To reap twice-blessed rewards

[Gogor]

The horror that the world wants to forget
The Daily Telegraph

It was an evil so monstrous that it defied belief Marcus Warren, in Yerevan, finds that Armenians are still suffering the pain of what the Turks did to them in 1915.

HER ghastly wounds saved the five-year-old's life. When one of the Turkish soldiers, picking through the pile of corpses,
saw the blood gushing from her head, he assumed that the girl would not survive.


Instead of finishing her off with his sword, the Turk left her alone. But he issued a terrible order to the little Armenian as he did so. "Die," she remembers him telling her. "But I didn't, I lived," says Rehan Manukyan, now 90 and still bearing
the scars of her ordeal. "And I have three children and 10 grandchildren."


She can recall little else of the slaughter that day in 1915. But judging by the mutilations to her face and hand, she as-sumes that the soldiers used cold steel, rather than bullets, to murder the women and children she was with. Her mother hugged her tight to her body as the killing started. That, the soldier's brutal command and the loneliness of being the sole survivor are the only memories she has of the massacre. While her face, the tip of its nose sliced off, and her right hand, missing half of its thumb and ring finger, are testimony to the soldiers' cruelty, Mrs Manukyan is a living witness to the first genocide of the modern era.

There are not many left, perhaps 20,000, and many of those would have been too small to remember how their families were forced from their homes and slaughtered on the spot or sent on death marches into the desert. Their experiences are a common bond and the memories and outrage at modern Turkey's denials of the numbers killed - and western govern-ments' collusion in the lies - live on in their children and grandchildren. "It was planned, 100 per cent planned," said Ma-sis Kojoyan, also 90, one of three survivors of a family of 23. Of his memories, two stand out. In one, a Turkish soldier lines up two little boys to kill them. The other is of his cousin trying to escape by diving into a river but holding her child's head above the water as if to save him.

As a five-year-old in the Turkish town of Malatya, Vergine Najarian watched babies being thrown into pits and being set on fire. In her flat in Yerevan, Armenia's capital, she asked: "How can we forget those terrible times? The memories are always flooding back and visiting me. And my children and their children will never forget what happened either."

At the genocide monument overlooking the city - a stele soaring into the sky next to an eternal flame in a pit surrounded by stone slabs - the 1.5 million massacred from 1915 onwards are not the only ones remembered. One plaque is dedicated to Viscount Bryce, the statesman and author of The Blue Book, a collection of evidence of the slaughter published in 1916.

An urn containing earth from his grave in Edinburgh is set into the stone. There is no space set aside at the complex for those who deny genocide. If there were, perhaps a place should be reserved for another peer, Baroness Williams of Crosby, the former Labour politician and SDP founder.

In Thursday's House of Lords debate on the place of the 1915 events in today's Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain she advocated drawing "a distinction between the horrors of history. No one alive remembers the Armenian massacre," she said.

Lavrenti Barseghian, head of Yerevan's genocide museum, said: "I feel that the UK Government is defending the Turks." The photographs on display at the museum, taken by German officers and smuggled out of Ottoman Turkey, anticipate
the images of mass killings and tragedy from later in the last century.

Piles of Armenian skulls are reminiscent of the exhibitions of Khmer Rouge terror in Cambodia. Lines of Armenians on the move through Turkey under armed guard look similar to scenes in the Balkans in the Nineties. Nearly 90 years on, the
legacy of the genocide in Armenia poisons relations between Ankara and Yerevan still. Their two states have no diplo-matic relations.

Mrs Manukyan spent 13 years in an American orphanage in what became Soviet Armenia but remembers no English, ex-cept for one nursery rhyme. Her flat suddenly echoes to her party piece, a rendition of Little Jack Horner. She changes the last line, though. "What a poor good girl am I," she sings, pointing to herself.

[Gogor]

HOLOCAUST UNIQUENESS
by Alexander Kimel
Rudy R. wrote:

