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Edited on Sat Jul-08-06 06:52 PM by blm
The whole article really must be read, and I think sent around to all media first thing Monday morning as a DU activist action. http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=9868Dear Leader’s Paper Moon The Washington Times considers North Korea a “gulag state.” But funny thing: The paper’s owner considers it a great place to do business. By John Gorenfeld Issue Date: 07.03.05 Print Friendly | Email Article “ Moon’s speeches foresee an apocalyptic confrontation involving the United States, Russia, China, Japan, and North and South Korea, in which the Moon Organization would play a key role. Under these circumstances, the subcommittee believes it is in the interest of the United States to know what control Moon and his followers have over instruments of war and to what extent they are in a position to in?uence Korean defense policies.”
-- U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee report, “Investigation of Korean-American Relations,” October 31, 1978
Several years ago, the communist dictator of North Korea decided to send a birthday gift to a special friend. The gift was a rare ginseng root, and the recipient, given the ideology of the sender, may seem at ?rst blush to be a surprise: the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, self-proclaimed messiah and proud owner of Washington’s ?agship right-wing newspaper, The Washington Times.
Their relationship, in fact, is based on more than the exchange of baubles. Moon once claimed that Kim Jong-Il has extended an invitation to reside permanently in his totalitarian paradise. “He tells me,” Moon once recalled in a sermon about Kim, “‘I will give you a comfortable place if you come here, and the people will appreciate you more here.’”
One has a reputation as the world’s most volatile ruler and is seen as a potential nuclear threat to the United States. The other is known as a media tycoon who rarely gets mentioned these days, existing chie?y in fading memories of young people marrying strangers during mass ceremonies at Madison Square Garden. Both are subjects of cultish veneration by their respective faithful.
Wherever Kim goes, storm clouds seem to shrink from gathering, according to the North Korean news service (which also lauds the “Dear Leader” as a better golfer than Tiger Woods, routinely shooting three or four holes-in-one per round), while Moon claims to be able to speak with the dead. Each man’s followers fervently believe that he exists beyond the plane of normal human experience.
In the material world, however, the ?ourishing relationship between the Uni?cation Church and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea raises difficult questions for the conservative Republicans who have built The Washington Times with Moon’s billions -- and about the extent to which he, his aides, and his front organizations, including his daily newspaper, have collaborated with the North Korean dictatorship.
An American Prospect investigation reveals that The Washington Times offices, housed in an imposing building on a northeast Washington strip otherwise known for tire shops and fast-food joints, serve as the base of operations for Moon’s diplomatic missions to his homeland. Moreover, the paper itself has served as an instrument of Moon’s partnership with the communist regime. Throughout the 1990s, as Western observers predicted that the Kim dynasty that rules North Korea would collapse for lack of hard currency reserves, the Moon organization invested tens of millions of dollars, which apparently included payments made before U.S. sanctions eased in 1999.
The Japanese press has accused Moon of involvement in an arms deal that appears to have enhanced North Korean missile-tube research -- a serious charge, considering recent fears about the advancement of North Korea’s missile-range capabilities. Indeed, Moon’s connections with the Kim regime have long been a matter of active concern for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Yet Moon remains a Washington political powerhouse in his own right, a generous friend of the Bush family, and a patron of religious-right and other conservative causes. Now 85 years old, he oversees a secretive international empire of media, religious, real-estate, commercial, and industrial entities, as well as a shifting maze of front groups with far more names than leaders. Notable among these organizations is the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace (IIFWP), which has an office in The Washington Times building -- and has been repeatedly publicized in the newspaper’s pages.
* * *
Moon’s growing constellation of ?nancial and political connections with North Korea -- an arrangement that would be impossible to imagine for any other newspaper publisher in America -- lend credence to critics who have long insisted that The Washington Times should register with the U.S. Justice Department as a political organ funded by foreign sources.
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