The Union of Councils for Soviet Jews reports on 6 January 2006 about another vandalism against the Armenians of Russia.

archival photo: another Armenian religous monument desecrated by Russian neo-fascists, known as "skinheads"

Unidentified vandals smashed a cross erected by the Armenian community of Syktyvkar, Russia (Komi Republic), according to a December 28, 2005 report by Igor Sazhin, head of the local branch of the human rights group Memorial, a participating NGO in a European Commission sponsored project to monitor xenophobia in Russia (UCSJ, the Moscow Helsinki Group, and the Moscow Bureau on Human Rights are the main grantees of the project).

The recently erected cross was broken in two at some point the previous day. Mr. Sazhin believes that the vandalism was the work of local neo-fascists, whom he blames for the still unsolved December 1, 2005 arson attack against a mosque in the city. The Armenian community plans to rebuild the cross.

Forbes informs on 6 January 2005, Turkey's Justice Minister Cemil Cicek (Jemil Chichek) urged Orhan Pamuk, the prominent Turkish novelist on trial for admitting the Armenian genocide, to apologize, so that his case can be dismissed.

Orhan Pamuk went on trial Dec. 16 for saying "30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands," but the proceeding was immediately stopped to await a ruling by the Justice Ministry on whether to proceed.

The controversy comes at a particularly sensitive time in the overwhelmingly Muslim country's push to join the European Union, which severely criticized the trial, questioning the commitment to freedom of expression in a country that opened membership negotiations with the bloc in October.

In urging Pamuk to apologize, the minister appeared to be looking for a way to end the case. Dozens of other people are facing similar charges.

"I wish he would" apologize, Cicek said on private NTV television, adding that he would like the writer to say: "I am sorry."

– from http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/ap/2006/0…/ap2433531.html

My "alleged masterpiece," as Harut Sassounian described my sarcastic letter to an American newspaper, made an editorial in USA Armenian Life Magazine , Hye Kiank Armenian Weekly on 6 January 2006, where Appo Jabarian, the publisher, wrote:

In their decades-long desperate attempts to obstruct
justice sought by the heirs of the 1.5 million victims
of the Armenian Genocide, the denialist Turkish
officialdom and its cronies in Israel and USA have
come up with an initial “invention”: rewriting
history.

When the foundations of the denialists’ “invention”
proved to be very shaky, the fathers of this ill-fated
invention came up yet with a new “invention”: they
started employing the word “alleged”, “allegations”.
So, every time a denialist intends to attempt to
discredit the veracity of the Genocide, he/she resorts
to profusely using the word “alleged” or “allegation”.

Probably, the most popular term among the denialit
Turks is the term “alleged Armenian Genocide” or
“Armenian allegations that a genocide has occured in
1915”. Every international act of recognition of the
Armenian Genocide drives the denialist Turk’s or his
cronie’s blood pressure to even higher degree.

And now, decades later, when the momentum of
international recognition is picking up steam, the
favorite anti-blood pressure “allegation” or “alleged”
tablets have proven to be very popular among the
so-called Turkish nationalists, and their cronies in
the West.

On Monday January 2, 2006, The Jewish Advocate of
Boston, MA broke new record in its attempt to please
the Turkish denialists. The Advocate has published a
photo showing skulls and living individuals
accompanied by the following caption: “A historical
photo of alleged victims of the Armenian genocide.”

Soon after the publication of the anti-Armenian biased
photo and the article, Simon Maghakyan, a fellow
member of Yahoo!ArmenianGroup wrote: “I read your
‘alleged’ article in the ‘alleged’ Jewish Advocate
about the ‘alleged’ Armenian genocide at the ‘alleged’
website
http://www.thejewishadvocate.com/this_week…ontent_id=689.”

Maghakyan continued: “The ‘alleged’ photo of the
‘alleged’ victims of the ‘alleged’ Armenian genocide
you posted, shows the ‘alleged’ Armenians and some
‘alleged’ Armenian skulls of ‘alleged’ Urfa, where my
‘alleged’ grandparents were ‘allegedly’ murdered
during the ‘alleged’ WWI. My ‘alleged’
great-grandfather’s ‘alleged’ name was Gevork
Maghakyan, and he was ‘allegedly’ shot in the
‘alleged’ Armenian cathedral of ‘alleged’ St. Mary,
where many ‘alleged’ Armenians, including my other
‘alleged’ relatives, were ‘allegedly’ burnt alive.”

