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Title: Where Did the Web Rumors About Obama Come From?
Source: McClatchey
URL Source: [None]
Published: May 9, 2008
Author: Matt Stearns
Post Date: 2008-05-09 14:55:00 by ghostdogtxn
Keywords: None
Views: 109
Comments: 3

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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 3.

#3. To: ghostdogtxn (#0) (Edited)

Insight Magazine

It might be alarming to some, but it's really not that surprising: WorldNetDaily and News World Communications are forging closer ties.

News World Communications is the owner of the conservative Washington Times, the conservative Insight newsmagazine and the wire service United Press International (whose highest-profile client is NewsMax; former Washington Times and UPI editor Arnaud de Borchgrave sits on NewsMax's board of directors). News World is controlled by the Unification Church, headed by Sun Myung Moon, who used to be widely criticized as a cult leader before he started spreading his millions around conservative causes.

Late last year, WND announced a content-sharing agreement with Insight magazine, which has brought to WND stories like a slanted one on Jan. 26 that describes the so-called "dirty dozen terror caucus" in Congress, in which writer J. Michael Waller equates supporting the causes to free Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier with providing "active support to terrorist organizations."

With such a content-sharing link comes commerce, and that means you go through the WorldNetDaily store to subscribe to Insight. WND editor Joseph Farah himself penned an e-mail sent to WND's mailing list shilling the magazine. In it, he calls Insight editor Paul Rodriguez "one of my best friends in the business" and claims "Paul is like me -- an independent thinker who digs deep and hard for the facts and draws conclusions based on what he finds rather than on some ideological assumption." Despite the Moonie money behind the magazine, Farah also wants us to believe Insight "operates on a shoestring."

Insight, meanwhile, returned the logrolling favor with an "in-depth interview" (as it was described in another e-mail WND sent out) of Farah. Far from being "in-depth," the interview is quite softball and has no real purpose beyond promoting Farah's new book. How softball? Farah says things like, "Writing a book of this kind is what God put me here to do. This is what my whole life up to this point has prepared me to do." The interview also parrots the "independent news site" claim without question and fails to mention the business arrangement between WND and Insight (though it did note that Farah received something called the Washington Times Foundation National Service Award in 1996).

The WND store also sells subscriptions to the weekly edition of the Washington Times -- which coincidentally features a column by Farah, who contributes another blurb: "If you want the perfect weekly print complement to WorldNetDaily, I strongly recommend the Washington Times Weekly, edited by my friend Robert Morton."

The company that Farah and WND are doing business has spent years building its conservative credentials -- to the occasional detriment of journalism. Washington Times staffers have complained about their stories being rewritten to a conservative slant -- called "prudenizing" in honor of Wesley Pruden, the paper's editor. An April 2002 Insight story goes to great lengths to try to paint the urban-legend busters at Snopes.com as biased against conservatives; the site had dismissed as false an earlier Insight claim that Hillary Clinton "played a significant role in defending Black Panthers accused of torturing and murdering Alex Rackley," but nothing writer John Berlau offers as evidence to contradict Snopes here specifically supports the magazine's claim to the contrary.

Moon himself claims no journalistic intent. At a celebration of the Times' 20th anniversary last year, Moon said he established the newspaper "in response to heaven's direction" and that "The Washington Times is responsible to let the American people know about God." Moon and his associated other businesses have reportedly poured around $1.7 billion into the Times to keep it afloat since its founding; neither it nor Insight have never made a profit.

Such massive subsidizing of a conservative mouthpiece has allowed conservatives -- not to mention the millions doled out to Jerry Falwell and other prominent conservatives to aid or bail out their various causes -- to overlook where that money is coming from. Moon considers himself a divine being of a similar stature to God and Jesus. He also considers the life of Jesus a "failure" because he did not establish a church like Moon's before he died. (Contrast to the conservative outrage over Ramsey Clark's statement calling Jesus a terrorist.) Moon reportedly get his start in the divine-being business by performing sexual "purification" rites, i.e., having sex with lots of women. The accounts of mind-control techniques used by the Unification Church to recruit new members are numerous. The behavior of at least one of Moon's children is worthy of the Clara Harris solution Farah speaks so highly of. (Consortium News and MoonieWorld have even more on the Moon way of doing things.)

