Fr. Simon Harak: Anti-War Leftist Takes Money From War Profiteers

Simon Harak, Lecturer in Theology at Marquette, is a leftist who came to Marquette last year to head a “Center for Peacemaking.”

Harak’s extreme political views have been exposed by GOP3.COM, as well as right here on the Marquette Warrior.

Harak specializes in rhetoric about the evils of “War Profiteers” and his motto appears to be “Stop the Merchants of Death.”

But in a splendid piece of investigative reporting, Daniel Suhr of GOP3.COM has discovered that Harak appears to be a beneficiary of the Merchants of Death.

Specifically, the Sally and Terry Rynne Foundation, which is funding the Center for Peacemaking, has large investments in defense contractors. As Suhr points out:

Honeywell is listed as one of the fifteen largest defense contractors in the nation, doing $4.2 billion in US defense contractors in 2004. 3M does a fair amount of defense contracting as well. Shell was once a top 50 defense contractor. Microsoft, not surprisingly, does some defense business, as does Chevron. Exxon Mobil and BP Amaco are top 50 defense contractors. Bell South and Wells Fargo are on the Army Pays list, which the “Stop the Merchants of Death” campaign identified as a way for non-military contractor corporations to support war and violence.

Suhr could have added Du Pont, historically one of the great “Merchants of Death” but fallen to 87th place in a 2001 listing.

Suhr draws the logical conclusion from all this.

Given that Fr. Harak has defined the last several years of his life in opposition to the corporations that profit on war, I think the only way he can maintain any measure of integrity and intellectual consistency is to refuse the gift from the Rynne Foundation. If he allows Marquette to keep the gift, he would, arguably, be making Marquette complicit in this nasty business of war profiteering.

It seems that Harak and his cohort Michael Duffey are in a tough spot. It’s easy to be self-righteous if you are criticizing the way other people get their money.

Just how serious are they in their claims that profits from defense contractors are immoral?