David Brooks in today's NYT explains why he is Jewish and a Christian or Christian whle remaining Jewish (the faith he

[Kid Berwyn]

23. I thought Brooks was a Moonie.

Sometimes the Truth is Friggin' Bizarre

by Scoobie Davis

May 8, 2006—SAN DIEGO (scoobiedavis.blogspot.com)—In David Brooks's latest column, titled "The Paranoid Style," (read it free here ) he writes:

Needless to say, (Kevin) Phillips's book (American Theocracy) is rife with bizarre assertions. (Phillips) writes that "many Orthodox Jewish females cannot even study the Torah," that the Rev. Sun Myung Moon "has been close to the Bush family," that the American Revolution was "in many ways a religious war."

Brooks's flippant treatment of Phillips' claim about the Bush family and Sun Myung Moon illustrates how dysfunctional Washington culture is and how clueless the nation's press corps and punditocracy are about how Moon has become a huge power player in Washington.

For those of you reading this unfamiliar with Moon, here's a brief tutorial: Sun Myung Moon established the Unification Church in 1954 because he claimed that Jesus appeared to him and authorized him to do the work left unaccomplished after His crucifixion (Moon has since claimed that his messiahship was endorsed by Buddha, Muhammad, and every dead U.S. president). Moon's church grew rapidly in membership and funds even though Moon was arrested by South Korean authorities who were suspicious about Moon's rather convenient claim that God endowed his penis with the authority to "bless the wombs" of young women in his flock. In 1971, after amassing a fortune from the labors of his devotees and establishing close connections with Park Chung Hee's authoritarian regime in South Korea, Moon decided he had bigger fish to fry and moved to the United States. Throughout the 1970's, Moon courted the powerful (such as President Nixon) and the church spent millions spreading Moon's message of world unity to Americans. As a result, the Unification Church experienced a (small) influx of upper-middle class college students in its ranks.

However, by the end of the 1970's, Moon's effort to convert America to Moonie principles was a dismal failure; in a 1979 survey of American attitudes of 155 well-known people, Moon was ranked 154th--the only person ranked behind Moon was Charles Manson. The reason: Most Americans are sane people; the more they learned about Moon, the less they liked him. They didn't like the idea of a self-proclaimed messiah calling for the destruction of American democracy (which he calls "Satan's Harvest&quot and the establishment of a one-world theocracy in which Moon rules and dissenters are "digested." I suspect it also rankled many Americans that a messiah who had unleashed his divine blessing rod on the lotus blossoms of naive female devotees would claim that American women were descended from "a line of prostitutes." They didn't like the idea of their children being recruited to spend long hours hawking flowers and trinkets so that Moon could live like a king.

CONTINUED...

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