My photograph from USA TODAY, published for my membership to the All-USA Academic First Team, has appeared in the anti-Armenian TallArmenianTale.com – a website that hatefully denies the Armenian Genocide.

Holdwater, the ghostwriter of the hatesite, is apparently pissed off at my blogging about Turkish historian Taner Akcam’s findings that Holdwater is Murad Gumen, an ex-Disney cartoonist of Turkish desent.

Hilariously enough, Holdwater is now denying that he is Murad Gumen by saying his communication with the United States Holocaust Memorial Council he wrote about wasn’t really his because somebody else had written it and in order not to get somebody else in trouble he said he had written it. (It was through this communication that Akcam made Holdwater’s identity public). Mr. Gumen, stop embarrassing yourself.

The idiot, who continuously claims he has proven the Armenian Genocide never happened and is now saying he is not who he said he was, is even unable to find the source that first wrote about his comparison of Armenians to rodents.

The fact of the matter is that “Armenian genocide” photos are undocumented, even Armin Wegner’s; some Armenian sites have sunk so low as to use documented photographs of Ottoman Muslims slaughtered by Armenians, in order to represent Armenian victims. While I don’t know which photograph The Jewish Advocate made use of, if the source of the photograph cannot be verified, an ethical journal must use a word such as “alleged.”

There are lots of things that Mr. Gumen doesn’t know, including the fact that he can be embarrassingly ignorant and stupid. The webpage he refers to has a link to my actual letter that he failed to read (oh, what a researcher).

If the idiot opened that link, he would see the photo I had written about (in fact, The Jewish Advocate acknowledged its mistake in silence by removing the ridiculous article from its website and its archives). And guess what the photo is?

I wonder if anything else on Earth can be more convincing to Murad Gumen than an old photograph with skeletons and a banner mentioning “Armenian cranes.” But again, genocide denial is not a simple rejection of the word “genocide” to describe the destruction of Ottoman Turkey’s native Armenian population. Denial is the micro-level refusal of accepting that a crime was committed against Turkey’s Armenian population.And to understand how embarrassingly short-sighted Mr. Gumen is, consider his unchallenged acceptance of a Turkish nationalist’s comment at this blog that “the recently discovered cave with the mass grave said to be of Armenian victims has been confirmed by European scientists to have been a Roman site.”If the idiot were to do a little bit research, he would find out that the Roman site had been reused during World War I as a mass grave. Whether used for Armenians or others, though, it will never be known. Because for some reason Mr. Gumen’s beloved Turkish Historical Society covered up the destruction of the mass grave by the Turkish military.We are not talking about a 90-year-old document, Mr. Gumen. This is a documented, photographed mass grave from last year that has been erased from the face of the Earth. Even if you don’t think there was Armenian Genocide, one wonders why would deniers like you not even accept the possibility of even one small mass grave of Armenian victims in Turkey.

According to a YouTube.com video, that I learned about from a post at the ArmenianGenocide.com forum, Slim Khezri (also known as Slim K), “an opinionated and well-experienced Artist” who plays the Arab pirate in the Pirates of the Caribbean 3 plays Turkish assassin Zeki Abaz in a short movie by Matt Van Gelder and Barry Taft – inspired by the assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink by a young Turk nationalist on Jan. 19, 2007 in Istanbul, Turkey.

Slim Khezri is Germany-born, Los-Angeles living Tunisian.

According to the YouTube.com preview (that actually has a few grammar errors), the film will be released in the Fall of 2007.

This week’s Reporter (June 30, 2007) has my newest article on the destruction of Djulfa cemetery that I just wrote for them using much information from my last semester’s research.

You can download the PDF version of current issue’s Section A – where my piece is – from here.

Here is the article in full:

International Reaction to Djulfa cemetery destruction has been only words and no action

by Simon Maghakyan

June 30, 2007

DENVER, CO. – After several failures to visit Djulfa (Jugha), where the largest medieval Armenian cemetery was reduced to dust by Azerbaijan’s military a year and a half ago, officials at international organizations are talking again about sending experts to the region.

      While reports about plans to send a mission by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to Armenia and Azerbaijan have again appeared in the media, words are all that have reached so far the remote shores of the Araxes where an archeological monument with thousands of ancient Armenian burial stones, khachkars, existed not too long ago.

      Still a UNESCO spokesperson says their talks are serious and, according to Armenpress, the organization is now working out the details of a visit both to Nakhichevan – where Djulfa is located – and Karabakh, where Azerbaijan alleges Armenians have destroyed Azeri monuments.