Maghakyan concluded: “Happy ‘Alleged’ New Year to you
and thank you for calling my family members ‘alleged’
victims. I hope it makes you feel special and unique!
With ‘alleged’ best wishes, ‘Alleged’ Simon Maghakyan
from ‘alleged’ Littleton, Colorado, USA”
Upon reading Maghakyan’s hilarious comments, Harut
Sassounian, another fellow member of
Yahoo!ArmenianGroup, and long-time-contributor to USA
Armenian Life, wrote: “Dear ‘alleged’ Simon, Your
‘alleged’ letter to the ‘alleged’ editor of the
‘alleged’ Jewish Advocate is an ‘alleged’
masterpiece!”

Sassounian signed: “‘Allegedly’, Harut Sassounian.”
Another fellow member Prof. Dennis Papazian wrote:
“Good show Simon, we have to mock them.”

This writer forwarded the following: “Dear Simon,
That’s the way to go with these ‘allegation’-minded
‘allegedly’ existing individuals, and governments.”
He continued: “Both my ‘alleged’ paternal and maternal
grandparents were ‘allegedly’ orphaned during the
‘alleged’ Armenian Genocide of 1915-23. “

He added: “Collectively, they have ‘allegedly’ lost
over 85 relatives, including their parents, uncles,
aunts, grandparents. They were ‘allegedly’ uprooted
from Sis, capital of Cilicia, Western Armenia.”

He concluded: “Putting all ‘allegations’ aside, here
is my wish to you all. I shall repeat this wish until
it materializes. If it doesn’t materialize during my
generation, I’d like to invite the upcoming
generation(s) to repeat it until it eventually
materializes: See you and your loved ones next year in
Western Armenia!”

He signed: “ ‘Allegedly’ existing in Glendale, CA USA,
Appo Jabarian.”

Radio Liberty reports on 6 Jan 2006:

Georgian media quote police officers as saying the schools were located in the predominantly ethnic Armenian region of Samtskhe-Javakheti.

They include branches of the Yerevan-based Law and Economics University and an examination center of the Movses Khorenatsi University, which is also headquartered in the Armenian capital.

Those schools were allegedly operating without a licence from the Georgian Education Ministry.

As I-Newswire informs, www.Genocide.com, a forum on genocide, writes about the destruction of Old Julfa:

The administration of www.Genocide.com is shocked with the sinister denial of the Azerbaijani party, and is adding its voice to the international community in protesting the destruction of Old Julfa’s ancient cemetery.

The Azerbaijani propagandists are in the hunt for new methods of denying the recent destruction of the ancient Armenian cemetery of Old Julfa. The latest shameless denial states, “Claims on existence of Armenian graveyard in Julfa are historically and ethnically baseless.”

Azer-Press Informsiya Agentliyi, an Azerbaijani source, quotes Dr. Vali Bakhshaliyev, a member of Azerbaijan’s National Academy of Sciences, as saying, “The claims of Armenian[s] are historically and ethnically groundless. There was not any Armenian graveyard in Julfa.” Dr. Bakhshaliyev referred to the publication of photographs and videos from mid-December (2005), which showed about 100 Azerbaijani soldiers destroying the last historic headstones (khachkars) of the Armenian cemetery of Old Julfa (Hin Jugha).

The historic cemetery of Old Julfa is so famous that to deny it ever existed – means to deny that the planet Earth exists. Even Azerbaijani websites enclose information about the cemetery (www.Azerb.com, for instance, writes, “Today you can still imagine Julfa's former grandeur, visiting what's left of… the vast cemetery with thousands of artistically sculpted tomb stones known as ‘Khachkars.’”). The ridiculous lies about Julfa’s nonexistence are hopeless tactics of denial. Before Dr. Bakhshaliyev’s announcements, the Azerbaijani media had fabricated information about “destruction of Azerbaijani holy place in Armenia” with the denialist ideology of “we did – but you did it too.” Apparently, the propaganda of the “destruction of Azerbaijani holy place in Armenia” had not been successful.