As to the horror involved, nothing said about the horrors others suffered can equal that actually felt by survivors of what-ever mass murder. Moreover, I believe it is morally wrong to compare genocides as to which were more barbaric, inhu-mane, cruel, or savage. Mass murder is Mass Murder
It is with amazement and sadness I read the posts of Prof. R. and Dr. F. As a Holocaust Survivor and a survivor of Stalin's terror, I can assure you that there is more than a quantum difference in the violence, terror, inhumanity, indifference, breakdown of morality and failure of religion. My reasoning is as follows:
HOLOCAUSTS, GENOCIDE AND POLITICAL TERROR.
During the Genocides or Stalin's political mass terror, life retained semblance of normalcy, and upon removal of the vio-lence, life returned to painful normalcy. After the Holocaust life did not return to normalcy, because there was no life left. The overwhelming majority of the victims were dead.
In the Ghetto of Rohatyn, in March of 1942, the Nazi Raiders, killed 3400 Jews, about 40%. Two months later life re-turned to a semblance of normalcy: new couples formed, people gossiped, the stains of blood were removed, people re-turned to food smuggling, etc. This happened during the early, Genocide phase, of the Holocaust. Two years later, out of 10,000 Jews, 9,900 were killed. Life did not return to normalcy, life ceased to exists. Exact description one can find in my site
Another difference between Genocides and the Holocaust is the rate of survival. Stalin killed 10 million people out of 230 million (4.3%), out of 800 million of Chines Mao killed 10 million (1.25%). Pol Pot killed about 11% of Cambodians. The Moslem in Serbia faced genocide, but today life returned to normalcy. In most Jewish communities especially in Eastern Europe, had a the survival rate below 5%. Those communities disappeared forever and ever. I believe that it is morally wrong not to recognize those fundamental differences.
HOLOCAUST CHILDREN.
The litmus test of any civilization is the way it treats its children. One million of Jewish children were gassed, burned alive, stabbed or starved to death. In no other genocides were the children targeted for destruction. How many Polish, French, or Ukrainian children were gassed? None. To forget the fate of the Jewish children that went up in flame - is immoral.
HOLOCAUST UNIVERSALISM
Genocides are caused by tribal or religious hatred, or political terror like in Russia or China, and are localized in one country. The Holocaust happened in many countries and Hitler's success was due primarily to the universal anti-Semitism, corroding the Western civilization. anti-Semitism was the universal glue.
The Holocaust is also an Universal tragedy. All the perpetrators were Christian or they arose from Christian culture. The Bystanders, who stood by and did nothing to save Jews, were also Christians.
DEMOCRACY AND DEICIDE. Rudy R. wrote:
The more absolute the power, the more likely the mass murder or genocide. Democratic regimes rarely murder their own citizENS......The answer, backed up by diverse case studies and quantitative analyses, is to promote democracy. The more democratic a regime (note that this is a continuum), the more secure people are in their lives--regardless of who and what they are.
I agree that Genocides can't happen in democratic states, but let me remind Prof. R. that the Weimar Republic was a de-mocratic state and the Reichstag was a democratic institutions. They were both subverted by Hitler, in a blink of the eye. Democracies are built on fragile foundations. How long will Russia of today remain democratic? Hitler subverted the Weimar Republic with his anti-Semitic rhetoric, that is based on the age all dogma of Deicide. The conflicts between the Serbs, Croatians and the Moslems are fueled by religious differences. Shouldn't we examine our religious dogmas and beliefs, that caused so much violence and inflicted so much pain throughout history?
HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTATION
Dr John P Fox wrote:
It appears to me that Tom Kramer, like so many others, has been induced into believing that the Nazi genocide of the Jews ("the Holocaust") is somehow a "unique" case, only or mainly because of the overwhelming amount of documentary evi-dence ....
Undoubtedly, if all the same kind of policy and eye-witness documentation were to be made available in the same quanti-ties and of the same quality for most of the other cases of genocide in the twentieth century, rapidly it would be seen how fatuous is all this talk of a "unique Holocaust."
When I watched the movie "Shindler's List" I realized that the picture conveys only 10% of the virtual reality of the Holo-caust. I believe that the neither the printed word nor the electronic or celluloid images can convey the real pain, sufferings, irrationality, brutality of the Holocaust. To deny the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust is laughable.
CONCLUSIONS
Our civilization is a violent civilization, nevertheless the violence was always random, seldom directed against children and women. This changed with the Holocaust, a new precedence was created, a quantum jump.

[Gogor]

I Am Being Vilified For Telling The Truth About Palestinians
by Robert Fisk

'The abuse being directed at anyone who dares to criticise Israel is reaching McCarthyite proportions'


In the Middle East jungle, a journalist has to expect a few sticks and stones. A Bahrain newspaper cartoonist once depicted me as a rabid dog (fit, of course, for extermination), and Cairo's most
lickspittle columnist called me "a crow pecking at the corpse of Egypt".

But the degree of abuse and outright threats now being directed at anyone -- academic, analyst, reporter -- who dares to criticise Israel (or dares to tell the truth about the Palestinian uprising) is fast reaching McCarthyite proportions. Take Edward Said, the
brilliant Palestinian academic who is a professor at Columbia University.

He has been facing unprecedented abuse from the Zionist
Organisation of America, which last year demanded that he be fired from the Modern Language Association and which now demands on an almost daily basis his dismissal from his professorship at Columbia -- solely because he points out, with clinical ferocity and painful accuracy, the historical tragedy of Palestinian dispossession, the brutality of Israel's continued occupation and the bankruptcy of the Oslo "peace" agreement. Columbia University has issued an
unprecedented public defence of Said and "the fundamental values of a great university", quoting John Stuart Mill and adding that to give way to the Jewish lobby's demand would be "a threat to us all
and to academic freedom".

Too true. Noam Chomsky -- himself Jewish -- is one of the most profound philosophers of our age, but his scathing reviews of the Israeli occupation and America's blind, unquestioning support for Israel now earn him ever more ruthless abuse. In the United
States, he wrote recently, a whole population is kept in ignorance of the facts because "the economic and and military programmes (of Israel) rely crucially on US support, which is domestically unpopular and would be far more so if its purposes were known."

Ignorance of the Middle East is now so firmly adhered to in the US that only a few tiny newspapers report anything other than Israel's point of view. You won't find Chomsky in The New York Times. It was put very well by Charlie Reese in a recent issue of the Orlando
Sentinel -- note the boondocks location -- when he wrote that "Palestinians won't get their independence until Americans get theirs".

But the attempt to force the media to obey Israel's rules is now international. We must say that Israel is under siege by Palestinians (rather than occupying Palestinian land), that Palestinians are responsible for the violence (even though Palestinians are the principal victims), that Arafat turned down a
good deal at Camp David (though he was offered just over 60 per cent of his land, not 94 per cent), and that Palestinians indulge in child sacrifice (rather than question why the Israeli troops have shot so many Palestinian children).

Israeli ambassadors and Israel's lobbyists have never been such frequent visitors to European newspaper offices, to complain about reports or reporters, sometimes in a quite disgraceful manner. The Johannesburg Star -- a sister paper of The Independent which carries my own Middle East reports -- was confronted by one pro-Israeli group this year which claimed that I was in some way assisting the right-wing historian David Irving -- someone I have
never met and never wish to meet. They subsequently withdrew their allegation.