And we haven't even gotten to the payments made by Moon's business empire to North Korea and Moon's connections with the Bush family.

Why bring all this up? Because conservatives like Farah used to be bothered by this kind of behavior. And because WorldNetDaily, along with other conservatives, has made a point of detailing the socialist roots of International ANSWER, chief organizer of anti-war protests in the United States. As David Limbaugh wrote in a Feb. 18 WND column, "The insightful proverb, 'we shall be known by the company we keep' applies as fittingly to useful idiots as anyone else." The same should also apply to WorldNetDaily's business arrangements.

conwebwatch.tripod.com/stories/2003/moonienet.html

If you’ve ever wondered how agit-propaganda works, you might take a look at the latest case study from the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s media empire – a bogus story about Barack Obama attending a Muslim “madrassah” when he was six years old, a smear that was then attributed to operatives of Hillary Clinton.

www.consortiumnews.com/2007/012207.html

Days after Barack Obama jumped into the presidential sweepstakes, he was hit with a thinly sourced story from his past--39 years in his past, to be exact.

The allegation, by a conservative magazine, raised questions about whether the Illinois senator had been schooled in Islamic radicalism when he was all of 6 years old.

Insight, a magazine owned by the Washington Times, cited unnamed sources in saying that young Barack attended a madrassah, or Muslim religious school, in Indonesia. In his 1995 autobiography, Obama said his Indonesian stepfather had sent him to a "predominantly Muslim school" in Jakarta, after two years in a Catholic school -- but Insight goes further in saying it was a madrassah and that Obama was raised as a Muslim.

Fox News picked up the Insight charge on two of its programs, playing up an angle involving Hillary Clinton. The magazine, citing only unnamed sources, said that researchers "connected" to the New York senator were allegedly spreading the information about her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The New York Post, which, like Fox, is owned by Rupert Murdoch, also picked up the article, with the headline: " 'OSAMA' MUD FLIES AT OBAMA."

Thus, in the first media controversy of the 2008 campaign, two of the leading candidates find themselves forced to respond to allegations lacking a single named source.

"The allegations are completely false," says Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs. "To publish this sort of trash without any documentation is surprising, but for Fox to repeat something so false, not once, but many times is appallingly irresponsible. This is exactly the type of slash-and-burn politics the American people are sick and tired of." Obama, aides note, is a Christian and belongs to a Chicago church.

Clinton campaign officials were relieved that what they regard as an absurd allegation was not picked up more widely. "It's an obvious right-wing hit job by a Moonie publication that was designed to attack Senator Clinton and Senator Obama at the same time," says Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson. Insight, like the Washington Times, is owned by a company controlled by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. No one answered the phone at Insight's office yesterday and its editor did not respond to an e-mail request for comment.

On the morning show "Fox & Friends" on Friday, co-host Steve Doocy said that madrassahs are financed by Saudis and teach a radical version of Islam known as Wahhabism, though he said there was a question whether that was the curriculum in the late 1960s, when Obama attended the school. Another co-host, Gretchen Carlson, said that those on the show weren't referring to all Muslims, only "the kind that want to blow us up."

After the show, Obama aides complained to Fox about what the campaign deemed inflammatory language.

Bill Shine, Fox News's senior vice president for programming, says the "Fox & Friends" hosts "did say repeatedly, over and over, that they were getting this from Insight magazine." He says the show will provide a "clarification" today by including the comments of Obama campaign spokesmen. He says the morning program is "an irreverent show" on which the hosts sometimes express their opinions.

