MetroWest Daily News, MA
July 21, 2006
Greenberg: Evil threatens survival of western world
By Dan Greenberg/ Local Columnist
Friday, July 21, 2006 – Updated: 01:03 AM EST
Let’s not mince words.
What is going on in Israel, Lebanon, and Gaza is not a “dispute”
or “conflict.” It is a battle for survival, another in a string of
battles of survival, in a prolonged war Israel has been fighting
against enemies that wish to annihilate it.
I am tired of hearing people talk about the “political blustering”
of radical Islamic leaders — referring to their fiery speeches and
deeds as threats made to gain some diplomatic leverage. If the past
100 years have taught us anything at all, it is this: political leaders
who advocate the destruction and slaughter of their opponents mean it,
and do it if they have the opportunity.
We learned this with Turkish leaders in the early 20th century who
slaughtered over a million Armenians.
We learned this with Communist dictators who, in the name of the
so-called “class struggle,” murdered their own people by the millions
— some forty million killed by Stalin in the Soviet Union, even more
by Mao in China. (Their use of the euphemism “struggle” for murder
is another example of sanitized language.)
We learned this with Hitler, who killed six million “Jewish vermin”
and over six million “inferior Russian Slavs” before being defeated.
We learned this with the Japanese armies in occupied China during the
“rape of Nanking.”
We learned this in Ruanda, in Bosnia, in Burundi, in the Congo, in
Iraq, where such terms as “ethnic cleansing” were used to represent
the killing.
We should have learned this on 9/11, where the “infidel” people of
“the great Satan” were slaughtered in the twin towers and the Pentagon.
Jonathan Goldhagen, in his trail blazing book “Hitler’s Willing
Executioners,” introduced the apt phrase “eliminationist politics”
to designate the discourse of destruction. This phrase recognizes
the call to annihilate a people, or a religious group, or a political
entity, for what it is — namely, a direct, unambiguous declaration
of intent to utterly destroy the alleged enemy.
All this has special relevance today.
In 1947, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into two
entities, one predominantly Jewish, the other predominantly Arab. (The
term — indeed, the concept — “Palestinians” was not in use then;
for the Arab population, since Palestine had been a province of Syria
from time immemorial.)
>From the moment the vote was taken, the Islamic nations of the region
vowed to destroy the Jewish enclave. The local population, joined by
all the neighboring states — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Transjordan (as
it was then called), Lebanon and Syria — and by the distant state
of Iraq, declared a war of annihilation against the fledgling state
of Israel, and vowed to drive the Jews into the sea.
In the intervening decades, only Egypt and Jordan have decided
to end their war and sign a peace treaty with Israel. Even within
those countries, radical Islamic groups (that threaten to overthrow
their governments and replace them with radical Islamic regimes)
have denounced the peace treaties as invalid.
For the others, the war never ended. It has been renewed periodically,
always with the same goal. The current call by Iran’s leader to
“finish the work Hitler had begun” and kill the Jews remaining alive
in Israel, is just a continuation of a by-now familiar routine of
renewed efforts to attain an old goal.
Israel’s attempts to deflect the hostility have been greeted with
derision. Leaving the part of Lebanon Israel had occupied — in an
attempt to end earlier hostilities across that border — did nothing
to change the goals of those living to the north of Israel.
Leaving Gaza, occupied after another earlier war of survival, did
nothing to change the goals of those living to the southwest or east
of Israel. Surrounded today as it has always been by nations that
support fanatics determined to wipe Israel off the map, the country
lives day by day in the shadow of its own destruction.
There is a reason we here have a hard time understanding all this. We
Americans are a fortunate, indeed unique, people. We have left our
eliminationist past behind, when we all but completed the task of
killing off this continent’s natives and decided to allow the remnant
that survived to live in their reservations. It is an ugly past,
one for which we have still not expiated, but from which we have
distanced ourselves.
With that behind us, we no longer have a direct connection to
eliminationist thinking. In so doing, we have come to believe that
other nations and peoples have distanced themselves as well from
their eliminationist pasts. Over and over again we mistake the
rhetoric of intent and action for boastful talk, for “racism,” for
“discrimination,” for a lack of tolerance that can be overcome by
patience, by negotiation, by civilized intercourse.