Then an odd thing happened in Ireland -- at a prize-giving ceremony in memory of a Belfast journalist. Mark Sofer, Israel's ambassador in Dublin, had been invited to talk about reporting in conflict zones to journalism students under the auspices of Co-operation
Ireland, a charitable movement dedicated to North-South relations. But at one point he chose to use the opportunity to attack my own reporting of the Middle East, to suggest that it should not be read or believed. Mr Sofer is, of course, entitled to his views -- but not to air his prejudices in a charitable forum without allowing a right of reply. The charity has since announced that it "totally dissociates itself" from the ambassador's remarks. So it should.

And yet it goes on. In South Africa, in Europe, in Australia -- I still treasure the five pages of abuse in an Australian lobby group's magazine headlined "The Ignoble Scribe" and accusing me of a "stupor of self-deception". Oddly, you can now learn more from
the Israeli press than the American media. The brutality of Israeli soldiers is fully covered in Ha'aretz, which also reports on the large number of US negotiators who are Jewish. Four years ago, a former Israeli soldier described in an Israeli newspaper how
his men had looted a village in southern Lebanon; when the piece was reprinted in The New York Times, the looting episode was censored out of the text.

So here's just one final question. If Arab ambassadors and lobbyists behaved like their Israeli opposite numbers, would we listen to them? Would we respect them? Would we run for cover and print only one side of the story? Would we hell.

[Gogor]

Differences Are Overwhelming
By Bruce Fein* -

The differences between the alleged Armenian genocide of the World War I era and the Holocaust are overwhelming, something akin to the legal chasm between first degree murder and negligent homicide. To equate the two would be to vitiate the moral stigma that should attach to the crime of crimes, and to violate the rule of law itself.

Under international law, genocide is carefully defined as the specifically intended extermination, in whole or in part, of a racial, ethnic, or religious group because of their identity as such.

Under the Ottoman Empire, Armenians were a favored, not disfavored, religious minority.

The millet system granted them unprecedented local autonomy. Further, many Armenians rose to the commanding heights of the Ottoman civil service and economy, with an Armenian serving as the Sultan’s Foreign Minister in the late 19th century. In the decades before World War I, when nationalistic impulses were surging, Armenian extremists sought to provoke the Ottomans into retaliatory action by chronic acts of terrorism, a model that worked well against the Ottomans in Bulgaria. Armenians themselves openly acknowledged this malevolent plotting.

When World War I arrived, Ottoman Armenians defected en masse to fight for the Empire's enemies, especially Russia. Others remained behind to serve as Fifth Columnists or saboteurs.

The Armenians boasted of their perfidy at the post-World War I Paris Peace Conference to justify their demand for a separate nation. The Armenian treason is well documented by Armenian sources, especially in the memoirs of Boghos Nubarian.

The massive Armenian alliance with the Empire's enemies ignited a cycle of massacre and counter-massacre. As self-preservation is the first law of nations, in 1915 Ottoman officials ordered the relocation of its politically suspect Armenian population then living in militarily sensitive zones to its territory now known as Syria. Armenians in Istanbul and elsewhere outside these national security areas were left generally undisturbed. The relocation enterprise proved grim. The Empire's food and medical resources were thin for all the population. Armenian casualties from starvation, disease, and Ottoman Muslim killings were painfully high, perhaps 300,000-600,000.

Similarly, at the end of the War and its aftermath, Muslim casualties at the hands of Armenians and their allies approximated 2.5 million. The Armenian figure though lower in absolute numbers, constitutes a substantially greater portion of the original Armenian population. The tragic Armenian losses and suffering deserve sympathy and commemoration, but no more so than their Ottoman Muslim counterparts. One innocent life is not worth more than another's in the eyes of God.

After the Ottoman defeat, the British occupied Istanbul and commanded full access to Ottoman Archives. Under the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, they were tasked to prosecute Ottoman officials guilty of Armenian massacres. More than 100 suspects were detained on Malta as a meticulous investigation ensued. After more than two years of exhaustive inquiry, Britain's highest legal experts advised against any prosecutions because want of reliable evidence. The detainees were thus released. No Ottoman official was either prosecuted or convicted of complicity in Armenian massacres in a court with the trappings of due process.

The post-World War I Ottoman Government was completely dependent upon the victorious Allied Powers who then occupied the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. This government established ersatz courts to try its political enemies. Included were trials on charges such as "outrages to Armenians." With almost no presentation of evidence, the courts found nearly every defendant guilty as charged. 1,376 individuals were sentenced to varying degrees of punishment for offenses ranging from violations of military order such as leaving a post without permission to failing to properly carry out the order under which the Ottoman Armenians of eastern Anatolia were relocated. No charges of crimes against humanity were raised or sustained. According to trial transcripts, the convictions were mainly political retribution, aimed at those who brought the Ottoman Empire into such a disastrous war. Sixty-two officials were sentenced to death and executed. Six officials, members of the Union and Progress Party, were tried in absentia and four were sentenced to death. Armenians eventually assassinated some of those tried in absentia.

Though these courts provided little due process, this does not mean that no Ottoman Muslims committed crimes against Ottoman Armenians or that no Ottoman Armenians committed crimes against Ottoman Muslims. But one must acknowledge that the Ottoman government brought to trial over 1,400 individuals for crimes against Armenians and executed some that were guilty of high crimes, while on the other hand, neither the Armenian nation nor Armenian guerrilla groups ever charged, disciplined, or prosecuted their own for equally gruesome and notorious crimes against Ottoman Muslims. Indeed, the perpetrators were characteristically treated as heroes!
They still are.

The differences between the Holocaust and the alleged Armenian genocide are cosmic. The Ottomans relocated Armenians because of suspect political loyalties, not because of race or religion. They were thus left undisturbed outside militarily sensitive areas. Hitler exterminated Jews precisely because of their race, not because of suspect political allegiance. Indeed, many had been highly decorated German soldiers in World War I. None were treasonous as World War II unfolded. But all were selected for the gas chambers or worse.

