Just to be clear : eating the new frozen sushi line that's coming out this summer won't result in more whales being killed, it merely will increase the profits of the leading Japanese whaling company and send money to the Unification Church, which bankrolls the Washington Times and the America religious right. And, of course, the new sushi line will probably speed up the rate at which the world's oceans are being stripped of large fish.

Back in the early 1980's Unification Church head Sun Myung Moon advised his followers to go into fishing. In a 1983 Moon talk, given, judging by the title of this piece from the Unification Church's website, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Sun Myung Moon explained:

"It is only a matter of time. The future of the ocean is inevitable. Is fish good for the diet? Ten or twenty years ago, Americans never even dreamed about eating anything raw, much less fish. Now they are going to Japanese restaurants and trying out the sushi and sashimi. If fish is going to be the main source of the human diet, what kind of fish would be the best to supply it? We have to produce a large fish and utilize all its qualities. What kind of fish should we use? Whales? Tunas? And what else? Shark! Actually, whales are not good to use for feeding lots of people. They are too large. They only give birth to one calf per cow and it takes a long time for them to gestate.

Let's look at the tuna and the shark. They contain the tastiest kind of meat. That's true!"

Reporters Monica Eng, Delroy Alexander and David Jackson explained in an April 2006 expose' on True World Foods and Moon's raw fish empire published in the Chicago Tribune :

"On a mission from their leader, five young men arrived in Chicago to open a little fish shop on Elston Avenue. Back then, in 1980, people of their faith were castigated as "Moonies" and called cult members. Yet the Japanese and American friends worked grueling hours and slept in a communal apartment as they slowly built the foundation of a commercial empire....

In a remarkable story that has gone largely untold, Moon and his followers created an enterprise that reaped millions of dollars by dominating one of America's trendiest indulgences: sushi". One Unification Church member, Takeshi Yashiro "serves as a top executive of a sprawling conglomerate that supplies much of the raw fish Americans eat."

Moon's project of encouraging the American taste for raw fish has proven startlingly prescient and 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".

Now, this summer, as Americans snack on True World Food's new Sushi Line, they can contemplate the prospect that they are plumping the profitability of a financial venture that has been slaughtering whales every year for decades. As Stephen Leahy of IPS news continues:

"Since the 1930s, Kyokuyo has been profiting from the deaths of an estimated 130,000 great whales," Thornton told IPS.

There has been a global ban on whaling since 1986. However, the Japanese claim the 1,000 or more whales they hunt each year in the Antarctic Ocean are for scientific research. Whale meat is found in leading Japanese supermarkets, and Kyokuyo is perhaps the leading distributor, he says.

As one website devoted to the messily grotesque reality of whaling relates, whaling is an exceedingly gory, and some would say quite cruel, enterprise. Can the politically connected "True Father" and "Messiah", as Moon has declared himself, who "collects heads of state" almost as a hobby, successfully launch a financial venture linked to the slaughter of whales ?

This Spring, George Bush Senior longtime friend and beneficiary of Sun Myung Moon's financial largesse, will share a stage with the wealthy cult leader at an event commemorating the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Washington Times. Will Greenpeace USA be on hand to protest ?  Can Moon go head to head with American environmentalist mores ?

Stay tuned.

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