Even when faced with the brutal facts of the past century, and by
the terrible consequences of ignoring the clear harbingers of those
facts, we want oh so terribly badly to believe that this time, at
last, the talk and the action is just bluff, just a political ploy,
and that “negotiation,” “cease-fires,” and gestures of welcome into
the political mainstream, will deflect the intentions of the radicals.
We are deluding ourselves if we think this way.
The slaughter perpetrated by the murdering leaders of the past century
ended only with their death or utter defeat. The slaughter being
prepared by radical Islam for Israel, and for Western societies,
will only be barred by the same preventive — the death or utter
defeat of those who plot and execute their evil designs.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Capitalism, Socialism, and Race
By Bill Dillard
Published 7/21/2006 12:06:39 AM
American Spectator
July 21, 2006
Europeans have long talked down to Americans on a variety of subjects;
our cowboy capitalism, our income inequality, our failure to embrace
their vision of a cradle to grave welfare state. This history of
condescension made all the more interesting the comments of Abdelkarim
Carrasco, a leader of Spain’s estimated one million-member Muslim
community, on the causes of last spring’s riots in France.
“Either Europe develops and supports the idea of a mixed culture,
or Europe has no future,” he said. “Europe has to learn from what the
United States has done: It is a country that has taken in people from
all over the world.”
The ironies are rich, aren’t they? Europeans, of all people, are
being lectured by a Muslim leader who, of all nations, points to the
United States as the world’s exemplar of assimilation and economic
opportunity.
We are the capitalists. They are the socialists. We are the
racists. They are the equal opportunity egalitarians. Here at home,
liberals have, for decades, cast themselves as the defenders of
oppressed minorities. Their enemies in this war, we are told,
are greedy conservatives, white businessmen (i.e., capitalists),
and their political henchmen, the Republicans. Conservatism is the
redoubt of racist oppressors, socialism the liberator of oppressed
minorities. Perhaps the greatest article of liberal faith is that
American racism is the most virulent strain to ever afflict the
world. Racism, we are constantly scolded, is “everywhere” in America.
But are these presumptions warranted by logic, reason, or human
experience? How is it that France has race riots in 2006, while the
U.S. is the volitional home to more ethnicities and cultures than can
be found in any other consensual political union on the planet? How is
it that Azerbaijanis and Armenians, Hutus and Tutsis, Serbs and Croats,
Hindus and Sikhs, and all manner of other people who used to butcher
each back home, can all come to America and live in relative peace?
Perhaps it is a propitious moment to revisit some long cherished
notions about capitalism and socialism, conservatism and liberalism,
and their respective impacts on racial assimilation. Herewith a
dissenting opinion to the orthodox view.
SOCIALISM ACTUALLY EMPOWERS the racist, because the absence of
market forces affords him the luxury of making decisions in economic
transactions on criteria other than efficiency and merit; criteria
such as ethnicity, and cronyism. Market capitalism strips the racist
of that luxury, and imposes a cost that must be absorbed and passed
downstream whenever he chooses the least efficient economic option,
preferring instead to base his decision on race. Because French
industry is so heavily regulated, and outcomes are largely determined
by bureaucratic fiat and not merit, outsiders who look different, talk
different, and have fewer skills to start with tend to be more easily
be marginalized and kept that way without penalty to the marginalizers.
Market capitalism, properly regulated by antitrust and
anti-discrimination laws, permits every person to realize his
inherent economic worth, and through experience and education, add
to that worth.
Thus, an Indian family that has been in the U.S. for less than a
decade, with virtually no cultural assimilation to begin with, can
find a flophouse motel, buy it, fix it up, show a profit, borrow for
major improvements, turn the place into a really nice motor court,
and send their children to a nice private school, all within a
generation. That same family in France has no such opportunity, not
because the French are more inclined to prefer their ethnicity than
any other group of people, but rather because their economy altogether
removes the incentive to deal on the merits with other ethnicities,
and also removes the penalties when the French choose less efficient,
but more familiar, French options.
Seen this way socialism enables race discrimination, and market
capitalism inhibits it. This seems so counterintuitive to most
Americans because, to the left’s credit, it led the political fight to
end legally sanctioned and institutionalized racism in America; while
the American right, in what was undoubtedly its greatest moral and
strategic failing, obstructed those efforts or refused to take part.