On Friday afternoon, John Gibson, host of Fox's "The Big Story," began a segment this way: "Hillary Clinton reported to be already digging up the dirt on Barack Obama. The New York senator has reportedly outed Obama's madrassah past. That's right, the Clinton team reported to have pulled out all the stops to reveal something Obama would rather you didn't know -- that he was educated in a Muslim madrassah."

www.washingtonpost.com/wp...1/21/AR2007012101161.html

The United States government launched a plethora of official investigations of Reverend Moon involving nearly twenty federal agencies. Hearings were conducted on Capitol Hill to warn of the dangers of new religious movements. Rep. Donald Fraser led a Congressional investigation of alleged ties between the Unification Church and the Korean CIA. The multi-million dollar effort came up with nothing of substance.

Meanwhile, a five-year IRS investigation finally produced a politically-crafted indictment against Reverend Moon. This indictment, handed down in 1981, charged him with evading income taxes nearly a decade earlier, as well as conspiracy to avoid those taxes. The government's purpose, however, was to force Reverend Moon to leave America.

When the indictment was handed down, Reverend Moon was in Korea. His lawyers recommended that he not come back to America, since there is no extradition treaty between the United States and the Republic of Korea. However, he did not follow their advice. He was, after all, a man of God, not a criminal fleeing the law. He immediately returned to the United States. He told his counsel: "I will not abandon my mission in America. That I will never do."

Upon arriving in New York for the Federal District Court arraignment he spoke only one sentence: "Your Honor, I am not guilty." The outcome of the trial was a foregone conclusion. He was convicted and sentenced to spend eighteen months in a federal prison. When, despite forty amicus briefs from mainline Christian leaders, legal associations, civil liberty groups and state governments, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, he prepared to go to jail.

The US Justice Department wanted to negotiate with Reverend Moon's attorneys. On the condition that Reverend Moon depart for Korea and never come back to the United States, they said, the government would waive his prison sentence. He flatly refused. His comment was, "It must be God's will that I go to prison. There must be a providential reason why I must go this way."

In the meantime, protests were being made all around the nation over the injustice Reverend Moon was suffering. Many Christian leaders who never knew or cared about him began to realize that the government had made a serious assault on religious freedom. Altogether, Christians and non-religious groups representing over 160 million Americans came to his legal defense. A Senate subcommittee, chaired by Senator Orrin Hatch, conducted its own investigation into Reverend Moon's tax case and published its findings in a report which concluded:

We accused a newcomer to our shores of criminal and intentional wrongdoing for conduct commonly engaged in by a large percentage of our own religious leaders, namely, the holding of church funds in bank accounts in their own names. Catholic priests do it. Baptist ministers do it, and so did Sun Myung Moon.

No matter how we view it, it remains a fact that we charged a non-English-speaking alien with criminal tax evasion on the first tax returns he filed in this country. It appears that we didn't give him a fair chance to understand our laws. We didn't seek a civil penalty as an initial means of redress. We didn't give him the benefit of any doubt. Rather, we took a novel theory of tax liability of less than $10,000 and turned it into a guilty verdict and eighteen months in a federal prison.

I do feel strongly, after my subcommittee has carefully and objectively reviewed this [Reverend Moon's tax] case from both sides, that injustice rather than justice has been served. The Moon case sends a strong signal that if one's views are unpopular enough, this country will find a way not to tolerate, but to convict. I don't believe that you or I or anyone else, no matter how innocent, could realistically prevail against the combined forces of our Justice Department and judicial branch in a case such as Reverend Moon's.

On August 20, 1985, Reverend Moon was freed after completing thirteen months of incarceration. Upon his release, major Christian and civil rights leaders, including Reverend Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority and Reverend Joseph Lowry of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, held a press conference to decry the persecution and imprisonment of Reverend Moon and to welcome him back.