The Christian cemetery of Julfa, as stated in a letter of the American congressmen Joe Knollenberg and Frank Pallone Jr. to the Azerbaijani Ambassador, “is known to specialists to have housed as many as 10,000 of these intricately carved khachkar headstones, up to 2,000 of which were still intact after an earlier outbreak of vandalism on the same site in 2002.” Back in 1648, according to Alexander Rodes’ data, there were 10,000 well-preserved headstones in Julfa, many as old as the 8th century. After Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin annexed Nakhichevan from Armenia and signed it off to Azerbaijan in the 1920s, the Armenian population of Nakhichevan (where Julfa is situated) was wiped out. Since then, many Armenian monuments (ancient cathedrals and thousands of beautifully-carved headstones) have been raised to the ground. Steven Sim from Scotland, who visited the ruins of the Armenian holy places in Nakichevan, affirmed in 2005: “a special state policy of destruction is being implemented in Azerbaijan.”

Photographs from the mid-December (2005) destruction of Old Julfa are available at http://www.armenica.org/history/old-jougha/index.html…

– from http://genocide.com/showthread.php?t=59

Due to the denial of the Armenian genocide, the Jewish Holocaust is well taught in Turkey and Turks praise themselves for "saving Jews during the Holocaust." For example, look at the denialist hatesite www.tallarmeniantale.com, where the "mysterious" Hold Water writes about "Turkey's Role as Savior of Many Jews."

Turks accepting Jewish refugees from Spain

The idea is to show that Turks are incapable of genocide, and are very passionate about defending victims. Needless to say, one of the main “arguments” of the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide is that Turks have saved so many Jews during the Holocaust that Turks could have never committed genocide against the Armenians. But more often is mentioned the fact, that during the Spanish inquisition the Ottoman Turkish Sultan gave refuge to Spanish Jews: thus, stopping a potential genocide to take place.

Well, there is no even need to mention that Turkey was Nazi Germany’s ally during WWII; but it is not the only thing. According to Yad Vashem (the biggest Holocaust memorial and museum in the world), only one Turk saved Jews during the Holocaust. Moreover, on 4 January 2006, Jihad Watch published it’s Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald’s comments, that reveal many things about the Turkish “saviors” of the Jews:

As for the belief of assorted Turkish antisemites that Turkey has always been "good to the Jews," this is nonsense. The Jews who settled in Salonika after their expulsion from Spain replaced a previous community of Jews whom the Ottomans had displaced, and it was not generosity but raison d'etat that prompted this: the Jews were felt to be less of a threat than Christians. What's more, they could dilute the Christian position in Salonika and possibly could be expected, as a weak and isolated community, to more readily do the bidding of the Ottoman government, as grateful and economically active dhimmis (not to mention the fact that the padishahin, or Sultans, always took Jewish doctors, believing them to be superior in their knowledge — you can even find note taken of this in the Topkapi compound).

But Jews in the Balkans were subject to the forced levy of children, or devshirme, though few seem to recall this. And Jews were subject to all the legal disabilities that other non-Muslim populations suffered from. But in the fantasy world of Turkish belief, one in which some Jewish commentators have willingly participated, the Jews of Turkey were treated practically like kith and kin.

For another illustration of the real Turkish behavior, on December 12, 1941 the dilapidated and leaking Struma, a ship loaded with more than 800 desperate Jewish refugees from the Nazis, left the Rumanian port of Constanta. A few days later the engine died. It was eventually towed into the harbor of Istanbul, and then, once more after a brief period, the Turks, not wishing to offend the Germans, towed the ship out into international waters. On February 12, 1942 an explosion — very likely caused by the Soviet navy, which had been ordered by Stalin to attack any ship entering the Black Sea beyond Turkish waters — caused the ship to sink. More than 800 people died. There was one survivor. The Turks might have let those refugees land, but did not. That failure belies the claims of Turks that they have always befriended the Jews.

As for the experience of the Jews of Palestine under Turkish rule, the local Turkish satrap was making plans for genocide on the Armenian model when World War I intervened. Nonetheless, Turkish behavior during the war led half the Jewish population to leave the area that would become Mandatory Palestine. During the war the famous agronomist Aronsohn, his sister Sarah Aronsohn, and others provided intelligence to the British that was far more valuable (as British intelligence agents explicitly recognized) than the few hundred horsemen, exaggerated into a "100,000 men," that Abdullah provided T. E. Lawrence. Those horsemen did little more than harry, ineffectively, the Turks on the Hejaz railway line. The Aronsohns and other members of the Nili Group (as it was called) were caught and killed; Sarah Aronsohn was tortured, but managed to commit suicide to prevent worse.