      And this week, the Armenian Foreign Ministry spokesman Vladimir Karapetian said that UNESCO has already determined the make-up of its monitoring group and that currently the issue is with the visits’ timing.

      Armenians and others have long urged UNESCO to interfere in the destruction of the Djulfa cemetery and other Armenian monuments.

      In October 2006, an international group of parliamentarians from Canada, France, Greece, the United Kingdom, Russia and Switzerland traveled to UNESCO’s Paris headquarters in order to request that Director-General Koїchiro Matsuura take up an investigation in Djulfa.

      Canadian Parliamentarian Jim Karygiannis, a member of the delegation to Paris, this week told this author that he still has not heard back from UNESCO.

***

      In addition to UNESCO, the Council of Europe Secretary General Terry Davis has expressed interest in sending experts to monitor cultural sites whenever a relevant agreement with Armenia and Azerbaijan is reached.

      But efforts by the European Parliament to send a delegation to Djulfa, headed by British MP Edward O’Hara, first in 2006 and again in April 2007 have been unsuccessful. This was despite the February 16, 2006 European Parliament resolution condemning the destruction of Djulfa and calling on Azerbaijan to allow “a European parliament delegation to visit the archaeological site of Djulfa.”

      O’Hara told this author that no party but himself is to blame for this year’s postponement which was “entirely due to domestic commitments.” This explanation is different from last year’s cancellation, which as The Art Newspaper (London) reported in June 2006, was due to Azerbaijan’s refusal to allow ten delegates to enter its territory.

      Meantime, there has been no reaction towards claims by Azeri officials and nationalist historians that the cemetery did not exist or was not Armenian. Foreign diplomats and organizations with presence in Baku have also been quiet toward Azerbaijan’s anti-Armenian activities. Former Norwegian Ambassador Steinar Gil, who publicized a case of vandalism at an Armenian church in central Azerbaijan, remains the only exception.

      Thomas de Waal, an expert on Armenian-Azerbaijani relations says that “foreign investors and diplomats in Azerbaijan are very sensitive towards anything that touches on the Armenian-Azerbaijani issue and the peace process and are therefore very timid about raising the issue of the destruction of cultural monuments.”

***

      Azerbaijan’s continuing military build-up and threats to launch a new war to win control over Nagorno Karabakh add on to the concern for the peace process. But Human Rights Watch has also blamed the West, especially the United States, for trading human rights for oil in Azerbaijan for inaction to condemn broad range of human rights violations.

      The U.S. State Department did not react on the Djulfa vandalism until pressed for comment. Following a congressional hearing on February 16, 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sent a written response to Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-Calif.) acknowledging U.S. awareness of “allegations of desecration of cultural monuments” and urged Azerbaijan to “take appropriate measures to prevent any desecration of cultural monuments.” She also said the U.S. has “encouraged Armenia and Azerbaijan to work with UNESCO to investigate the incident.”

      During a visit to Armenia in March 2006, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matt Bryza called the destruction a “tragedy.” He said: “it’s awful what happened in Djulfa. But the United States cannot take steps to stop it as it is happening on foreign soil. We continually raise this issue at meetings with Azeri officials. We are hopeful that the guilty will justly be punished.”

      Later that month, Bryza’s State Department manager, Assistant Secretary Dan Fried, told the Armenian Assembly of America conference in Washington that he “would be happy to raise issues of Armenian historical sites” with Azerbaijani officials because respect and protection for cultural sites is “a universal policy of the United States.”

      And in her May 12, 2006 response to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), U.S. Ambassador-designate to Azerbaijan Anne Derse noted that the U.S. is “urging the relevant Azerbaijani authorities to investigate the allegations of desecration of cultural monuments in Nakhichevan. If I am confirmed, and if such issues arise during my tenure, I will communicate our concerns to the Government of Azerbaijan and pursue appropriate activities in support of U.S. interests.”

***

      The destruction of Djulfa, nonetheless, did not make it into the State Department’s 2006 International Religious Freedom Report on Azerbaijan released on September 15, 2006. The report only repeated the previous years’ language that “all Armenian churches, many of which were damaged in ethnic riots that took place more than a decade ago, remained closed.”

      Likewise, the report failed to notice the words of the Norwegian Ambassador that a church in the village of Nizh was in early 2006 “restored” with Armenian lettering eliminated from its walls and nearby tombstones. That “restoration” was part of the Azerbaijan’s effort to present the Armenian cultural heritage on its territory as “Albanian” – that is belonging to a culture that became extinct hundreds of years ago – and therefore not Armenian.

