known as the Anti-English Spectrum, Yie investigates complaints by South Korean parents, often teaming up with authorities, and turns over information from his efforts for possible prosecution.

Outraged teachers groups call Yie an instigator and a stalker.

Yie waves off the criticism. “It’s not stalking, it’s following,” he said. “There’s no law against that.”

Since its founding in 2005, critics say, Yie’s group has waged an invective-filled nationalistic campaign against the 20,000 foreign-born English teachers in South Korea.

On their website and through fliers, members have spread rumors of a foreign English teacher crime wave. They have alleged that some teachers are knowingly spreading AIDS, speculation that has been reported in the Korean press.

Teacher activists acknowledge that a few foreign English instructors are arrested each year in South Korea — cases mostly involving the use of marijuana — but they insist that the rate of such incidents is far lower than for the Korean population itself.

“Why are they following teachers? That’s a job for the police,” said Dann Gaymer, a spokesman for the Assn. for Teachers of English in Korea. “What this group is up to is something called vigilantism, and I don’t like the sound of that.”

The article goes on to mention the fact that Anti-English Spectrum has posted photos of teachers’ apartments online and the death threats made against the ATEK president. Like Kushibo and Brian in Jeollanam-do, I remain unconvinced that the death threat is undoubtedly from a Korean person as opposed to, say, an expatriate playing some kind of sick joke.

What’s most important, I think, is that now that this guy has publicly admitted to a famous, international newspaper that he stalks, er, I mean, follows, foreign teachers, it’s time to bring the hammer down on the guy.

Edit/Update:

Brian in Jeollanam-do now has a post in which he gives a lot of background information on Anti-English Spectrum, both from his blog and from other sources such as the blog Gusts Of Popular Feeling and law professor Benjamin Wagner.

In case you’re thinking that Mr. Yie actually cares about education, I would direct you to this comment by King Baeksu, a.k.a. author Scott Burgeson.

Browse the AES site and you will find at least two threads from 2007 in which Yie himself urged his cafe members to call up my former employer, Hongik Univesity, and demand that I be fired for the “crime” of publishing a critical, but nonetheless bestselling and well-reviewed, book about Korea — despite the fact that at the time I was a certified ESL instructor with some ten years’ experience in the field. He was even so thoughtful as to include the phone number of Hongik’s office of academic affairs. No mention of my actual teaching ability — or lack thereof — was mentioned in either thread, I might add.

An equivalent analogy would be neo-Nazis in the US trying to get a Korean-American university instructor fired for writing a critical book about the US.

Of course, this is no surprise to anyone familiar with Mr. Yie and his group. Aside from advocating the harassment of foreign teachers, he has never made any suggestion as to the improvement of English-language education, or education in general.

Like asadalthought, I liked this quote from the LA Times article:

Yie, who is single and has no children, volunteered to help organize an effort to rein in such behavior.

But he looks so cheerful, handsome, and kind.

Surely some Korean woman is eager to snatch up this prize of a man.

In the interest of fairness, I feel that I should point out this part of the article:

In 2005, by then living in Seoul, he joined the fledgling activist group after seeing an upsetting posting on a website: claims by foreign teachers that they had slept with Korean students.

Yie, who is single and has no children, volunteered to help organize an effort to rein in such behavior.

“People were angry; most of them were parents with kids,” he said. “We all got together online and traded information.”

Gaymer says he doubts that such a posting ever existed. Instead, he says, Koreans were angry about photos posted on a job website showing foreigners dancing with scantily clad Korean women.

“They were consenting adults at a party with foreign men,” he said. “They weren’t doing anything bad or illegal.”

They’re both right. Gaymer is correct in that people were enraged upon seeing pictures of Korean women dancing with foreign men at a party. Those women were stalked and harassed online, and called “whores” by people who in all likelihood went on to form Anti-English Spectrum. However, Yie is also correct. The website called English Spectrum (from which Yie’s group gets its name) had a discussion forum as well as column written by an unnamed foreigner called “Ask The Playboy.” The Playboy and other members did indeed discuss ways to seduce one’s adult students. Plans and strategies for sleeping with one’s students is unacceptable, indefensible behavior for so-called “teachers.” Other members of English Spectrum should have spoken up, or spoken up more strongly, but they didn’t, and now we are all suffering the consequences. I write this because I feel that we must counter lies with truth, not with distortions of our own. As they say, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” We should take the high moral ground by owning up to what really happened. However, as they also say, “Let the punishment fit the crime.” Also, the innocent should not be punished along with the guilty. For Yie and his group to be sta… er, following innocent teachers because of the actions of a few who, in all likelihood, are no longer even in Korea, is beyond the pale.

Like Brian, I would also strongly discourage any kind of vengeful retaliation. If he or one of his cronies is, ahem, following you, then gather evidence (e.g. photos) and take it to the proper authorities. That’s their job, and don’t think, “I’m not a Korean, they won’t take me seriously.” Look at Bonojit Hussain.