[Marxism] Moon Over Washington

["Craven, Jim" <JCraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

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, Contributor 
6.09.04

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 <http://www.tongil.or.kr/> ,
was in the blog world. There, dozens of the most CSPAN2-hardened cynics
reacted to the screenshots
<http://www.gorenfeld.net/blog/2004/05/im-and-i-approve-this-messiah.htm
l>  with a resounding "WTF,"
<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c2coff=1&q=%22myung+moo
n%22+wtf&btnG=Search>  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),
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) 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.) 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
<http://www.iifwp.org/programs/IIPC/reports/forging_path/images/DC_20040
323_05021.jpg>  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
<http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFul
l&cid=1086230742461>  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
<http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/09/24/moon/>  his anti-sex
missionaries $475,000 in Abstinence-Only dollars to bring Moon's crusade
against "free sex" <http://www.freeteens.org/stories/freesexnot.htm>  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
<http://www.tparents.org/UNews/Unws0304/cross_mj_overview.htm>  series
of "tear down the cross
<http://www.tparents.org/UNews/Unws0304/cross_bronx.htm> /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 <http://www.unification.net/news/2003/news20030418_1.html>
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
<http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&group=a
lt.religion.unification&c2coff=1&selm=a56dnRcX6tCz9PXdRVn-hw%40comcast.c
om>  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."

<http://gadflyer.com/writers/writer.php?WriterID=138>  

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