This is scary and too sick!
(Sun Myung) Moon Over Washington
Why are some of the capital's most influential power players
hanging out with a bizarre Korean billionaire who claims to
be the Messiah?
by John Gorenfeld, Guest Contributor
June 9, 2004, the gqadflyer, v.1.1
http://gadflyer.com/articles/?ArticleID=131
Should Americans be concerned that on March 23rd a bipartisan
group of Congressmen attended a coronation at which a
billionaire, pro-theocracy newspaper owner was declared to be
the Messiah -- with royal robes, a crown, the works? Or that
this imperial ceremony took place not in a makeshift basement
church or a backwoods campsite, but in a Senate office
building?
The Washington Post didn't think so. For a moment on April 4,
a quote from the keynote speech was in the Web version of its
"Reliable Sources" column. The speaker: Sun Myung Moon, 84,
an ex-convict whose political activities were at the center
of the 1976-8 Koreagate influence-peddling probe. That's when
an investigation by Congress warned that Moon, after having
befriended Richard Nixon in his darkest hour, was surrounding
himself with other politicians to overcome his reputation: as
the leader of the cult-like Unification Church, which
recruited unwary college students, filled Madison Square
Garden with couples in white robes, wed them in bulk and
demanded obedience.
That was before he launched the Washington Times -- "in
response to Heaven's direction," as he would later say -- and
a 20-year quest to make his enemies bow to him. He has also
claimed, in newspaper ads taken out by the Unification
Church, that Jesus, Confucius, and the Buddha have endorsed
him. Muhammad, according to the 2002 ad, led the council in
three cries of "mansei," or victory. And every dead U.S.
president was there, too -- because Moon's gospel is
inseparable from visions of true-blue American power.
Now, this March, Moon was telling guests at the Dirksen
Senate Office Building that Hitler and Stalin, having cleaned
up their acts, had, in a rare public statement from beyond
the grave, called him "none other than humanity's Savior,
Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent."
But not long after it appeared on the Post's web site, the
paper erased the quote. Columnist Richard Leiby told me via
e-mail that it shouldn't have gone out in the first place.
The paper replaced it with breaking news about "Celebrity
Jeopardy!" with Tim Russert.
The Return of the King
So no one covered this American coronation, except Moon's own
Times, which skipped the Messiah part. It wasn't in other
newspapers, which only wink at the influence of Moon's far-
right movement in Washington, when they cover it at all.
In fact, the only place you could read about the new king,
unless you bookmarked Moon's Korean-language website, was in
the blog world. There, dozens of the most CSPAN2-hardened
cynics reacted to the screenshots with a resounding "WTF,"
the sound of dismay and confusion at a scene that news
coverage hadn't prepared them for. The images might as well
have come from Star Trek's Mirror Universe.
First, we're shown a rabbi blowing a ram's horn. Most Jews
would hold off on this until the High Holy Days, but it
probably counts if the Moshiach shows up in a federal office
building at taxpayer expense. Then we see the man of the
hour, Moon, chilling at a table at the Dirksen in a tuxedo,
soaking all this up. He claps. He's having a ball.
Cut to the ritual. Eyes downcast, a man identified as
Congressman Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.) is bringing a crown, atop
a velvety purple cushion, to a figure who stands waiting
austerely with his wife. Now Moon is wearing robes that Louis
XIV would have appreciated. All of this has quickly been
spliced into a promo reel by Moon's movement, which implies
to its followers that the U.S. Congress itself has crowned
the Washington Times owner.
But Section 9 of the Constitution forbids giving out titles
of nobility, setting a certain tone that might have made the
Congressional hosts shy about celebrating the coronation on
their websites. They included conservatives, the traditional
fans of Moon's newspaper: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Rep.
Curt Weldon (R-PA.), Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) and
Republican strategy god Charlie Black, whose PR firm
represents Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. But there
were also liberal House Democrats like Sanford Bishop (D-
Ga.), Roscoe Bartlett (D-Md.), and Davis. Rep. Harold Ford
(D-Tenn.) later told the Memphis Flyer that he'd been
erroneously listed on the program, but had never heard of the
event, which was sponsored by the Washington Times
Foundation.
Rep. Curt Weldon's office tenaciously denied that the
Congressman was there, before being provided by The Gadflyer
with a photo depicting Weldon at the event, found on Moon's
website. "Apparently he was there, but we really had nothing
to do with it," press secretary Angela Sowa finally conceded.
"I don't think it's quite accurate that the Washington Times
said that we hosted the event. We may have been a
Congressional co-host, but we have nothing to do with the
agenda, the organization, the scheduling, and our role would
be limited explicitly to the attendance of the Congressman."
The spokeswoman for one senator, who asked that her boss not
be named, said politicians weren't told the awards program
was going to be a Moon event. The senator went, she said,
because the Ambassadors promised to hand out awards to people
from his home state, people who were genuinely accomplished.
When the ceremony morphed into a platform for Moon, she said,
people were disconcerted.
"I think there was a mass exodus," she said. "They get all
these senators on the floor, and this freak is there."