Killings during wartime for political reasons are not genocide; otherwise, war itself would be defined as genocide and the American fire and atomic bombings of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki would have exposed United States President Harry Truman to a genocide prosecution.

In sum, the Armenian tragedy of World War I falls miles short of genocide because it pivoted on Ottoman political-national security calculations, not on racial or religious hatred. Further, Armenian deaths were not specifically intended, but were the unfortunate fall-out of malnutrition, pestilence, and community retaliatory vendettas. Indeed, the Ottoman government prosecuted more than 1,400 for maltreatment of Armenians. Hitler, in contrast, prosecuted Germans for refusing to kill, maim, or maltreat Jews.
Evidence proffered to support the Armenian genocide claim is unpersuasive. Ambassador Morgenthau's Story is routinely adduced as the smoking gun. But his narrative is almost entirely hearsay and his veracity highly suspect. His chief translator and secretary were both Armenian, Arshag Schmavonian and Hagop Andonian, respectively. Further, Morgenthau's correspondence with President Woodrow Wilson betrays an intent to contrive news, such as asserted Ottoman villainies, that would prod the United States into war. Moreover, Morgenthau unapologetically preached the racial inferiority of the Turks cursed with "inferior blood." Would you trust the Ku Klux Klan to provide reliable accounts of black behavior in the United States?

Morgenthau's storyline also fails to substantiate a racial, ethnic, or religious as opposed to a political motivation for the actions of Ottoman officials. He writes, for example: "That the Armenians all over Turkey sympathized with the Entente was no secret. 'If you want to know how the war is going,' wrote a humorous Turkish newspaper, 'all you need to do is look in the face of an Armenian. If he is smiling, then the Allies are winning; if he is downcast, then the Germans are successful.'"

If Ambassador Morgenthau's evidence were convincing, the twin decisions of the United States not to declare war on the Ottoman Empire and not to assume a League of Nations protectorate over a post-World War I Armenian state seem inexplicable. Morgenthau's story is also undercut by United States Secretary of State Robert Lansing's observation in November 1916: "I could see that [the Armenians'] well-known disloyalty to the Ottoman Government and the fact that the territory which they inhabited was within the zone of military operations constituted grounds more or less justifiable for compelling them to depart their homes. "United States Ambassador to Turkey, Rear Admiral Mark L. Bristol, wrote on March 28, 1921: "I see that reports are being freely circulated in the United States that the Turks massacred thousands of Armenians in the Caucuses. Such reports are repeated so many times it makes my blood boil. The Near East Relief have the reports from Yarrow and our own American people which show absolutely that such Armenian reports are absolutely false."

The United Nations Economic and Social Council Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities refused to endorse an Armenian genocide assertion leveled by Special Rapporteur Benjamin Whitaker for want of proof. That non-endorsement was reaffirmed by the United Nations on October 5, 2000.

The post-World War II Nuremberg Tribunal refused to entertain as evidence a quote attributed to Adolph Hitler on the eve of his Polish invasion asking who remembers the extermination of the Armenians. The attribution is no more reliable than the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as Princeton Professor Heath W. Lowry concludes in his authoritative booklet, "The U.S. Congress and Adolph Hitler on the Armenians."

Morgenthau's story is further dubious because, as United States Senator Hiram Johnson fretted, truth is the first casualty of war. Thus, the British-created Bryce Commission after World War I concluded that reports of countless rapes of Belgian women and gruesome killings of children by German soldiers were apocryphal wartime propaganda calculated to stir public wrath against the enemy. Isn't at least substantially likely that Ambassador Morgenthau succumbed to a corresponding reporting disease regarding the Ottoman's?

Morgenthau's story is also disputed by esteemed historians with no Ottoman or Turkish axe to grind, such as William Langer, Stanford Shaw, Bernard Lewis, and Justin McCarthy.

Commander Arthur Tremaine Chester, the Representative of the U.S. Shipping Board in Istanbul, wrote in the New York Times History Journal in February 1923 a powerful refutation of the Armenian genocide claim that should shake the confidence of even its strongest proponents: "We hear a great deal about the deportation of Armenians from the Northeast of Turkey during the World War. The facts are that the Turks sent an army to the Russian border to defend their country against the threatened Russian invasion. The army consisted of Turkish subjects of all nationalities, being drafted just as ours are drafted. At the front the Armenians used blank cartridges and deserted in droves. This was bad enough, but the Armenians were not satisfied with this form of treachery. The provinces in the rear of the army had a large Armenian population, and these people, feeling that there was an excellent chance of the Russians defeating the Turks, decided to make it a certainty by rising up in the rear of the army and cutting it off from its base of supplies. Let me draw a parallel imaginary case. Suppose that Mexico was a powerful and rival country with which we were at war, and suppose we sent an army to the Mexican border to hold back the invading enemy; suppose further that not only the negroes in our army deserted...but those left at home organized and cut off our line of communication. What do you think we as a people, especially the Southerners, would do to the negroes? Our negroes have ten times the excuse for hating whites than the Armenians have for their attitude toward the Turks. They have no representation, although they have an overwhelming majority in large sections of the South, and have nothing to say in the making or administration of the laws under which they are governed. South of the Mason and Dixon line they are practically a subject race, while the Armenians in Turkey have not only full representation but special privileges not accorded by any other country."

Genocide charges are too important to be addressed by sloppy or careless history or political manipulations.

[Gogor]

JEWISH DIASPORA TO DEFEND AZERBAIJAN

A senior Azerbaijani official, dealing with relations with
Azeris living abroad, met on Tuesday with a visiting member of
Israeli parliament Anon Korin. A Baku-based 525 Gazet newspaper
reports that the meeting was also attended by Israeli ambassador
to Baku Eitan Naen.