On August 24, 1992, Reverend Moon completed his forty-year wilderness course. At a gathering of 1,000 world leaders at the World Culture and Sports Festival, Reverend Moon declared that he and his wife are the Messiah and True Parents of all humanity. This marks the beginning of the Completed Testament Age. Mrs.. Moon has given a fitting description of the meaning of the Messiah and the True Parents.

Ladies and Gentlemen, what is the Messiah? The Messiah is the True Parents of humankind. God's original plan was to establish perfected Adam and Eve as the true ancestors of humanity. Satan, however, invaded this ideal, and God, ever since, has been working toward the emergence of ideal True Parents through which all humankind can be restored. As true fathers and true mothers ourselves, we must vanquish Satan, liberate humanity and build the kingdom of Heaven on earth. As God's sons and daughters we must inherit God's love, life and lineage. Moreover, we must also inherit True Parents' love, life and lineage. Then we will have achieved unity between heaven and earth, vertical and horizontal, and mind and body. This will be the starting point for the eternal world of peace.

The following year saw an even greater activism on the part of Mrs. Moon, as she delivered the address, "True Parent's and the Completed Testament Age" in 44 cities in America, 27 cities in Japan, on 40 university campuses in Korea, and 41 nations around the world. This monumental achievement included such notable venues as Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., the United Nations in New York City, the Kremlin, and congressional buildings in Japan, Korea, and Canada.

With absolute faith, hope and love, Reverend Moon has dedicated himself to the call of Jesus. Through God's power and Principle, despite persecution, he has accomplished the work which Jesus called him to do. First, after a long search, he discovered the teachings of the Divine Principle: God's ideal for humanity, the root of evil, and the formula to restore the ideal. Next, he tried to explain his insights to the established Christian churches, but when they rejected him, he began the lonely and difficult path of a prophet in the wilderness. For over forty years, amidst persecution and ridicule, he established a church reaching out to people across the globe.

Tens of thousands of Unificationist families, sanctified by God's blessing, are practicing a quality of love which transcends all racial and national barriers. Organizations founded by Reverend Moon in education, the arts, science, communications and international affairs show how every aspect of human life can be centered on God's true love. Reverend Moon has emerged on the world stage to demonstrate God's true heart by loving and embracing his enemies, the leaders of North Korea and the Soviet Union, who once had imprisoned him and sought to kill him. He has brought together the leaders of warring religions.

True love has now triumphed over evil. All the satanic barriers have been broken down. The Completed Testament Age has dawned. God's true love, which was lost at the fall of man, has made its triumphant reappearance in the world. This love is the power of new life for all individuals, marriages and families the world over. We pray that this brief testimony to the providence of God will inspire the reader to study further, and to make a personal commitment to building the kingdom of Heaven on earth.

www.unification.org/rev_mrs_moon.html

Brother of George Bush visits Paraguay president as guest of Moon-backed group

www.religionnewsblog.com/...niversal-peace-federation

Sun Myung Moon is Telling Christian Ministers to Take Down the Crosses

www.tlem.net/takedowncrosses.htm

OPEN LETTER TO THE AMERICAN CLERGY LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE (ACLC) and ANY CHRISTIAN LEADERS ASSOCIATING WITH SUN MYUNG MOON SPONSORED EVENTS.

www.tlem.net/lettertoamericanclergy.htm

www.tlem.net/infiltration.htm

Moon Front Groups As part of his plan to take over the world, Moon has initiated numerous organizations. Although they are often established by members and although church members towards the public often vehemently deny ANY affiliation with the UC, inside the church these organizations are proudly viewed as "Father's projects" ...intended to further the establishment of "God's Kingdom of Heaven on Earth" ...under Mr. Moon's rule as the Messiah and "True Parent of Mankind." To members this was another sign that "he must be the Messiah" ...since he is so incredibly successful in "furthering God's providence."

www.tlem.net/moonfrontgroups.htm

bush_is_a_moonie  posted on  2008-05-09   22:53:32 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  

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