A new world order
The last time someone declared himself Emperor of the United
States, it was the Gold Rush's Joshua Norton, a sort of
failed dot-commer of the 1850s. But he was broke, whereas a
random sampling of Moon's properties might include a healthy
chunk of the U.S. fishing industry, the graphic tablet
company Wacom, and swaths of real estate on an epic scale.
The money-losing Times is paid for by the $1 billion he's
sunk into it, along with untold funding for conservative
policy foundations like the American Family Coalition.
George Soros has recently gotten lots of coverage as a
supposedly eccentric billionaire influencing U.S. politics.
But Soros is no Moon. In Moon's speeches, a "peace kingdom"
is envisioned, in which homosexuals -- whom he calls "dung-
eating dogs" -- would be a thing of the past. He said in
January: "Gays will be eliminated, the three Israels will
unite. If not, then they will be burned. We do not know what
kind of world God will bring, but this is what happens. It
will be greater than the communist purge but at God's
orders."
And ignoring every mainline Christian denomination's
rejection of the idea of Jewish collective guilt, Moon's
latest world tour calls on rabbis to repent for betraying
Christ, the Jerusalem Post reported last week. Speaking in
Arlington, VA in 2003, Moon said Hitler killed six million
Jews as a penalty for this rejection. And he's frank about
calling for democracy and the U.S. Constitution to be
replaced by religious government that he calls "Godism,"
calling the church-state separation the work of Satan. "The
church and the state must become one as Cain and Abel," he
said in the same sermon.
Towards this end, Moon's "Ambassadors for Peace" have been
promoting his goal of a "Religious United Nations" organized
around God, not countries. In the June 19, 2003 Congressional
Record, Rep. Davis joins Rep. Weldon in thanking Moon and the
Ambassadors for "promoting the vision of world peace." He
praises their plan to "support the leaders of the United
Nations" through interfaith dialogue. Much of the dialogue
has consisted of getting Moon's retinue of rabbis, ministers
and Muslim clerics to hug each other, and be photographed
handing out awards to politicians. The Ambassadors have
addressed the United Nations and the British House of Lords.
They have also honored at least one neo-Nazi, William Baker,
former chair of the Holocaust-denying Populist Party.
And far from the free lunches that Emperor Norton received in
San Francisco, Moon's groups have taken home grant money from
the Bush Administration, which has given his anti-sex
missionaries $475,000 in Abstinence- Only dollars to bring
Moon's crusade against "free sex" to both black New Jersey
high-schoolers and native Africans. The Centers for Disease
Control briefly announced that another Moon foundation was
the only group qualified to receive another, no-bid grant for
HIV education in Africa. Only after a competitor raised
objections did the CDC cancel the grant program entirely.
Meanwhile, one of Moon's top political movers, David Caprara,
has been appointed by George W. Bush to head AmeriCorps
VISTA; and another former church VIP, Josette Shiner, was
given a senior trade position.
Friends in high places
In the early stages of the Reagan Revolution that embraced
the Washington Times and Moon's anti-Communist movement, it
was embarrassing to be caught at a Moon event. Until George
H.W. Bush appeared with Moon in 1996, thanking him for a
newspaper that "brings sanity to Washington," famous guests
often spoke at front groups that concealed ties to the
Unification Church. Bill Cosby was horrified to discover he'd
agreed to speak at one. The reputation of future "Left
Behind" author Tim LaHaye suffered after his wife
accidentally gave Mother Jones a recording of him dictating a
fond letter to Moon's lieutenant Bo Hi Pak, plotting to
replace Vice-President Bush with Jerry Falwell on the 1988
ticket. To many Christians, Moon was offensive, preaching
that Jesus failed and that he would clean up the mess.
But now that he's forged unbreakable ties with conservative
Christians, Moon has moved on to African- American ministers,
and, through them, allies in the Democratic Party. This has
been below the radar of the press, but not for lack of
outlandishness. Moon celebrated Easter Sunday, 2003 by
launching a coast to coast series of "tear down the cross/Who
is Rev. Moon?" events, targeting pastors in poor
neighborhoods. From the Bronx to L.A., Moon's people were
convincing pastors to pull the crosses off their walls and
replace them with his Family Federation flag. An old hymn was
invoked: "I'll trade the old cross for a crown."
To Congressmen attending earlier stops in this roadshow, all
this mysticism may have seemed too murky and exotic to
understand. But the storyline is simple enough, if you take a
step back.
Moon's newest followers were invited to tear down the
traditional symbol of Christianity, told they could swap it
for a crown. But unlike the crown in the hymn, it wasn't for
them. It was the one that Congressmen gave, March 23 at the
Dirksen Senate Office Building, to a wealthy right-wing
newspaper owner, one described by Time magazine in 1976 as
"megalomaniacal," not much of an exaggeration for someone who
claims to be the Second Coming. Unless of course he actually
is.
The next day, according to a speech posted to a Moon mailing
list and Usenet by a Unification church webmaster, Damian
Anderson, Moon said he was leaving the country. "True Father
spent 34 years here in America to guide this country in the
right way," he told followers. "Yesterday was the turning
point." But you can't buy Moon's high opinion of your country
so easily (he's called the U.S. "Satan's harvest").
America, he said, was on the road to its doom. Why? "Homo
marriage." 26
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