The Obama administration has one eye opened to recognize the genocide that radical Muslims are conducting against Christians in the Middle East, but the other eye remains closed to the threat that North Korea poses to the West. The North’s human rights abuses, taken together with a steady stream of nuclear threats against its Asian neighbors and the United States, signal the crisis that could soon spread beyond the Korean peninsula. Barack Obama’s shuttered-eye approach may soon be no longer tolerable.

A new report published by a Washington-based nongovernmental organization offers an unobstructed aerial view of a gulag region of the Hermit Kingdom by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Satellite imagery of a mountainous mining area, enclosed by a 12-mile-long security fence near the border with China, and recorded between 2006 and 2015, reveals a steady expansion of a prison camp for political prisoners. What appears to be burial mounds sprout near the mines from time to time, testimony to the consequences of hard labor that is the usual punishment for “enemies of the state,” which can include anyone.

The abuse of political prisoners is no secret. “In the political prison camps of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the inmate population has been gradually eliminated through deliberate starvation, forced labor, executions, torture, rape and the denial of reproductive rights enforced through punishment, forced abortion and infanticide,” the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea has concluded.

The disregard for human life that drives the Communist regime in Pyongyang to abuse its own further illuminates its dream of eliminating enemies abroad, real and imagined.

Far from a way to win international respect, the North’s behavior has further solidified a consensus that the world will be a safer place once the Kim dynasty ends ― or is ended.