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The Armenian Weekly; Volume 74, No. 7; Feb. 23, 2008
Commentary and Analysis:
1. Totah Confusion
By Garen Yegparian
2. Some Free Republics Free-er than Others
By Andy Turpin
3. Letter to the Editor
***
1. Totah Confusion
By Garen Yegparian
I’ve always advocated action, participation, doing something over doing
nothing-in a word, activism.
But all along, I’ve held a bias that’s now been revealed to me. I suppose I
owe everyone an apology. I’d just always assumed that activists, especially
any who survive into their twenties and beyond, also develop/have good
judgment. At the very least, I’ve observed most organizations checking the
overzealousness of some of their members/activists in the interest of not
doing damage to their cause. It seems I am dead wrong on this front.
Some time within the past month or so, Annie Totah, who sits on the Armenian
Assembly’s Board of Directors (and has even been its chair and vice-chair)
and is ARCA’s national chair (the Armenian Rights Council of America-the
ADL/Ramgavars’ version of the ANC), sent out an e-mail that could have
negative repercussions for the Armenian community. She is also heavily
involved in the Jewish community, having married into it. Check this and
more of her credentials out on the Assembly’s and ARMENPAC’s (the Assembly’s
political arm) websites.
Normally, this is exactly the kind and level of participation I’d be
advocating and lauding. But, here that judgment thing pops up again. The
e-mail she sent negates many of the positives of her involvement. I have not
been able to secure a copy of the e-mail, and that’s secondary. What’s more
important is a piece by Ed Lasky it references found on the "American
Thinker" website. You can find the reference to this on Ben Smith’s Blog,
Politico.com.
The problem is the nature of Lasky’s piece and being associated with it.
Eyeballing some of his other writings quickly conforms his conspiracy
mongering approach. The piece in question, titled "Barack Obama and Israel,"
does a smear job on that candidate. There’re subtle and overt references to
Obama’s choice of religion and denomination; attempts to assign guilt by
association using some of Obama’s supporters alleged transgressions against
Israel; and even an attack based on Obama’s opposition to John Bolton’s
nomination as UN Ambassador. The article even takes potshots at members of
Congress, some of them H.Res.106 sponsors, among these Adam Schiff, one of
our strongest Congressional supporters.
Annie Totah’s e-mail, presumably sent to a Jewish audience to demonstrate
the superiority of her chosen candidate (Hillary Clinton), may or may not
sway its intended readers. Frankly, I don’t care. In fact I wouldn’t even
care if the other candidate were targeted. That’s not the point. Totah and
ARMENPAC have chosen to support Clinton. That’s actually good. This way,
regardless of who wins, with the ANC’s endorsement of Obama, one faction of
our community plugged in.
But resorting to sleazy, innuendo-laden tactics like using this article
reflects poorly on us as a community. It certainly reflects poorly on the
organizations in which Totah holds high positions. But then, in the Assembly’s
case, perhaps this is to be expected. Remember, they won the "coveted"
SpitRain Award last August. In case you think I’m overreacting, here’s how
Ben Smith describes Totah: "a Washington society figure and
Armenian-American activist who’s also a member of Clinton’s finance
committee." Those who don’t personally know any other "Armenian-American
activists" might, given human nature, attribute to the rest of us a love of
gutter politics.
I’m not starry-eyed, nor delusional. Politics is blood sport. Of course
these kinds of things will be done. But there’s a wisdom that’s expected of
those holding visible positions in organizations. They cannot be associated
with this kind of activity because it reflects poorly on the organization.
For all I know, the Clinton campaign may have been following exactly this
line of thinking by feeding Totah Lasky’s piece to disseminate.
Please call on Annie Totah, ARCA, ARMENPAC and the Armenian Assembly to
apologize for this embarrassing gaffe. If she refuses, those organizations
and others she serves should remove her from any offices she holds.
If they don’t, then we the community will know how to judge and not support
them in the future.
—————————————— ———————————–
2. Some Free Republics Free-er than Others
By Andy Turpin
WATERTOWN, Mass. (A.W.)-Many will remember Feb. 17 as the day of
independence for the Republic of Kosovo (or Kosova, depending on your ethnic
identity).
You may be asking, however, "Why should we care?"
The first answer is that both American and Armenian UN peacekeeping troops
are in Kosovo at the moment, and any Serb or Russian military aggression in
protest of Kosovo’s declared independence would directly endanger them.
The second answer is that such a declaration of independence sets an
international legal precedent for the "legitimatization" of the Republic of
Karabakh.
Though to be pragmatic, the precedent itself may have to tide us over for a
while in lieu of international recognition of Karabakh.
The reasons, of course, are political. To the U.S. and the UN, Kosovo’s
successful independence proves that 1999’s NATO air strikes and commencement
of UN peacekeeping efforts were not in vain. It also doesn’t hurt that in a
post-9/11 world, most Kosovar Albanians are Muslim and very pro-U.S. at a
time when our list of Muslim political allies is short.
Yes, this is the same strategic devil’s logic that is behind America’s
ongoing alliance with Turkey that constantly kills Armenian genocide
recognition bills in Congress, but if its results help Karabakh’s case
later, then some small Armenian phoenix may arise from the ashes.
Government agencies also tend to prefer one-party systems and oligarchies
when it comes to both legitimate and underworld governments at home and
abroad.
Given Kosovo’s high corruption rate, it must be known by the State
Department that much of their donated aid money, given through organizations
such as USAID, is often siphoned off by Albanian-KLA oligarchs who funnel it
back into their U.S. operations, thereby making the U.S. State Department
tacitly creating more hardship for US law enforcement agencies in the States
by backing Kosovo’s independence.
The New York police department would seem to understand this equation all
too well.
Its recent "Operation Old Bridge" swoop, a 90-member cooperative arrest
operation between US and Italian law enforcement agencies as a massive
Italian mafia crackdown in the month of February, is illustrative of such
crime rate boil-over fears.
The unspoken consensus is that some law enforcement higher ups would rather
just keep tabs on Albanian crime instead of Albanian, Russian, Turkish and
Italian crime together.
There is also the added factor that if Kosovo-Albanian groups are in part
funded by some U.S. monies, that investigations into Albanian crime might
not dig too deep if they happen across funds that could trace back to the
golden State Department victory of independence.
This was the case, and the lesson learned by law enforcement agents in the
1970s and 80s.
At that time, the Russian mafia was actually facilitated by the US
government to take its current infamous position of prominence by having
several federal indictments against Russian criminals blocked by officials
in the US-Israel lobby on the grounds that it would damage State Department
programs that had issued such criminals politcal asylum visas to come to the
U.S. from the former Soviet Union on grounds they were persecuted as ethnic
Jews.
The lesson to Armenian criminals in Glendale: Beware, unless "U.S.
Approved."
———————————- ——————————————-
3. Letter to the Editor
Dear Editor,
We were upset to see the ad for Vahan Hovhannisyan (Feb. 9 issue, p. 16)
published in the "New Armenian" orthography. Perhaps you will say that this
was a camera-ready ad sent from Armenia; however, even then, it should have
been disqualified on account of its typos. We, who are subscribers and/ or
readers of the Armenian Weekly hope that we won’t see a repeat use of
material in the "New Armenian" orthography, which needs to be dismissed in
favor of the 1600-year-old "Mesropian" or classical orthography for the
unadulterated preservation of the Armenian language and for the realization
of the oft-touted slogan "One Nation, One Culture."
Sincerely,
Aris G. Sevag
On behalf of "Mesrobian Oukhd" Eastern U.S. Branch