Yeah, Washington Times…
Sun Myung Moon is the leader of the Unification Church, which he founded on May 1, 1954 in Seoul, South Korea. Moon is also the founder and leader of the global Unification Movement which owns, operates or subsidizes many for-profit corporations and other organizations involved in political, mass-media, and other activities.
He is well-known for holding Blessing ceremonies, which are often called “mass weddings”, and for founding The Washington Times newspaper in 1982.[1]
Moon has said he is the Second Coming of Christ, the “Savior”, “returning Lord”, and “True Parent”. He teaches that all people should become perfected like Jesus and like himself, and that as such he “appears in the world as the substantial body of God Himself.” [2][3]
Moon has been among the most controversial modern religious leaders,[4][5] and has been widely criticized.
Since founding The Washington Times with Unification Church funds in 1982, Moon has said that by 1993 he had subsidized over one billion dollars of operating losses at The Washington Times. More recent estimates of Moon’s ongoing subsidies of Unification Church owned media, which now include United Press International and Insight Magazine, have exceeded three billion dollars in the US alone.[41]
Critics assert that Moon has quietly used Unification Church media assets as political propaganda tools, to covertly act in support of Moon’s political agenda, including Rev. Moon’s stated goal of establishing the United Nations as a theocratic one-world government, with “True Parents” in the role of Secretary-General “in eternity” (see quotation above).
In the mid-1990s former United States President George H. W. Bush accepted millions of dollars from Moon’s Women’s Federation for World Peace to speak on his behalf around the world, a fact[42] that Moon and the Unification Church have touted to their advantage, particularly in efforts to improve the image of the Unification Church outside the US. While discussing one of Bush’s trips (a 1995 tour of Japan), Bo Hi Pak said:
“Then George and Barbara Bush went to Fukuoka, the capital of Kyushu. The people of Kyushu were flabbergasted at Father and Mother’s power to tell a U.S. president what to do and plan his schedule. Incredible. This completely changed the attitude of the Japanese government and media toward the Unification community.”
In June 2006 the Houston Chronicle reported that in 2004 Moon’s Washington Times Foundation gave $1 million to the Greater Houston Community Foundation, which made donations to the George Bush Presidential Library.[43]
According to insiders, much of the effort is to buy respectability:
“The idea was that we’d be like Disney, controlling all kinds of media, working on behalf of God,” said Ron Paquette, who was president of Manhattan Center Studios, the church’s New York recording facility, until he left the faith in 1994. Paquette, whose job gave him access to financial information about several church-related businesses, said he believes virtually none of Unification’s U.S. operations is profitable. “A lot of the stuff they do is for prestige, so they can show President Bush our dance academy and our newspaper,” Paquette said. “The idea is to bring Bush in, use his name and picture, buy Moon credibility.”
