Tel-Chai Nation

The Armenian Weekly has a statement to make regarding attempts by Azerbaijan to claim Armenia "committed murder" in Khojaly in 1992, or make it sound as though it's inherently worse than the Armenian Genocide committed during WW1:

Every year in late February, some Azerbaijani American community leaders ask public officials to sign “Khojaly Remembrance Day” proclamations. They are generally inaccurate and victimize those who have suffered persecution and genocide by Turkey and Azerbaijan for 130 years.

During the week of February 22, the Armenian American community in Maine would normally pause and remember the victims of the Sumgait pogroms and of subsequent massacres in Kirovabad, Maragha and Baku. This year, we were faced with a difficult, complicated and unexpected challenge.

The mayor of Portland agreed to a request made by the president of the Azerbaijani Society of Maine to issue a “Remember Khojaly Day” proclamation. In addition, the Maine Holocaust and Human Rights Center (HHRC) agreed to cosponsor a webinar with the Azerbaijani Society of Maine and the Azerbaijani Embassy about the “Khojaly Massacre.” The proclamation and webinar requests have misrepresented the “Khojaly Massacre” and wrongly accused Armenians of genocide, reigniting intergenerational trauma for so many descendants of Armenian Genocide victims and survivors.

As Americans of Armenian descent, we to one degree or another are in a perpetual state of latent sorrow. This can be explained by the Kubler Ross model of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. This is not a perfect linear construct, and one can move between stages. Turkey and Azerbaijan refuse to recognize the Armenian Genocide of 1.5 million souls and continue an ongoing extermination and disinformation campaign targeting the descendants of genocide. This prevents acceptance of past events so that new insults such as this proclamation elicit intense pain and anger. Accordingly, our Armenian American community rose up in true grassroots fashion to inform the Portland Mayor Kate Snyder why this proclamation was hurtful in light of our past.

Mayor Snyder was empathetic and apologized for the hurt she had unintentionally caused. She has generously offered to facilitate an appropriate April 24 remembrance. We also reached out to the acting director of HHRC. It is unfortunate that he could not comprehend the emotions we were feeling. It was also stunning that a human rights center would collaborate with the Azerbaijani Embassy, which represents the Azerbaijani government. How could a human rights center aid and abet an unrepentant and genocidal government? Our community will press this issue with the board of directors in the near future. [...]

Everyone should be sympathetic with the loss of innocent Azerbaijani life in an active war zone. However, the misinformation campaign about Khojaly creates a false equivalency with the Armenian Genocide where 1.5 million Armenian, Greek, Assyrian, Chaldean, Syriac, Aramaen and Maronite Christians were systematically murdered in brutal and barbaric fashion. Proclamations which call Khojaly a genocide also trivialize the Holocaust and genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur and Myanmar.

Given that there've been Somali Muslim immigrants in Maine who've caused any number of terrible incidents to date, while authorities almost completely allowed the horrors to occur, it shouldn't be a shock if Portland's municipality could've gone a similar route favoring Azerbaijan propaganda, nor if certain sources allegedly representing Jewish community are either, given how far-left they are. And that's terrible.

And on that note, Israel National News also published at item by some Israeli academics who feel Azerbaijan's running a smear campaign against Armenia:

We the undersigned are Jewish and Israeli scholars in the field of Near and Middle Eastern studies. We are writing this open letter in defense of the honor and good name of a people and their country near our homeland: Armenia. We are writing this because there has been a campaign in the Israeli and Jewish press, we suspect funded by the government of Azerbaijan, to slander and defame the Armenians. One such article appeared on the Arutz Sheva website, (which, it should be added, also posted several articles explaining the Armenian viewpoint) in an article by Paul Miller on 23 February 2021, in the Jerusalem Post and Tablet. [...]

It used to be said of Israel that it had more nightmares per square block than any other country. Armenia was somewhat like this: broken people beset by memories of horror, trying to plant trees, build cities, and make a new life. In Israel, we made the desert bloom; the Armenians did the same on their rocky soil, but they had to contend with collectivization, Stalinist purges, the heavy hand of Big Brother to the north, and the attentive ear of the secret police. [...]

Antisemitism is deep-rooted and endemic in Armenia, though no more so than it is in most Christian societies. Several of us, scholars in Armenian studies, have experienced such prejudice first hand and on numerous occasions. Unsurprisingly, the recent war served as a pretext for such attacks on Israel, notably in social media. Azerbaijan took advantage of this to mount a propaganda offensive in the Jewish and Israeli media. Articles ostensibly by various authors from different places seem, interestingly, all to harp on the same two or three points.

These articles mention recent vandalism of the modest Holocaust memorial in the Armenian capital, Erevan. That is true; but it would be hard to name a country, sadly, whose Holocaust memorials have not been vandalized. Not to justify vandalism at all, one still must point out that the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and research center in Israel carefully avoids all mention of the Armenian Genocide in its exhibits, despite the fact that Hitler was inspired by it in making his plans for the Final Solution. The more we know about the history of the Nazi movement, the more important a prototype – the murder of the Armenians – becomes.

I haven't been to Yad Vashem in a number of years, but if this is still the case, I must firmly agree it's embarrassingly bad, and sets a poor example to obliterate any and all mention of Armenia from their archives. A challenging query: does this have anything to do with fear that relations with Azerbaijan will be jeopardized if any official mention is made?

Azerbaijan is presented in this propaganda campaign as the best friend of the Jewish people. Again, that is not the true picture. We will adduce but one instance in which an Azeri community acted with deliberate and gratuitous hostility towards a defenceless Jew. Lev Nussimbaum grew up in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, and moved after the Russian Revolution to Berlin. He converted to Islam, took the name Kurban Said, and published a romantic novel, Ali and Nino. The hero is a Muslim boy; and the villain of the book is a rich Armenian with a big, black, long, powerful… car. During the years of the Nazi regime, the local Azerbaijani community in Germany kept fingering poor Mr. Said to the Gestapo as a Jew. He escaped to Italy and survived there, miraculously, in hiding. You will not find this unedifying incident in the panegyrics to Azerbaijani philo-Semitism.

We cannot address all the misinformation streaming out of Baku. But we would like to declare here that we, precisely as Jews and Israelis, support the right of the Armenian people to live as a free nation in their home land. We respect their ancient, honorable, unique culture. We condemn the hateful slander directed against them. We also condemn all expressions of antisemitism, regardless of their pretext. We oppose aggression against the Armenians and believe our country should have no part of it. We will stand by their side.

And I firmly believe the scholars who wrote this did the right thing. All Israeli reporters involved in the propaganda/taqqiya campaign, no matter how unwittingly, would do well to cease their involvement. It's not like Armenia's innocent; I've long been aware of that. But that doesn't mean we should be excusing Azerbaijan, and using them for virtue-signaling. And if Yad Vashem's omitting any info about Armenia from their archives, they'd do well to change the situation without delay.

Labels: anti-semitism, Armenia, Asia, dhimmitude, islam, Israel, jihad, msm foulness, racism, turkey, United States