Moonie Sushi Business Linked To Japanese Whaling (and politics)

[babylonsister]

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/4/23/15249/4612

Moonie Sushi Business Linked To Japanese Whaling
By Bruce Wilson Mon Apr 23, 2007 at 03:24:09 PM EST



How does Unification Church head Sun Myung Moon finance the Washington Times, an exceedingly partisan newspaper that loses perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars a year? How does cult leader Moon, well connected to the powerful Bush family and who has boasted of spending "hundreds of millions" to influence American politics, bankroll the American religious right? The answer is fishy, literally.
As Moon predicted over two and a half decades ago, Americans have taken to raw fish and Moon's Unification Church has been on hand to cash in. As an April 2006 Chicago Tribune expose' related: "The Moon followers' seafood operation is driven by a commercial powerhouse, known as True World Group. It builds fleets of boats, runs dozens of distribution centers and, each day, supplies most of the nation's estimated 9,000 sushi restaurants". Recently, True World Foods was implicated in an an illegal shark poaching ring, but this summer the company plans to profit from the growing American taste for Sushi in a venture that may prove even less politically and culturally savory. True World Food's partner in a the new supermarket frozen Sushi line planned for launch around the nation this summer, reports IPS News Service, is "Japan's Kyokuyo, a multinational seafood conglomerate, sells between 10 and 20 million cans of whale meat a year, according to an Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) report released Tuesday. 'Kyokuyo is breaking international laws,' said Alan Thornton, president of EIA, an environmental group based in the United States and Britain."

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Moon's project of encouraging the American taste for raw fish has proven startlingly prescient and wildly successful. Raw Tuna and shark meat is indeed tasty, so tasty in fact that Tuna and sharks are disappearing from the World's oceans - as are whales.

American Sushi eaters have largely been unaware of the extent to which their raw fish cravings have helped finance the American religious right and the exceedingly partisan Washington Times, a paper recently troubled, writes Max Blumenthal for The Nation, "by allegations of racism, sexism and unprofessional conduct".

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