Anon Kerin was quoted as saying that before departing for Baku
he had met with Jews who repatriated from Azerbaijan, and who
expressed willingness to assist their previous homeland and to
contribute to the development of ties between the two countries.

Ambassador Naen recalled the role of Jewish lobby in USA in
helping to repeal the so-called section 907 that prohibited the
US government from providing aid to Azerbaijan unless it lifted
the blockade of Armenia and Nagorno Karabagh. He reiterated that
Jewish organizations in Europe and USA will continue defending
Azerbaijan.

[Gogor]

JEWISH NEWSLETTER BLASTS ARMENIAN MEDIA FOR ANTI-SEMITIC STORIES
AZG Armenian Daily

A Weekly Human Rights Newsletter from the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union, Bigotry Monitor published in its August 23, 2002 Volume 2, an article, entitled RACISM, ANTISEMITISM RISE IN UNLIKELY PLACES, Armenian Newspapers Print Absurd Lies About Jews. The following is the reprint of the article, but we would like to mention that neither the daily Azg nor any other Armenian newspaper has ever written that “the international acknowledgment of the Holocaust undermines the importance of the Armenian genocide.” We are against, in general, “the competition” between tragedies and that was why we condemned the efforts of Israeli ambassador to Armenia Ms. Rivka Kohen to put Armenian genocide at a level lower than the Holocaust, which, we should admit, caused an anti-Israeli, but not anti-Jewish wave in Armenia.

“While blatantly anti-Semitic articles rarely appear in the Armenian press, there are occasional expressions of frustration with Israel's friendly relations with Turkey and Azerbaijan, as well as acerbic assertions that worldwide knowledge of the Holocaust minimizes the importance of the genocide of Armenians in 1915. In most cases, articles even on these subjects avoid explicit anti-Semitic rhetoric. However, during this summer, two Armenian newspapers have systematically defamed Jews in a land that used to be a tranquil corner for Jews of the former Soviet Union.

The most strident of the newspapers, "Azg," is a publication of the Armenian Democratic Liberal Party, a nationalist organization also known as the Ramkavar Azatakan Party after its leader. A daily, "Azg" has a print run of around 3,500 copies. (The two leading state newspapers in the country have print runs of 15,000 and 5,000 copies, respectively.) In an article on May 31 about the openly racist anti-Armenian policies of Governor Aleksandr Tkachov of Russia's Krasnodar Kray, the paper's Moscow correspondent, Ruben Hayrapetyan, found a way to blame , the Jews. The following quote is from the English-language version of the article, as it appeared on the "Azg"
"Russian nationalists admit their complete helplessness to fight against Jews. They know that out of 7 billionaires in Russia 5 are Jews. The wife of the sixth, Azeri Vagit Alekperov is said to be a Jew and all of them made their fortunes not by producing something, but taking hold of the Russian national wealth — crude oil and non-ferrous metals and selling it to the West. Nothing is changed when they are called Jew mug, nothing. The point is that according to some sources the mother of governor Tkachov is also Jew, though I do not have enough grounds to insist on it, but many steps of the governor could be explained by this fact. Let us recall that the leaders of the October Revolution in 1917 were all Jews, who built a new Russia by ruthlessly destroying Russian nobility, professional military and Orthodox Christians. Now there are wonderful conditions in Russia to plunder the country making Armenians, Azeris, Kurds and other minorities the scapegoat. By the way, chief of migration department in the administration of governor Tkachov is a pure blooded Jew."

What is especially absurd in this concatenation of anti-Semitic propaganda is the allegation that Jews control the policies of the Krasnodar Kray regional administration directed against ethnic minorities. The region is widely regarded as the most anti-Semitic part of Russia.

On July 13, "Azg's" Moscow correspondent Hayrapetyan claimed that Russia's friendlier relations with Israel are a result of years of pressure on the part of Russia's "Judafied" media and Russian Jewish organizations, which he claimed are controlled by Israeli intelligence. On August 1, his article titled "Hitler Would Applaud the Government of Israel" compared the actions of the Israeli military in the occupied territories to those of Nazi Germany ("Hitler also promised his people living space") arid attributed to the late president of the World Jewish Congress Nahum Goldman a statement to the effect that anti-Semites hate Jews "only a little more than we deserve."

The article was prompted by the Israeli army's occupation of land belonging to the Can Apostolic Church in order to construct a wall separating Israel from the West Bank, which set off a firestorm of protest in the Armenian media and official circles. However, most of the criticism was phrased in ways that did not seek to defame Jews. On July 23, the same land seizure issue was the subject of an article in "Golos Armenii," a leading independent publication with a circulation of around 5,000. In the opening paragraph of the article titled "Ghosts of the Past: They Don't Just Exist, They Rule the World," the author implied that the Armenian government should link Israeli policies to Armenia's Jewish community. Shouldn't the government retaliate against Israel's land confiscation, the author asked, by seizing the "luxurious jeep of the chief rabbi of Armenia"? The article went on to contend that the land confiscation was motivated by: "[T]he Armeniaphobia of Israeli, and more broadly, Jewish political and public circles who drew attention to themselves starting with their furious opposition to international recognition of the Armenian genocide and ending in the openly pro-Turkish regional policies of Israel, which in the end, are especially targeted against Armenia."
According to the author, a connection exists between the Israeli government's refusal to recognize the 1915 massacre of Armenians as a genocide and the supposedly hidden Jews in the Turkish government at the time. He also quoted as an authority the anti-Semitic forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." He charged that the sinister motive behind the Israeli stance on the Armenian genocide has to do with "the ethnic origins of a number of leading members of the Young Turks who held during the First World War key positions in the Ottoman Empire and were thereby directly involved in the misdeeds of the Turkish authorities towards Armenians. The chief ideologues and conductors of Pan-Turkism, everybody knows, were hardly Turks."

