Moon was church founder, went to prison for tax fraud
GAPYEONG, SOuth KOREA — The Rev. Sun Myung Moon was a self-proclaimed messiah who built a global business empire. He called both North Korean leaders and American presidents his friends, but spent time in prisons in both countries. His followers around the world cherished him, while his detractors accused him of brainwashing recruits and extracting money from worshippers.
These contradictions did nothing to stop the founder of the Unification Church from turning his religious vision into a worldwide movement and a multibillion-dollar corporation stretching from the Korean Peninsula to the United States.
Moon died today at a church-owned hospital near his home in Gapyeong County, northeast of Seoul, two weeks after being hospitalized with pneumonia, Unification Church spokesman Ahn Ho-yeul told The AP. Moon’s wife and children were at his side, Ahn said. He was 92.
The church will hold a 13-day mourning period beginning today, it said in a statement. The funeral will be held Sept. 15.
Moon was born in 1920 in a rural part of what is today North Korea. He founded his Bible-based religion in Seoul in 1954, a year after the Korean War ended, saying Jesus Christ personally called on him to complete his work.
Moon developed good relationships with conservative American leaders such as former Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Yet he also served 13 months at a U.S. federal prison in the mid1980s after a New York City jury convicted him of filing false tax returns. The church says the U.S. government persecuted Moon because of his growing influence and popularity with young Americans. In later years, the church adopted a lower profile in the United States and focused on building up its businesses.
Moon’s U.S.-born youngest son, the Rev. Hyung-jin Moon, was named the church’s top religious director in April 2008. Other children run the church’s businesses and charitable activities in South Korea and abroad.
Hyung-jin Moon told the AP in 2010 that his father’s offspring do not see themselves as his successors.
“Our role is not inheriting that messianic role,” he said. “Our role is more of the apostles ... where we become the bridge between understanding what kind of lives (our) two parents have lived.”
— In what was called a first for Egyptian state television, a woman wearing a headscarf presented headlines in a newscast Sunday, breaking with a code of secular dress that for decades effectively barred the wearing of Islamic head coverings.
The anchor, Fatma Nabil, wearing a dark suit coat and an off-white hijab that covered her hair and neck, presented headlines at noon on Channel 1, one of several television stations operated by the state.
The vast majority of Egyptian women choose to wear some form of Islamic head covering. By Sunday evening, however, an online debate had broken out over whether Nabil’s appearance might be one step in an effort by President Mohammed Morsi, a former leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, to encourage a more Islamic sensibility on Egyptian newscasts and in society.
Veiled women have been presenting the news for years on private sat-