Right Wing rumor mill funded by Shark Poaching Ring?

Posted by Bruce Wilson at 4:45 PM on February 1, 2007.

The past several months have been quite a season for scandals on the American right, and now a new one might even top the Haggard debacle, in significance if not in tawdry splashiness. For years, hundreds of millions of dollars, at least, in Unification Church money has bought influence among American politicians and journalists, and top leaders of the Christian right [ click on image for video of George Bush Sr. and Barbara Bush attending Moon's wife's birthday party ] and Unification Church owned media has spread lies, rumors, and slant.

Sources feeding the church's apparently endless coffers have been murky and dubious to say the least and one, apparently, has been a mammoth west coast illegal baby leopard shark poaching ring. In the yearlong criminal proceedings against the ringleader, as Robert Gammon from the East Bay News writes "previously undisclosed evidence [ video of a sermon posted on a Unification Church website ] suggests that the conservative newspaper publisher and church supreme leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon both knew of and encouraged Thompson's illegal operation... Torres and Assistant US Attorney Maureen Bessette, the lead prosecutor in the case, have been tight-lipped about the investigation. But according to a source familiar with the audio, both have been sent copies of the sermon that implicates Moon."

Here's an MP3 of the incriminating testimony.


This is far from the first incident linking Moon's empire to fishy business. But although methods and totalitarian theocratic goals of Moon's Unification Church have been known for decades, eccentric behavior associated with the church, such as cross burials and an elaborate coronation ceremony in a US Senate office building, to crown Moon the "prince of peace" (with dozens of congress members and senators attending) has neither gained much media attention nor  cramped Moon's style. But the self fashioned emperor of the universe, who in the 1980's served 18 months in jail  for tax evasion may now be humbled once again.

Moon's "True World Foods" business has become the US' largest supplier of Sushi grade fish, and presumably that is one reason Sun Myung Moon calls himself "the king of the ocean" ( note : Moon actually considers himself the king of everything and so the "sea-kingship" merely derives from that fact ) so it might be a fitting irony if such a potentate, given to traveling the globe with the famous and powerful, were to be laid low by.... little fishes..

Tagged as: moon, unification church

Bruce Wilson writes for Talk To Action, a blog specializing in faith and politics.