[Gogor]

TURKEY'S ISRAEL ALLIANCE - WORKING IN BOTH WASHINGTON AND THE MIDDLE EAST

"The extent of Turkish-Israeli military co- operation is still largely unknown to the Arab states, and to many in Israel itself."

"Encirclement of Syria lies at the heart of this still-growing alliance."

"The Americans chair a regular meeting of Turkish and Israeli intelligence officers in Tel Aviv and on at least one occasion last year a Jordanian officer was also present."

MER - Washington - 2/24:

JERUSALEM DRAWS IN THE TURKS TO SPY ON ARAB FOES

By Robert Fisk in Beirut*

FOR MONTHS, Israeli and Turkish intelligence officers have manned joint listening posts on the Syrian, Iraqi and Iranian borders, sharing information on guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) and Syr-ian and Iraqi military movements.

In Ankara and Jerusalem, Israeli and Turkish officials have also shared their experiences of two similar oc-cupation zones - Israel's in southern Lebanon and Turkey's so-called "security zone" in northern Iraq. Is-raeli jets now regularly flyalong the Turkish-Syrian frontier and - according to Syrian sources - over north-ern Iraq as well.

Encirclement of Syria lies at the heart of this still-growing alliance. When Syria put the Kurdish PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan on a plane to Moscow last year - the first part of a journey of exile that has ended in a Turkish prison - it was a sign of just how concerned Damascus had become by Turkey's power and the threats it was uttering. Indeed, the warnings to Syria from Sulieman Demirel, the Turkish President, to end its support for Mr Ocalan were almost identical in wording to those issued by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, to Syria when faced by Hizbollah attacks against Israeli occupation troops in southern Lebanon. "We reserve the right to Retaliate against Syria," Mr Demirel said last October. "All necessary measures will be taken over Syria if the need arises."

But the extent of Turkish-Israeli military co-operation is still largely unknown to the Arab states, and to many in Israel itself. The Turks are interested in purchasing Israel's "Propine" early-warning system and its top secret "Wall" anti-missile technology, which is partly funded by the United States.

The upgrading by Israel of Turkey's Phantom jets is already costing Ankara Ј382m, a small price for the Turkish military, which has Ј19bn to spend on hardware over the next 10 years. Turkey has given Israel permission to fly its jets through Turkish airspace to attack Iraq if Israel is targeted by Iraqi missiles as it was in the 1991 Gulf War.

Professor Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Centre for strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, first revealed the extent of Turkish-Israeli co-operation in a remarkable - but largely unpublicised - lecture at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington five months ago. He spoke only vaguely of the joint listening posts on the Syrian, Iraqi and Iranian borders but described them as "an important facet of our intelligence gathering capability". There was also, Professor Inbar added, "co-operation on terror".

The alliance was a Turkish idea, initiated in 1997 when the Turkish air force commander arrived without warning to see the Israeli ambassador in Ankara with the words - according to Professor Inbar - "we want to invite the Israeli chief of the air force to come to Turkey to visit". It wasn't all plain sailing. When the Turkish navy paid its first official visit to the Israeli port of Haifa last year, the Israelis had not bothered to send a naval representative to meet it; and Turkish officers were astounded when the Israeli harbourmas-ter refused to let their ships into port unless they agreed to pay harbour dues.

But Israeli planes are now training in Turkey, using Turkish bombing ranges, just as Turkish pilots are now flying in the skies over Israel. The Americans chair a regular meeting of Turkish and Israeli intelligence officers in Tel Aviv and on at least one occasion last year a Jordanian officer was also present. If Jordan's new King Abdullah was to upgrade this relationship, it would further isolate Syria. Mr Netanyahu's gov-ernment has long believed - wrongly - that President Assad can be blackmailed into making peace without handing back the occupied Golan Heights if Syria was sufficiently intimidated.

President Demirel attempted to calm Arab fears when he attended the Islamic summit in Tehran last year although Turkey pointedly hosted a senior Israeli air force officer in Ankara at the same time. Oddly, Turk-ish distrust of Syria sometimes outdoes even Israel's suspicions. In 1996, just after the Israeli prime min-ister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered, the deputy Turkish foreign minister described Israel's policy towards Syria as appeasement.

Back in 1982, Turkey condemned Israel's invasion of Lebanon as aggression until Israel furnished Turkey with intelligence files on the Armenian ASALA extremist group. Much to Turkey's delight, Mr Ocalan's PKK are always referred to by the Israelis as "terrorists"; Israel has expressed sympathy for Iraqi Kurds - but never for the millions of Kurds who live under Turkish military oppression. Israel supports only a limited form of autonomy for the Kurds of Iraq; which is not surprising since that is precisely the limited freedoms it wishes to give the Palestinians.

For Israel has had to cut its moral cloth to maintain its Turkish alliance. Turkey has successfully sought the help of Jewish lobby groups in New York and Washington to cosy up to the Americans and emphasise Turkey's strategic importance to the Middle East in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's Collapse. Inevita-bly, pro-Israeli groups have now begun to sympathise with Turkey's contention that the 1915 Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians did not constitute genocide and may not have been - despite absolute proof to the contrary - the century's first holocaust.

Professor Inbar lamentably ducked the moral point in Washington. "I cannot really make a competent statement on this issue," he said - and Jewish American members of Congress have gone so far as to sug-gest no Armenian genocide took place. Others have been braver. Yosi Sarid, a member of the Knesset's foreign affairs and defence committee, remarked that "Jews who lost 6 million of their people in the horror of the Nazi genocide should be the last to join in denying the existence of another genocide . There is a hardly a single outrage this [Israeli] government is not willing to commit under the pretence of a narrow-minded national interest, which is bound to prove counter-productive."

* Robert Fisk of is the longest serving Western correspondent in the Middle East. He writes for the London newspaper THE INDEPENDENT which recently published this article.