That a handful of prominent Jewish refugees did spend the war in Turkey, and some — one thinks of Erich Auerbach, who re-wrote his important literary study "Mimesis" from scratch after having lost the first draft — were grateful to the Turkish government. And one can still find, in those used bookstores along Istiqlal Caddesi, the odd volumes belonging to German Jewish scholars who continued to live in Turkey well into the 1960s and even 1970s, and then gradually, died out.
– from http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/arch…74.php#comments

I just watched (4 January 2006) the first part of “Walking the Bible” on PBS (America’s Public TV). I was stunned with the unbelievably ridiculous information provided in the part of the Mount Ararat. I don’t find other words, rather than “complete idiots” to describe the people who shot that “documentary” and wrote the part. Moreover, the “documentary” plagiarized information from a National Geographic article!

The most ridiculous information was that Mount Ararat situated at the “Iranian-Iraqi border, highly populated by the Kurds.” (of course the journalist knows that he was in eastern Turkey, but the information was misrepresented in a way that it alluded the Mount was in Iraq.)

Well, I guess I cannot argue with the journalist that Ararat “means a lot to the Kurds,” (though he could mention that Ararat has been the national symbol of the Armenians for at least 3000 years, and that every Armenian has a picture of Ararat in her/his home) but what is unbelievable is that the words of Frank Viviano’s “Armenia Reborn” was plagiarized (National Geographic, March 2004). Walking the Bible said, “But Ararat beckons. It is officially closed by the Turks.” This sentence does not make any sense, unless you have read Viviano’s article and you know what he means. What Viviano means (and states), is that Ararat still beckons to Armenians, a people to whom Ararat is officially closed by the Turks (because Turkey blockades the Republic of Armenia). But Walking the Bible said that the mount was closed to the Kurds (this is too ridiculous!). So not only Walking the Bible program plagiarized the words of Frank Viviano, but also gave false information.

Is this how PBS spends the money of American taxpayers?

The official website of the program is http://www.pbs.org/walkingthebible/.

Hovik Hoveyan – a not well-known writer, known better for being the Minster (the head) of Armenia's ministry of culture, puts himself in the row of “all-mighty people,” a class of usually low-educated idiots in Armenia, who think they can do whatever they want without being responsible to any laws.

Մնում էր` Հովիկը <<լավ տղա>> դառնար…

The Irish Examiner reports on 4 January 2006, "Armenia’s culture minister attacked and pistol-whipped two utility workers today after electricity was cut off to his flat, police said.

Police were investigating Ovik Oveyan, but no arrests had been made as of this evening, police spokesman Sayat Shirinyan said.

According to a prosecuting official, Mr Oveyan called officials at the Armenian Electric Network sometime before noon when a problem with an electric cable shut off power to his apartment. The official asked to remain unnamed since he was not authorised to speak to the media.

After arguing with an official, Mr Oveyan, his son and several friends drove to the network’s offices and with a pistol attacked at least two officials, who later had to seek medical treatment for head wounds, the official said."

UPDATE: As Armenian Liberty reported on 5 January 2005, Hovik Hoveyan left his job after the incident. bye idioto

As European Jewish Press reports, "On 12 December, 19 historians signed the 'Freedom for History' petition, demanding the removal of legislation on Holocaust denial and denial of the Armenian genocide, as well as a law that condemns slavery as a crime against humanity. They claim the legislation undermines their research work. "

This information was highly published in Turkish newspapers, but, needless to say, for Turks "19 historians" were "French historians" and the talk was not about Holocaust and Genocide denial, but about the removal of "so-called Armenian Genocide claims" (see Zaman's French Historians 'Jointly' Ask Annulment of Armenian Genocide Law ).

What Turkish newspapers are not happy to announce now, is that, according to European Jewish Press, "The call to suppress anti-revisionist laws was dismissed on 2 January by LICRA, the league against racism and anti-Semitism and on 20 December, 32 intellectuals signed a petition entitled 'let’s not mix everything up' to counter the first initiative. "

The year of 2006 for the denialists had a bad beginning… Fortunately!

Samira, a Canadian girl of Iranian heritage whom I met last year in Toronto, wrote from Germany about her experience of visiting a former Nazi concentration camp. Here is what she wrote in the last part of her letter on 3 January 2006:

i am currently in berlin and today visited the sachsenhausen concentration camp
located on the outskirts of berlin…it was exhausting…physically and
emotionally.

particularly traumatic was the pathology rooms where the scientists would do
their experiments…

even the germans do not like to talk about these events…
there is also such a large turkish population here and i can't help seeing
some sort of correlation between the denying genocidiares.