***

      The most detailed outsider’s account of Nakhichevan’s Armenian heritage remains that of Steven Sim, a Scottish architect who visited the area in the summer of 2005. During his visit he found no trace of a single medieval Armenian church he had travelled to research, with local interlocutors denying there were any churches there in the first place.

      Still, while traveling along the border with Iran, Sim did manage to see the Djulfa khachkars from his train before the hand-crafted stones were erased from the face of the Earth in less than half a year.

      More than 350 years ago before Sim’s visit, a foreign traveller to Djulfa had estimated 10,000 khachkars in the cemetery. By 1998, less than seven decades after a Soviet agreement with Turkey placed Nakhichevan under Azerbaijan, there were only 2,000 khachkars remaining while the entire Armenian population had disappeared.

      According to eyewitness reports cited by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), Azeri authorities made efforts to destroy much of the Djulfa cemetery in 1998 and again in 2002. Describing what he saw in Djulfa in August 2005, Sim reported “what I saw was real savageness, but I cannot say that they did not leave anything, since there are still lying khachkars.”

      Four months later, on December 15, 2005, Russia’s Regnum News Agency was the first international outlet to quote reports of approximately “100 Azerbaijani servicemen penetrate[ing] the Armenian cemetery near Nakhichevan… using sledgehammers and other tools… to crush Armenian graves and crosses.”

      This final stage of destruction, which also amounted to desecration of Armenian remains underneath the burial monuments, had reportedly started on December 14 and lasted for three days, leaving no trace of a single khachkar.

      An Armenian film crew in northern Iran, from where the cemetery was visible, had videotaped dozens of men in uniform hacking away at the khachkars with sledgehammers, using a crane to remove some of the largest stones from the ground, breaking the stones into small pieces, and dumping them into the River Araxes using a heavy truck.

      Nevertheless, Azeri president Ilham Aliyev told the Associated Press that the reports of the destruction are “an absolute lie, slanderous information, a provocation.”

      By March 2006, photographs of the cemetery site showed that it had been turned into an army shooting range. An Azerbaijani journalist who visited the area on behalf of the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting in April 2006 similarly found no traces of the cemetery left.

A letter from Canadian Doctor Berge Minassian who is visiting his ancestral Armenia:

Yerevan is ALIVE.  The traffic of cars and people is
unbelievable.  And everyone is Armenian!  Tonight I
sat on the steps of the hotel in the main square and
watched the flag across the circle on the other
building.  A slight breeze was making it fly about
tricolored and such a source of pride.  The moon rose
above, the smiling happy people strolled about, the
beautiful young girls and couples with smiles that we
simply do not see in Toronto…  We had a bite, walked
on Abovian.  Spoke for half an hour with a T-shirt
salesman on the street.  Of course he knew someone we
knew from the old country, and we almost went to his
place to carry on the conversation, a perfect
stranger, yet a feeling as if he is an uncle.

Saturday, we will see Gayaneh Ballet at the Opera
house, and each night this week we could have attended
a different play, had we had time from all the
meetings and kef.

I wish I could live here.

Amnesty International has finally taken note of discriminatory treatment of Azeri refugees from Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh by the Azerbaijani government.

In a press release and a study released today, Amnesty International summarizes the state of Azeri refugees as followed:

• Internally displaced people are restricted by the internal residence registration system to a fixed address in order to receive aid and social services, despite the de jure abolition of this system in the Azerbaijani Constitution. Residence permits in prosperous urban centres are difficult to obtain without the payment of bribes.
• New settlements for the internally displaced have been constructed in geographically remote, economically unviable and otherwise unsuitable locations, leading to isolation and segregation.
• The internally displaced have not been consulted on decision-making processes with direct impact on their lives, for example, the location of new settlements built to house them.
• The internally displaced are consistently encouraged to see their situation as temporary, discouraging them to seek integration or permanent resettlement in another part of the country.

Interestingly, Armenia has long accused Azerbaijan for deliberating worsening the lives of Azeri refugees in order to receive international support and sympathy in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh.

An Azeri refugee is quoted by Amnesty International as saying, “We are ready to live with the Armenians of Karabakh and we have not forgotten our historical home there. But we won’t see peace for at least ten years, that’s why we want decent living conditions now.”

Artsakh, the unrecognized Armenian Republic of Nagorno Karabakh and de jure part of Azerbaijan, is more free than Azerbaijan.  The newly released 2007 Freedom House report says the Armenian enclave is partly free while Azerbaijan is not free.