[Gogor]

Zhirinovsky causes scandal over Holocaust action


Russian ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky was the focus Thursday of a scandal at the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, when he protested against a motion to mark the Holocaust Remembrance Day and refused to stand during a minute of silence.

Zhirinovsky, the Duma's Deputy Speaker who is well know for his scandalous behaviour, said a motion to mark the memory of the millions killed by the Nazis in World War II was "unacceptable."

"There are so many holidays. Should the Russian parliament stand like this every day?" he yelled.

"What kind of Russian parliament are we talking about if it stands up to commemorate the Jews," he said.

Zhirinovsky continued shouting while most legislators stood in silence.

Both Russia's Chief Rabbi Adolf Shayevich and Chief Rabbi Berl Lazar condemned Zhirinovsky's outburst, which featured prominently in television news bulletins.

"The memory of the Holocaust is a guarantee of democratic changes in our country and that it will never again turn back toward totalitarianism and any forms of hatred," Lazar said in a statement.

Lazar called on politicians to condemn Zhirinovsky's behaviour.

Shayevich said "It is deplorable that such people sit in parliament, enjoy influence and eat and drink at the expense of the voters."

The Chief Rabbi said Zhirinovsky's and his supporters' refusal to get up "speaks volumes about their moral principles."

Shayevich said he could easily imagine Zhirinovsky and his supporters "carrying police armbands and killing Jews, gypsies and Caucasians during World War II."

Here are some words of Zhirinovsky:


Nothing would happen to the world should the whole Turkish nation perish, although this is not something I wish upon them. But let the Turks remember how they came to Asia Minor, barbarously seizing Constantinople, looting it, massacring and subjugating all the peoples of Asia Minor. Let them remember how they massacred 1.5 million Armenians in April 1915. Let them remember this, and let mankind's conscience tremble at the way a whole people can be massacred in the space of three nights.1 And millions of Kurds are groaning under the Turkish yoke and are unable to live in their own Kurdish state. A bitter fate has divided them. A large part of them live in Eastern Anatolia, on Turkish territory; some are in Syria, northern Iraq, western Iran, and the Transcaucasus. This is a people of thirty million. It has the right to its national freedom. Who can give them this? Only Russia.

It is impossible today to place victim and aggressor on one set of scales. We finally have to understand who brought civilization to this world. Who conquered the cosmos--and who seized others' lands, looted other peoples, drove them off into slavery, burned and turned Christian churches into mosques.

What culture did the Turks bring to Asia Minor? Even today, Western tourists in Turkey are shown the remains of Byzantine culture. There is no Turkish culture--you don't have culture with an unsheathed sword. Who provided the basis of the Turkish army? The Janissaries. Who were they? Slav boys, captured along with their parents. The parents were killed and the boys were brought up in the Turkish spirit and turned into the core of Turkey's fighters.2 It's somehow strange that Slav boys destroyed Slav peoples while fighting under the Turkish flag. Who will answer for this? Who will pay for the desecration of Byzantine culture, of Slavic peoples? There was no Nuremburg trial to judge Turkey's genocide against Armenians. But where is the difference between the Turks and the Germans? The fascist regime was guilty for the deaths of fifty million people. The Germans had a population of seventy to eighty million. This is the same as when the seventeen million-strong Turkish nation wipes out 1.5 million Armenians. It is the same proportion. The Turks brought as much evil to mankind as the Germans. But the Germans, their party, and their ideology were put on trial. An international trusteeship was set up. Even now there are foreign troops in Germany. But no one punished the Turks. It turns out that you can wipe out the Armenians because they are a little people. But you can't do this to the French, Russians, or British, because then you'll be put on trial. But such political "hazing" won't work. All nations are equal. No one is permitted to engage in genocide. Today Georgia is wiping out the Abkhaz and Ossetians, but Europe is silent. Flatten Sukhumi with tanks. Dismember Abkhaz corpses. After all, your leader [Georgian president Eduard] Shevardnadze helped shake the USSR's position in Europe and destroy its military might throughout the world.3 And in gratitude to Mr. Shevardnadze for this he is allowed to engage in political banditry. There are not many Abkhaz, but they want to live on their own land, in freedom. But they are deprived of this right. This is genocide, racism, fascism, and it is happening today. Who will stop it?

And what about the confrontation between Azeris and Armenians? How much longer will this last? Until the annihilation of the Armenian people. But this time it's the Azeris, not the Turks. Another Turkic nation. But that's the key to the issue: Azeris and Turks are the same. In 1915, the Turks massacred 1.5 million. The Azeris have been doing this since February 1986, five years already [sic]. The Turks took three nights, while the Azeris will take fifteen years. And they will try to wipe out the Armenians completely in order ultimately to wipe out the Armenian state. Why? Because it is a Christian state. It hinders the linking up of two Turkic peoples, the Azeris and the Turks. What is Nakhichevan?4 An artificial creation. Azeris on Armenian territory. Armenia has always been there, was there from ancient times. The country of three seas--the Caspian, Black, and Mediterranean. And what is left of Armenia today? A little strip of land is all that is left of a great state, a state with a great culture, the first slave-owning state on the territory of present-day Russia.

[Gogor]

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF ARMENIANS WERE EXPELLED FROM KRASNODAR
AZG Armenian Daily

An Armenian parliament delegation left on Thursday for a one-day visit to southern Russian Krasnodar, the scene of recent inter-ethnic tension, which involved members of local Armenian community, to meet with governor Alexander Tkachov, chairman of local Duma and members of Armenian community.