Understandably, the question of whether the economics of the left
or the right most effectively assimilates different ethnicities is
easily confused with the question of which side deserves the credit
for waging the political fight to end racism in America. But they
are two entirely separate questions.
We saw the marginalizing effects of socialism with the favoritism shown
to Great Russians in the Soviet Union. We see it again today in France,
Europe’s grandest exponent of continental socialism, its cities in
flames because of the lack of economic opportunity exacerbated by race
discrimination that is in turn enabled by its stratified and heavily
regulated economy. Ireland, Europe’s most market oriented economy,
has no such issues. And indeed, there is a rough correlation in time to
the widespread institution of market reforms in Ireland and the rise of
an accretive peace between Catholics and Protestants. George Mitchell
helped, but so did market opportunity. Here at home, if only we had
looked, we would have seen the empowering effects of the market when
prior to the Civil Rights era, with virtually no social safety net, and
rampant discrimination, blacks in America compiled enough wealth that,
on a stand alone basis, they comprised the 10th wealthiest nation in
the World. In his “promised land” speech, on the last night of his
life, Martin Luther King, Jr. actually quoted that statistic when
urging boycotts against businesses that discriminated against blacks.
Never stop and forget that collectively, that means all of us together,
collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the
exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the
United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and
I could name the others, the Negro collectively is richer than most
nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty
billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the
United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you
know that? That’s power right there, if we know how to pool it.
To black Americans living in a time of institutionalized, even
legally sanctioned racism, the market wasn’t their oppressor. The
market was their only shelter from the storm — the only place where
white Americans who would never have blacks to dinner or allow them
to join their country clubs would, albeit incompletely, put their
prejudices aside and afford blacks a place at the table.
Of course, blacks were treated unfairly in the pre-civil rights era
market, because capitalism does not prohibit racism. But the capitalism
of that day was the one true ameliorator of the barriers of race; the
one place where in the hard unemotional currency of economic exchange,
the worth of ethnically disfavored people was given value. Thus, in
our society, and indeed in any society with a race problem (that is
to say, any political compact whose members consist of more than one
race), capitalism and markets are not the problem. They are part of
the solution. Markets create reasons for people to focus their hearts
and minds beyond their own cultures and ethnicities. They meld. They
do not divide.
As proof of this assertion consider a question with a self-evident
answer. Would African-Americans be more broadly assimilated
into mainstream American life if the political movement to end
discrimination against them hadn’t been dominated by people who held
such enmity for the market, and who instilled that same enmity in a
broad cross-section of the beneficiaries of their efforts? But then,
that isn’t the fault of the left, is it? That’s the fault of the right.
Bill Dillard is a businessman and freelance writer living in Savannah,
Georgia.
rticle.asp?art_id=10120
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

PRESS RELEASE
The Heritage Party
Yerevan 0033, Armenia
Tel.: (+374 – 10) 58.08.77, 52.22.38
Fax: (+374 – 10) 54.38.97
Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
Website:
July 21, 2006
Heritage Headquarters Under Lock Again
Yerevan — The Service for Mandatory Execution of Judicial Acts (SMEJA)
of the Ministry of Justice, which recently became the visible servant
of the business and political interests of the ruling clan in Armenia,
this time even surpassed itself.
Today, on July 21, approximately thirty marshals from SMEJA, led
by Major Vahram Yenokian, head of SMEJA’s Central and Nork-Marash
Division, again surrounded the Heritage Party’s main office which,
based on the Court’s ruling that went into effect on July 12, had
been reopened yesterday, on July 20. Initially, the SMEJA officials
prohibited the staff from entering their office and subsequently locked
and resealed the office doors. When Heritage Chairman Raffi Hovannisian
demanded that he show a Court order or other legal warrant to that
effect, Yenokian shamelessly responded that they were carrying this
out in line with Hovannisian’s own formal request for execution of
the Court’s June 26 verdict. This demonstrated that the high-ranking
SMEJA officer interpreted that ruling in a way that was convenient for
him and those he serves. Yenokian was under strict telephonic orders
and thus was simply uncompromising. He did not even reply to Zaruhi
Postanjian, Hovannisian’s attorney, who demanded that they wait until
Judge Edward Avetisian formally elucidated his verdict pursuant to
a request for clarification officially submitted to him today.