The Republic of Armenia has also been rated as partly free. Particular attention is paid to the troubling state of women and human trafficking in Armenia:  

Domestic violence and trafficking in women and girls for the purpose of prostitution are believed to be serious problems. Representation of women in the current Parliament is low: at year’s end, only 7 out of 131 seats in the National Assembly were held by women. According to the election code, women shall now comprise 15 percent of a party’s list for the proportional election and hold every tenth position on party lists, marking an improvement from the 2003 parliamentary elections.

The Freedom House report failes to take a note of the growing institutionalized anti-Armenianism in Azerbaijan such as the government sponsored destruction of Armenian monuments.

I am writing my final for my Middle Eastern Politics class and the following question has come to my mind – does the “Arab CNN” al-Jazeera (indirectly) support or stop terrorism?

The western answer is that it, of course, al-Jazeera indirectly supports the spread of Islamic fundamentalists’ and al-Qaeda’s rhetoric by providing much air time to their releases.

I think it could be argued, nonetheless, that al-Jazeera’s work may have just been doing (again, indirectly) the opposite.

If you look at the history of ideological Islamic fundamentalism, you may find out that their empowerment came about from western-supported persecution of thought.  The BBC has a shocking documentary called “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” that deals with this exact phenomenon.

Sayyid Qutb, “the man whose ideas would shape al-Qaeda,” was nothing but a conservative critique of western materialism.  He was an Egyptian writer who studied in Colorado.  Of course the guy was crazy in the way he disagreed with American values (such as calling Jazz music a tool for sex). But he was treated even crazier (just for his crazy thoughts) by American-supported Egyptian government.  Placed in jail, tortured and executed.

I think giving voices to all parties should not be required, but forcefully silencing voices can bring about unanticipated fanaticism. So perhaps al-Jazeera has not been given the credit for actually toning down Islamic terrorism?  Just a random thought.

Two things you don’t want to be in Azerbaijan are a journalist or an Armenian.  While I am still trying to find out why the government hates independent journalists so much, I may be closer to finding out where there is so much hate for Armenians. THE TEXTBOOKS, of course!

From MehrNews via WikiPedia

A 5th grade history book from Azerbaijan entitled “Fatherland” shows most of northern Iran and significant portions of Armenia (including all of Lake Sevan) and Georgia (Kvemo Kartli and southern Kakheti) under Azerbaijani control.

 Received from Iran in a group e-mail: 

A Turkish Daily News Column by Orhan Kemal Cengiz (“Kunta Kinte, ‘Armenian Seed,’ the Denial of Racism,” June 22, 2007) resonates with the recent revealing of racist denier “Holdwater” (the ghostmaster of TallArmenianTale.com hatesite) as cartoonist Murad Gumen.

Cengiz writes:

I have never come across any Turkish person who considers himself a racist. However, racist remarks are just flying in the air in the daily conversations in this country. Our language is full of racist remarks. For example, Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, is called an “Armenian seed” (Ermeni Dölü). If you consider how much Öcalan is hated in this country then you can imagine how “flattering” being an “Armenian seed” may be. “Jews are cowards!” “Arabs are back stabbing people”! Not to mention very offensive vocabulary about the Roma people!

What Cengiz says is true, but not only for Turks. I don’t think any person in this world would admit they are racist, not even a single member of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet Cengiz is particularly upset with the denial of racism in Turkey for the simple fact that Ottoman Empire’s desendant Turkey sees itself a victim and hence doesn’t see its minorities as vulnerable to hate in Turkey:

I believe this feeling of ‘being a victim’ serves as a kind of block in our collective unconscious. It is a way of turning upside down some historical facts in this country. It is a way of not confronting what had happened to non-Muslim citizens of this country. “I am the victim, not the Armenian, or Greek, or Jew!” Today we still have this feeling and it is getting stronger. We are again the victims of the Western powers’ conspiracies against us! We are the Kunta Kintes of the modern times, surrounded by enemies and about to be victimized again by the white man! Are we really!?

Interestingly, racist Murad Gumen has been doing exactly whatCengiz writes about.  Shamelessly comparing Armenians to rodents (“Armeni-lemmings identify with this [photographed] rodent”) and hatefully denying the Armenian Genocide (“I have 100% hatred of the deception of Armenians’ age-old propaganda”), Murad Gumen is fast to proclaim he is not a racist (“I have zero hatred of Armenians”).  You are what you do, would respond the French philosopher.