Armenia, Western Values and Islam

(updated 01-Oct-2023)

Inside the territory of the Muslim country of Azerbaijan is the Christian Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh where 120,000 Armenians have been besieged by the Azerbaijani army of the dictator Ilham Aliyev.  

A new trauma is unfolding for the Armenian people as Azerbaijan has finally taken over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Most of the Armenians of the enclave are currently leaving their ancestral lands out of fear of ethnic cleansing and atrocities that the Azeris are likely to commit.

For centuries the Armenian people, whose territory was once much larger than the current territory of the Republic of Armenia, have been the victim of the Muslim countries surrounding them: Turkey, Iran and Azerbaijan. After the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks at the turn of the 20^th century, accompanied by death marches across the desert into Syria and Lebanon where Armenian refugees have settled and constitute large communities, Armenian Christians are again the target of genocide, this time at the hands of the Muslim Azeris.

Just as the circumstances of the genocide of 1915 allowed its perpetration by Turkey, with the chaos of World War I, the present world-wide tensions in the Caucasus and the Black Sea region are leaving the Armenians alone in their struggle to survive. For the decades during Soviet rule, the Armenians found protection with the Russians. Now that Russia is itself isolated as a result of its invasion and annexation of Ukrainian territories, it has abandoned the Armenians. The large-scale flight of ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh is a continuation of a decades-long process of territorial loss by historic Armenia, a good chunk of which has been annexed by Turkey after the genocide of 1915.

Just as the West abandoned the Armenians during the 1915 genocide, the West today is watching with indifference another chapter in the loss of Armenian territories and an unfolding ethnic cleansing. Azerbaijan is finally integrating Nagorno-Karabakh to its territory, leading to serious fears of atrocities and flight of Armenians from their ancestral lands to join their brethren in Armenia proper.

US secretary of State Anthony Blinken declared that he was “deeply concerned” about the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, like many other Western nations have done. “Deep concern” means in diplomatic language that the West is not going to do anything to stop the Azeris from seizing the Armenian territory and evicting its people out. This posture invites a contrast between how the West handled a similar situation in Kosovo, a Muslim enclave of Christian Serbia.

Kosovo is historically an integral part of Christian Serbia, and the Serbs were among those Europeans who stopped the Muslim Turks who were on their march to conquer and forcibly impose Islam on Europe. In the Balkans, where Serbia is located, the marching Muslim armies managed to convert the populations of today’s Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania, leaving a patchwork of interlaced Christian Orthodox (Serbia, Montenegro), Christian Catholic (Croatia, Slovenia), and Muslim (Albania, Bosnia and Kosovo) communities and territories.

When the Balkan wars of the 1990s erupted, the West sided against the Christian Serbs in defense of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The US administration of Bill Clinton dispatched a malignant and pernicious envoy, Richard Holbrooke, who did all he could to dismember Christian Serbia, leave Serbs trapped under Muslim rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and later forced the seditious secession of the Kosovo province of Serbia to create a new  Muslim State in Europe. In one strike of unexplainable diplomacy, the West created two new Muslim States in the heart of Europe – Bosnia and Kosovo - while Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism were growing and already sowing terror across Europe and the Middle East. The US seems to be on a path of sowing the seeds of future strife in Europe as a way to weaken the Old Continent, prevent it from challenging American hegemony, and manipulate it into submission. Current events in Serbia prove this hypothesis right, as the 1990s US-brokered Dayton Accords are crumbling and threatening another war in the heart of Europe.

Is the objective of this US diplomacy to please oil-rich Arab Muslim states? Is it to appease Islamists for fear of terrorism? How can the West send its NATO forces to forcibly detach a province (Muslim Kosovo) from a sovereign country (Christian Serbia) to create a brand new Muslim country that could be a potential threat down the line? Why doesn't the US apply the same diplomacy to liberate Muslim Palestine from the savage brutality of Jewish Israel? Or to forcibly detach the province of Nagorno-Karabakh from Muslim Azerbaijan and either re-attach it to Armenia or create a brand new Christian Armenian country? Could it be that the US is afraid of nearby Russia? In fact, Nagorno-Karabakh was always a part of Armenia, but the Russian butcher Joseph Staline "gifted" this Armenian territory to Azerbaijan during Soviet rule as a way of sowing division and maintaining Soviet grip. Could the Americans be following Stalin's method by creating two new Muslim countries in the heart of Europe as a way to sow the seeds of future strife, weaken Europe and keep it towing the American imperialist line? At the time of this writing, Serbia is massing its troops along the Kosovo border. Ultimately, the charlatan US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who brokered the secession of Muslim Kosovo from Christian Serbia, bears responsibility for his lousy treacherous job that is crumbling before our eyes..

In the same manner, the West handled the endless crises of Lebanon: The Lebanese Christian community has been beleaguered and under siege by relentless Muslim hostility from Lebanon’s Stalinist neighbor, the Syrian dictatorship of the Assad dynasty. Since the 1960s, the Lebanese Christians who had built a liberal, tolerant, and prosperous country, were gradually abandoned to their fate as they fought for their survival against the Egyptian "Arabs" of Nasser in the 1950 and 1960s, the Palestinian "revolutionaries" of Arafat (1960s-1980s), the Syrian "Baathists" of Assad (1970s-2000s), and the distant but effective onslaught of the Sunni Muslim Gulf Arabs who financed the Lebanese War from the late 1960s through the 1990s while also financing mosque building, radicalization with Al-Qaeda and ISIS, and sowing their terror reign in Europe and the Middle East. In more recent times (2000s-present), the Iranian Muslims have taken over the task of threatening the existence of the Christian community through their proxy terror organization of Hezbollah. 

Throughout that period, not only did the US (and its European poodles behind it) show indifference, but it allied itself with the Muslim Arabs against the Christians. In four separate and consecutive crises, American republican administrations (Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr.) sold the Christians out to Syria and Saudi Arabia by imposing on the Lebanese Christians exacting solutions that they knew would not work on the long term, simply to appease the Arabs and gain short term benefits (oil, coalition against Saddam Hussein, etc.).

It is therefore not quite a mystery why the West, in places like the Balkans, Lebanon, and now Armenia, has been on a course of appeasement with Muslim nations that are otherwise ideological enemies of the West. These are the same Islamic nations that never stopped attacking the West militarily with terror attacks and the implant of Islamic centers and mosques throughout Europe and the US. In contrast, when the aggressor is Christian (e.g. Russia) and the victim is Christian (e.g. Ukraine), the West adopts a clearer, more or less ethical posture of defending the victim against the aggressor.

And now in Armenia the same scenario is unfolding. Why doesn’t the West demand the secession of Christian Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh (area: 3,170 Sq. Km) from Muslim Azerbaijan and create a new Christian country, just as it forced the secession of Muslim Kosovo (10,900 Sq. Km) from Christian Serbia? While the Bosnia and Kosovo secessions from Serbia could not have been directly driven by mercantile interests like oil, it is the backing of countries like Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations to the Muslims of Kosovo and Bosnia that forced the oil-subservient West to agree to dismember Serbia. Same with Lebanon. But in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, the subservience to interests is flagrantly obvious. Azerbaijan has major oil and gas resources in the Caspian Sea, and neither the West nor Russia wants to alienate the Azerbaijani dictator Aliyev.

I wish that diplomats and officials of certain countries stop claiming that their foreign policies are driven by “values” when they themselves trample those same values for mercantile interests. The enduring torment of Muslim Palestine at the hands of the barbarian Jewish Israelis is another case in point of Mafia-style blackmail politics, and not one of so-called values.