Earlier Tkachov had a meeting with the chairman of the Union of Russian Armenians Ara Abrahamian (some say at the order of president Putin). The reasons are clear, last month local youths went on a rampage through an Armenian cemetery in Krasnodar, vandalizing and destroying Armenian tombstones, the governor’s anti-Armenian announcements and other threats towards local Armenians. The question is of serious concern for Armenian authorities. What would happen if hundreds of thousands of illegally living in Krasnodar Armenians were expelled to unemployment stricken Armenia?
When reading liberal Russian press one comes across numerous articles condemning “anti-Caucasian, pro-fascist, chauvinistic and racist” actions. But there is also the nationalistic press, which does not reach Armenia and which expresses moods typical of a sizable segment of Russians. This segment of Russians consider Krasnodar governor Alexander Tkachov as a persistent defender of the interests of Russians and a new kind of a leader. The propagated idea is that the population of several Caucasian republics had accelerated by their aggressive, belligerent and anti-Russian actions the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Having gained the “cherished” independence, leaders of the newly independent states had been so much attracted by national wealth that in a short period of time dragging on their existence has become number one problem for peoples in these countries and millions of people from Caucasus headed for Russia.

Caucasians insist that mass emigration to Russia brings only profits, even in demographic terms, as due to low birth rates among Russians they are becoming “ a dying nation.” But Russian retaliate that national minorities should not settle down in prospering Moscow or Petersburg, but should settle down in remotes areas and explore the vast riches of the Urals or Siberia. And under these conditions Tkachov acquires the fame of the only governor who is not afraid of telling the truth and fighting against illegal migration, as hundreds of thousands Armenians, Azeris, Kurds, Georgians, Chechens and Turks have invaded the fertile, warm regions in his province. “He understands that if this influx is not stopped Krasnodar may turn into a second Kosovo,” Russians say.

Interestingly, but Russian nationalists admit their complete helplessness to fight against Jews. They know that out of 7 billionaires in Russia 5 are Jews. The wife of the sixth, Azeri Vagit Alekperov is said to be a Jew and all of them made their fortunes not by producing something, but taking hold of the Russian national wealth- crud oil and non-ferrous metals and selling it to the West. Nothing is changed when they are called Jew mug, nothing. The point is that according to some sources the mother of governor Tkachov is also Jew, though I do not have enough grounds to insist on it, but many steps of the governor could be explained by this fact. Let us recall that the leaders of the October Revolution in 1917 were all Jews, who built a new Russia by ruthlessly destroying Russian nobility, professional military and Orthodox Christians. Now there are wonderful conditions in Russia to plunder the country making Armenians, Azeris, Kurds and other minorities the scapegoat. By the way, chief of migration department in the administration of governor Tkachov is a pureblooded Jew.

By Rouben Hayrapetian

[Gogor]

"We, the jews, are the masters of the world and its corrupters,
manipulators of crises in it and its exterminators" – Dr. Oscar Levy.
ArmTV never misses the opportunity to make Israeli and Jewish propaganda.
This is one of the harmful foreign state policies adopted by the Kocharian
administration. The motives standing behind this are obvious. Here, in
Lebanon, Embassador Navassardian's efforts to maintain "gentleman
aggreements" with the 3 traditional political parties proved to be
successful. Negative reactions to President Kocharian's enthusiastic visit
to Israel were minimal. Great patriotic work, Mr. Navassardian.
However, one should not be a historian to remember that Zionists and
"deonme" (fake muslims) Tessaloniki jews, Free-masons of the "Grand Loge
d'Orient" like Talaat, Enver, Dr. Nazim, Javid and many more were the real
organizers of the Armenian Genocide. Eventually they exterminated the
dashnak party leaders as well, fellow freemason "brothers", thanks to whom
the "Ittihad ve Terrakki" (Young Turks) and helped them seize power. They
were after all, Armenians.
Today, shamefully, almost all leaders and numerous members of the dashnaks,
henchaks and the ramgavars are brothers in masonry of the Young turks.
Sounds absurd, but it's reality.
Have you ever asked yourselves why the Hebrew state, world Zionist
organizations and most Jewish scholars and historians violently resist the
recognition of the Armenian Genocide and assist the turks in their denial
despite the "sili-bili" with armenian organizations in America? On the
other hand, they are making the world sick and tired of their Holocaust
and are about to complete the implementation of the "The Protocoles of the
Wise of Zion", establishing unrivaled political and economic power over
all nations through their spies (including the Pope and…), destroying all
resistance on their way…
We strongly recommend the President, whom we know to be a quick learner, to
leave military prosecutor Jhangirian and his team alone completing his
investigations of the October 27 killings, and take some
privacy to study the lessons of Armenian history of the last century. Shall
we list a bibliography?
Mr. Vartan Oskanian, witnessed for his seriousness and intellectuality,
continuously surprises us with his attitude. He humiliated us during his
visit to Israel last year. It is understood that a foreign minister is the
puppet of the President concerning foreign policy matters. However, he
should have at least respected and read the masterpiece of his predecessor,
late Prof. John Guiragossian "Young Turks in front of the justice of
history" or "Badaskhanadounere" (The responsibles – by Sabah-Gulian"),
before adopting pro-Israeli policies. One cannot serve his country at this
cost. Not to say that personally speaking, this is ingratitude toward the
kind Arab people who saved his ancestors and provided them all means to
survive and progress.
Furthermore, it is shameful that some ambassadors have turned some
embassies party clubs, with "advisors" speaking to you with "comrade" or
"brother"!!! (E.g. embassy in Lebanon).
Although the first president's wife is of jewish origin, he had enough
wisdom and knowledge to develop the Tehran-Damascus-Cairo axes, instead of
today's Nato-Israel oriented politics, betraying on its way the Serbs, the
Arabs and others. Not speaking of the ethical side.
Finally, Armen Arzoumanian, ArmTV correspondent is a clown and a jerk,
along with his boss Naghdalian and colleagues Lilit Setrakian and the other
cynical bimbos.
Aram Krikorian