Link to Jerusalem Post on Israel-Azerbaijan relations

I am redirecting interested readers to a Jerusalem Post article on recent developments between Israel and Azerbaijan on the occasion of Peres visit to Baku.

The Manipulations of Alexandre Adler

Alexandre Adler

Hrant Dink must be turning in his grave about all the articles that have invoked him to argue for causes quite foreign to his own. While we might applaud the fact that Dink's murder has forced many Turks to speak out publicly against the nationalist ideology that caused his death, some unsavory characters have perversely seized the occasion to attack diaspora Armenians and the Republic of Armenia. Alexandre Adler's recent column in Le Figaro to me represents the height of this kind of cynicism.

Adler's essay crafts "connections" between ideas and events that are hallucinatory at best. After eulogizing Dink for one paragraph, Adler proceeds to launch into a vicious tirade against Armenia only to end with a melodramatic paean to the founder of post-Soviet Azerbaijan and the father of the state's current ruler:

Héros de l'Union soviétique, fils de mollah, excellent connaisseur de la poésie persane et patriote turc à la Mustafa Kemal, Haidar Aliev synthétisait ces courants culturels apparemment incompatibles, en tout cas aujourd'hui, en un espoir uto­pique pour demain : la grande alliance des trois cultures russe, turque et persane dans un nouvel ensemble producteur de laïcité et de démocratie.

[A USSR hero, son of a mullah, remarkable connoisseur of Persian poetry, and a patriotic Turk, Haidar Aliev combined those cultural currents which, at least today, seem incompatible, with a utopian hope for tomorrow: the great alliance of three cultures - Russian, Turkic, and Persian in a new fusion producing secularism and democracy.]

Adler then has the audacity to declare that

Si un jour nous parvenons à réaliser cette ambition, on se souviendra de Dink comme de l'un des héros stoïques de cette indispensable longue marche

[If one day we manage to achieve this ambition, we will remember Dink as one of the stoic heroes of this long, vital march.]

Adler's enlistment of Dink in his ode to Haidar Aliev is distasteful enough, as is his characterization of Armenia as a "violent, aggressive, and inept" country. But even more insidious is Adler's effort to link Armenia to Russian and Arab terrorism, and, along the way, to establish some kind of moral equivalence between the genocide of 1915 and Armenians' alleged crimes in recent times:

Certes, la Turquie devrait avancer avec retenue et dignité vers une prise en compte de plus en plus lucide de la tragédie de 1915, mais l'Arménie d'aujourd'hui a aussi son chemin à accomplir pour conjurer une bonne fois pour toutes son alliance faustienne avec les éléments les plus terroristes de l'ex-Union soviétique et du monde arabe, le moment Asala, si on cherche à lui donner un nom.

[Surely, Turkey must advance with self-restraint and dignity toward a more and more lucid accounting of the tragedy of 1915. But today's Armenia also has a ways to travel to conjure {i.e., "do away with"} once and for all its Faustian deal with the most terrorist elements of the former Soviet Union and the Arab world, the Asala moment, if one is looking for a name to give it.]

Few would deny that Armenia, like a host of other former Soviet republics, is experiencing some serious problems. The most serious challenge facing the country is the ongoing blockade against it by Turkey, and by Azerbaijan, with which it continues to be embroiled in a conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Other troubles include corruption and authoritarian tendencies among some of its leaders - tendencies that are abundant elsewhere in the region (indeed, Azerbaijan probably takes the prize). But to link Armenia to Islamist or ex-Soviet terrorism is an insidious lie.

Asala (the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia) was a terrorist group active in the late 1970s and until the early 1980s, which assassinated Turkish diplomats in the West. It was founded and based in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. But it had no connection at all to Armenia, which in any case was a Soviet republic then. Nor was it ever embraced by the vast majority of Armenians in the diaspora.

Finally, as horrible as the actions of the now defunct group may seem today, anyone who seeks to compare them with the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians is nothing but a vicious demagogue.

On top of all this, after linking Armenia to the attempted assassination of John Paul II (a connection that seems as solid as the visions produced by the mushrooms he must have ingested), Adler also manages to drag the Jews into the whole mess, of course on his side. As if the innuendo about Armenian connections to Arab terror weren't enough, he praises Haidar Aliev as someone "qui aurait banni ... racisme et antisémitisme" [who would have exiled racism and antisemitism].