With respect to the unlawful actions–which obviously were “directives
from above”–of the state-owned Paronian theater’s management against
the party’s main office, Judge Avetisian of the Court of First Instance
of Yerevan’s Central and Nork-Marash communities had issued on April
14 an injunction prohibiting the defendant theater from taking any
restrictive action against the office in question and the usage of
the property located in it and forwarded its ruling to SMEJA. Then,
on June 26, the same Court ruled that the forcible closure of the
Heritage office was illegal, and thus the SMEJA seals placed on the
doors of the office had effectively expired. While the Court instructed
the plaintiff to pay certain installments on the contract, it held the
defendant and its negligent conduct to be solely responsible for this
situation, thus constructively validating the five-year real-estate
lease that had been signed between Hovannisian and the government’s
agent in September 2002.
In Yenokian’s words, they were sealing the doors today since they
would soon be removing the party’s belongings from the office and
taking them to SMEJA.
The lawless lackeys wearing official uniforms for the ruling clique
should come to understand that they will be held accountable for
their flagrantly illegal acts, the sole objective of which is to
obstruct and disrupt the normal, lawful activities of any and all
political opposition.
Founded in 2002, Heritage has regional divisions throughout the
land. Its central headquarters are located at 7 Vazgen Sargsian Street,
Yerevan 0010, Armenia, with telephone contact at (374-10) 580.877,
fax at (374-10) 543.897, email at [email protected], and website at

Reconciliation of Armenian and Azeri People
Inseparable from Reconciliation of Armenia and Turkey
PanARMENIAN.Net
21.07.2006 15:03 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Representatives of Azerbaijan were also present
at a six-sided meeting of citizens and NGOs of the South Caucasus,
held in Yerevan July 8-13.
Upon returning to Baku Azeri journalist Alekper Aliyev published travel
notes Trip from Baku to Erivan, where he distorted the statement
of editor of web-site Luiza Poghosyan on
problems between the two peoples. Aliyev interpreted her words as,
“The myth on genocide, we are stuffed with, has become a complex
for the Armenian society and made it sick. We raise our children
in hatred towards Turks. In this case Turks for us are Turkey and
Azerbaijan. We are told we won a war, however, actually our entire
region lost, specifically we lost.
No development is observed, nothing good is taking place. How long
can this hatred propaganda last? We cannot work for the future,
constantly thinking retrospectively.”
“Azeri journalist Alekper Aliyev was invited to Yerevan as a
participant, not a journalist to cover the event and his reports
represent his personal impression from what he heard and saw in
Yerevan.
Thus, in my opinion, he does not have to be literally exact in his
wordings,” Luiza Poghosyan told a PanARMENIAN.Net reporter.
“I spoke of the Genocide when discussing the question of stereotypes. I
said the following: “The issue of reconciliation of the Armenian
and Azeri peoples cannot be viewed separately from the process
of reconciliation of Armenia and Turkey. Hostile stereotypes,
rooted in the Armenian consciousness, in most cases are general,
referring both to Turks and Azeris. Myths on Genocide, we were fed
with for many years during the soviet period, transformed into a
doomed concept about eternal hostility between Armenians and Turks,
as well as Azeris. I have a deepest conviction that the process of
recognition of the Genocide, the process of denouncing the crime
against humanity has turned in us, Armenians, into a complex of being
exceptional and complex of superiority over the rest of the world. This
is the disease, hampering us from adequately perceiving the reality
and moving forward. I summed up my statement with a suggestion to the
colleagues from Azerbaijan to discuss our capacities and work together
in an Armenian-Azeri-Turkish format for joint search for rapprochement
and overcoming stereotypes. I want to add also that at our meeting
a moratorium for political topics was announced and each of us spoke
of the problems of his or her own society,” L. Poghosyan said.

Recall of Evans to Have Negative Impact on US-Armenian Relations
PanARMENIAN.Net
21.07.2006 15:10 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The story of recall of US Ambassador to Armenia
John Evans can have a negative impact on the US-Armenian relations,
Head of Hay Dat Office, ARF Dashnaktsutyun Bureau Responsible for
Foreign Policy Affairs Kiro Manoyan stated in Yerevan. In his words,
the trouble is that the US State Department still cannot clearly
explain the cause of recall of the head of the diplomatic mission. At
that Manoyan refrained from evaluation on the real cause of recall
of Amb. Evans.
