Author: Emma Jilavian

AGBU Press Office
55 East 59th Street
New York, NY 10022-1112
Website: www.agbu.org

PRESS RELEASE

Monday, November 5, 2018

HENRIKH MKHITARYAN HONORED AT AGBU LONDON GALA TO BENEFIT TUMOXAGBU CENTERS

FRENCH-ARMENIAN FOOTBALLER YOURI DJORKAEFF JOINS GUESTS FROM ACROSS THE GLOBE

While matches with Henrikh Mkhitaryan, a midfielder at Arsenal F.C., draw many 
of his fans to the stadium, thousands of Armenians across the globe cheer for 
him on screen, simultaneously taking pride in his stellar athletic 
accomplishments. On November 3, "Micki's" supporters and friends of the 
Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) gathered at The Dorchester in London 
to celebrate his achievements in football, thank him for his humanitarian 
outreach and raise funds for the two TUMOxAGBU Centers. 

Born in Yerevan in 1989, Mkhitaryan grew up dreaming of playing football. His 
passion for the sport began watching his late father Hamlet Mkhitaryan-a 
footballer who played for Armenia's national team and the local Premier League 
in the 1980s. Starting in a senior club in Armenia at 17, Mkhitaryan embarked 
on an international career only four years later. His personal discipline, 
intelligence and talent landed him contracts with Borussia Dortmund and 
Manchester United F.C. Now, an idol for youth, Mkhitaryan has empowered 
thousands of Armenian children who look up to him, inspired by his drive and 
his love of his country. Involved in charity projects early on in his career, 
he was appointed UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in Armenia in 2016, and has worked 
with the organization vigorously championing children's rights and access to 
education and sports.

A convivial and festive atmosphere prevailed throughout the gala, with Master 
of Ceremonies Camilio Azzouz, who welcomed guests from across the globe, 
including French-Armenian football star Youri Djorkaeff who joined the evening. 
Azzouz, a trustee of the AGBU London Trust, spoke on the importance of AGBU's 
strategic partnerships and the power of programs like TUMOxAGBU, which became a 
reality with the support of AGBU Central Board Member and CEO of Amber Capital 
Joseph Oughourlian who was inspired to help expand the reach of the successful 
Tumo Centers for Creative Technologies (TUMO). 

For Oughourlian, the night was one to highlight the work of AGBU and TUMO, and 
also an opportunity to note defining moments of Armenian national identity. 
"Growing up in France there was a palpable shift in pride as we watched Youri 
and the French National Team win the country's first FIFA World Cup in 1998.  
With his talent, he brought Armenians to the world of football. And now, once 
again we beam with joy each time Henrikh Mkhitaryan takes the field and we hear 
his name cheered in the crowd. Henrikh has taken the opportunity to teach the 
world of football and its millions of fans about Armenia. They are our success 
stories and when one of us succeeds, we all succeed," Oughourlian stated on 
stage. This is the third time that Oughourlian, along with his wife Jenny, has 
generously hosted the AGBU London Gala.

The highlight of the evening came when Mkhitaryan himself, arriving shortly 
after his Arsenal F.C. match, took the stage to accept the AGBU Global 
Excellence Award. "I would like to thank AGBU and its leaders for inviting me 
to be part of this great event organized to support the education of our 
Armenian youth. I would like to thank Youri for being a role model to me when I 
was younger as I dreamt of playing professional football. We have to inspire 
our youth and focus on providing them with new life opportunities to encourage 
them to reach their goals. I am grateful to see the work of organizations like 
UNICEF, AGBU and TUMO," he said.

Since their inception in 2015, the TUMOxAGBU Centers have touched the lives of 
3,000 students. These state-of-the-art facilities offer bright, promising 
students access to free hands-on programs, helping them discover their talents, 
acquire new digital skills and boost their creativity. Building on its mission 
to make innovative and quality education accessible to more young people, AGBU 
continues to help shape the next generation of skilled and educated Armenians 
through various programs and initiatives, including the partnership with TUMO, 
which yielded the establishment of these centers.

The spirit of the night did not waiver. In fact, the excitement built and 
lasted. AGBU President Berge Setrakian concluded the evening which raised over 
$230,000, saying: "Each generation of Armenians must have their heroes-ones who 
embrace their identity and share it with the world, as well as ones who 
encourage us all to strive for excellence. From Aram Khachaturian to the late 
Charles Aznavour, this has always been the case. Today we have this wonderful 
role model for our youth. Henrikh, you exemplify all that we think of as a true 
citizen of the world. Thank you for continuing to bring pride to us all."

To learn more about the TUMOxAGBU Centers or to support this life changing 
program, please visit agbu.org/education/tumoxagbu/.  

The Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) is the world's largest non-profit 
organization devoted to upholding the Armenian heritage through educational, 
cultural and humanitarian programs. Each year, AGBU is committed to making a 
difference in the lives of 500,000 people across Armenia, Artsakh and the 
Armenian diaspora.  Since 1906, AGBU has remained true to one overarching goal: 
to create a foundation for the prosperity of all Armenians. To learn more visit 
www.agbu.org.

https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.chronicle.com_article_What-2Dthe-2DGrievance_244753_&d=DwICAg&c=clK7kQUTWtAVEOVIgvi0NU5BOUHhpN0H8p7CSfnc_gI&r=LVw5zH6C4LHpVQcGEdVcrQ&m=UVtjr0RW4Cqy8SVrhnaYN7FRyp0ZHYgOj-_-LMqlZc8&s=ioEw-lH9I1sjtK8ganMUNcsmuNf1JmeMY0NobdFxo3E&e=

What the 'Grievance Studies' Hoax Means
October 09, 2018 

 Over the summer, the Wall Street Journal's Jillian Kay Melchior became
suspicious of a bizarre-sounding academic journal article, "Human reactions
to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland,
Oregon," published in the journal Gender, Place & Culture. She started
investigating, and discovered that the article's author, "Helen Wilson," did
not exist. The article was part of an elaborate hoax cooked up by Helen
Pluckrose, the editor of the online magazine Areo, James A. Lindsay, a Ph.D.
in math, and Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at
Portland State University. "Sokal Squared," Yascha Mounk called it, and the
label stuck.

The trio of hoaxers, Melchior discovered, had written 20 fake papers and
managed to get seven of them accepted at peer-reviewed journals, including
"Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply
to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism," composed of passages of Hitler's Mein
Kampf rewritten so as to appear to be a theoretical argument about social
justice. As the hoaxers explained in Areo, they targeted fields they
pejoratively dub "grievance studies" - "gender studies, masculinities
studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, critical race
theory, critical whiteness theory, fat studies, sociology, and educational
philosophy" - which they consider peculiarly susceptible to fashionable
nonsense.

Does the hoax identify something uniquely rotten in gender and sexuality
studies, or could it just as easily have targeted other fields? Is it a
salutary correction or a reactionary hit job? And what does it portend for
already imperiled fields? The Chronicle Review asked scholars from a variety
of disciplines. Here are their responses.

To hoax morally suspect fields like economics, one of the fake papers
concocted by James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian and
accepted for publication in Hypatia argued, is morally righteous. To hoax
morally righteous fields like gender studies, on the other hand, is morally
suspect.

This hilarious little piece of meta-textualism shows that the scholars
behind Sokal Squared are more conversant in postmodern discourse - and more
attuned to its lighter modes - than some of their critics seem to assume. It
also shows that they know their enemies well enough to predict their
reactions with uncanny accuracy.

What is most striking in the intense debate which this hoax has already
occasioned is the sheer amount of tribal solidarity it has elicited among
leftists and academics. Virtually the whole debate has focused on the
supposedly malign motives, or the supposedly evident stupidity, of the
authors. I don't find these criticisms to be particularly persuasive. Like
Alan Sokal, Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian locate themselves on the
left. And while it did them no favors to write up their hoax in the style of
a social-scientific experiment, thus inviting the wrong standard of
judgment, their mastery of postmodern jargon and their sly humor is evident
in the corpus of work they have produced in the past year. If you don't
believe me, dear "Sokal Squared" critics, I beseech you to actually skim
some of the papers: you may even, despite yourself, end up having a good
chuckle.

But what I've found most striking - and debased - about this grand circling
of the imperiled wagons is the ad hominem nature of so many of the
reactions. So let me concede, for the sake of argument, that the motives
behind the hoaxes were nasty; that they provided succor to the
anti-intellectual enemies of the academy; that their hoax was, by its very
nature (or, as Hypatia would have it, by its impermissible choice of
target), immoral. What would follow from all of this?

Practically nothing. Because, after all, it is possible to glean valuable
information from the immoral actions of evil people. And even if all of the
charges laid at the feet of Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian were true,
they would have demonstrated a very worrying fact: Some of the leading
journals in areas like gender studies have failed to distinguish between
real scholarship and intellectually vacuous as well as morally troubling
bullshit.

Perhaps this does not mean that we should celebrate the perpetrators of the
hoax as moral heroes. Perhaps it would have been possible to hoax other
fields in similar ways. And as the hoaxers themselves emphasize, there is no
reason to conclude that all of academia is rotten, or that we shouldn't
devote serious attention and resources to studying sex, gender, and race.

But for all of the caveats, one thing remains incontestable in my mind: Any
academic who is not at least a little troubled by the ease with which the
hoaxers passed satire off as wisdom has fallen foul to the same kind of
motivated reasoning and naked partisanship that is currently engulfing the
country as a whole.

Yascha Mounk is a lecturer on government at Harvard University.