Both advocates for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide as well as their opponents have appealed specifically to Jews and their historical experience to aid their respective causes. One canard circulating among various denialist groups is the claim that Armenians were or are antisemitic, which is part of a transparent effort to impugn Armenian credibility and to provoke antipathy toward the cause of genocide recognition among Jews. Adler seems to be employing a similar strategy by linking Armenians to Arab terrorism, while presenting Aliev as a heroic vanquisher of antisemitism. I think I speak for many Jews when I say that I want no part in Adler's dangerous game.

Israel's Position on Nagorno Karabakh

MK Yosef Shagal
(Yisrael Beitenu)

Yesterday, the following item appeared on PanARMENIAN.net, with the usual spelling mistakes and grammatical idiosyncracies:

With the absence of Azerbaijani Embassy in Israel it’s incorrect to speak on delicate topics such as the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, Knesset member Josef Shagal said in Baku. In his words, Israel doesn’t have official stance on the conflict, as Azerbaijan did not express its position on the Palestine-Israel conflict and did not support the military operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon. “Once nobody could believe that Israel will withdraw troops from Sector Gaza Strip. However, it became a reality as a consequence of certain processes. I am sure, the same will happen with the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. The day will come when positive tendencies will lead to resolution of the problem. I wish the conflict be settled peacefully,” Shagal said, reports Zerkalo Baku-based newspaper.

It is not immediately apparent why this is news, but the person in question, Yosef Shagal caused a bit of a scandal last time he opened his mouth about South Caucasian affairs on May 15, 2005. Back then, the former Baku native, who emigrated to Israel in 1990, announced that "Israel supports a fair position of Azerbaijan in the Upper Karabakh conflict." For good measure, he went on to promise Israel's support in canceling the Congressional arms embargo on Azerbaijan, enacted by the U.S. House of Representatives in in 1992 (Sami Rozen, Axis). Unfortunately, these remarks were taken quite seriously in the region, and, some analysts argue, used by the Iranians to pull Armenia closer toward them (Ibid.).

Never mind that at the time, Shagal had no official government position whatsoever, and that he was a rookie backbencher of an upstart (though significant) opposition party, Yisrael Beitenu, composed of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, including a number of outright racists such as its chief, Avigdor Lieberman. In the wake of Shagal's bizarre and unauthorized comments - which seemed to represent only his own private foreign policy - Israeli Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni canceled her trip to Azerbaijan, which has not hosted an Israeli minister since 1998, in order not to convey the impression that the government endorses Shagal's position.

Things have changed slightly since 2005. Now, unfortunately, Yisrael Beitenu is a member of the governing coalition, though its representatives, with the exception of Lieberman, named Deputy PM and Minister for Strategic Affairs, work mostly in insignificant committees. No doubt, Lieberman made sure that Shagal would toe the line this time. The Knesset member even threw in Israel's dissatisfaction with Azerbaijan's line during the war with Hizbullah in the summer.

While searching for information on Shagal, I discovered an interesting document. It is a protocol of a meeting with Jewish organizations from the former Soviet republics, which took place at the end of the war, in August 2006, in Israel (the organizations had come one a solidarity mission). Present at the meeting was the head of the Jewish community in Armenia, Rimah Verpapitian-Feller (sp?) Rimma Varzhapetian-Feller (thanks for the correction, Anonymous) as well as a certain Genady Zalmanovitch, head of the Azerbaijani Jewish community. While the former did not speak during the meeting, Zalmanovitch went on in quite some detail - he finally stopped, after protests from the audience - about Iran's discrimination against Azeris and the comparably privileged status of Armenians in the Islamic Republic. Zalmanovitch began his long-winded speech by admitting that he "sometimes offend[s] the representative from Armenia." What is more interesting, however, is that Zalmanovitch highlighted that "Lebanon recognized the Armenian Genocide [literally, "the Armenian Shoah or Holocaust"; לבנון הכירה בעקרון בשואת הארמנים] , while Turkey and Azerbaijan opposed this."