We note that the major version explaining the reason for John Evans’
recall is his statement on the Armenian Genocide.

Armenia Interested in Strengthening State Ties with Iran
PanARMENIAN.Net
21.07.2006 15:24 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ No relations can substitute for the Armenian-Iranian
ones and Armenia is interested in further strengthening state ties with
Iran, Head of Hay Dat Office, ARF Dashnaktsutyun Bureau Responsible
for Foreign Policy Affairs Kiro Manoyan stated in Yerevan. In his
words, Armenia has diplomatic relations in the region only with Iran
and Georgia, which is also a friendly state.
“Armenia’s relations with those two countries should be arranged
to a degree to replace the absence of relations with Azerbaijan and
Turkey. If the international community applies sanctions against Iran,
Armenia will not support these,” the ARF Dashnaktsutyun representative
said.

MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT BELIEVES SERGE SARGSYAN WILL NOT OCCUPY ANDRANIK
MARGARYAN’S PLACE AND WILL NOT RESIGN
Lragir.am
21 July 06
In reply to forecasts that on joining the Republican party with
his administrative and economic resource the defense minister will
gradually take up the role of the formal or informal leader of the
party, Rep. Armen Ashotyan stated July 21 at the Pastark Club that the
Republican Party has a leader, and the powers of the party hierarchy
are set down clearly. Armen Ashotyan said Serge Sargsyan will be
offered the post of the chair of the Council of the Republican Party.
Of course, there is no doubt that the powers of the Republican Party
are set down clearly, but the powers of the government hierarchy
of Armenia are set down equally clearly, which however, did not bar
Serge Sargsyan from having greater powers than the post or posts he
occupies allow. Armen Ashotyan says he is not very close with Serge
Sargsyan and he does not know if his possibilities are greater than the
post. Meanwhile, it is not necessary to be close with Serge Sargsyan
to know this. It is enough to observe which of his possibilities makes
businessmen, heads of communities and other officials announce that
they will be where Serge Sargsyan is.
Or what would happen with the hope of the Republican for becoming
powerful in case the defense minister resigns from his post? “I don’t
think it is possible. Although the president of Armenia appoints
ministers, particularly the minister of defense, I think such a
scenario is not possible, I even think it is impossible.
Political activity and political post do not contradict, and the post
of the minister is political, Mr. Sargsyan is a civilian, who took
up the post of defense minister, two functions, two spheres must be
independent. As a minister of defense, Mr. Sargsyan will work in his
sphere, as a chair of the council of the party he will work in his
sphere,” says Armen Ashotyan.

Republican Party to hold a special sitting
ArmRadio.am
22.07.2006 11:36
The Republican Party of Armenia will hold its special sitting today.
Preceding the parliamentary elections the Party is testing its
forces. Some code changes are envisaged. Particularly, the position of
the President of the Party’ s Council will be resumed. It is noted that
Defense Minister Serge Sargsyan will be elected to the position. The
majority of the People’s Deputy faction, President of the Football
Federation Ruben Hayrapetyan and Head of Kentron community of Yerevan
Gagik Beglaryan also joined the Republican Party.

International scientific conference on issues of cardiology to open in
Yerevan
ArmRadio.am
22.07.2006 11:48
A two-day international scientific conference dedicated to issues of
cardiology will open in Yerevan today. Some 200 doctors form Yerevan
and marzes will participate in the conference.
The scientific conference aims at introducing Armenian doctors to
the latest novelties in the world medicine.

Sitting on the “Resumption of transportation of passengers in the Black Sea” held in Moscow
ArmRadio.am
22.07.2006 14:30
A meeting dedicated to the “Resumption of transportation of passengers
in the Black Sea” was held in Moscow. Representatives of Azerbaijan,
Georgia, Ukraine, Romania, Albania, Greece and Turkey participated in
the sitting, “Trend” reports. The sitting was held in the framework
of the international collaboration of the Black Sea Economic
Cooperation Organization countries, which is presided over by the
Russian Federation.
Issues related to the regular passenger ties in the Black Sea basin and
he prospects of resumption of these were discussed during the meeting.