The Russian 102nd military base – which is stationed in the city of Gyumri in Armenia’s northwest – has opened two new military sites in the Syunik province, reinforcing the areas near the border with Azerbaijan, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said.

“I think it’s no secret that two new strongholds of the Russian 102nd military base have been established in the Syunik province, and the establishment of these two new strongholds is an additional guarantee for ensuring the security of the Syunik province and overall Armenia. This is very important to note,” Pashinyan said in parliament on May 3. 

Azerbaijani servicemen tortured and killed 19 Armenian prisoners of war after the end of the recent Nagorno Karabakh war, Artak Zeynalyan, who represents the interests of the captives and POWs in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), said on social media today.

“During the second Artsakh war launched on September 27, 2020, as well as after the signing of the trilateral agreement on November 9, 2020, Armenian civilians and servicemen continued to be taken captive.

19 of those, who have appeared in captivity, have been tortured and killed by the Azerbaijani servicemen, which is a war crime.

We have appealed to the European Court of Human Rights over the facts of torture and killing of POWs, detained persons”, Zeynalyan said, publishing the list of that 19 persons:

Civilians

1. Eduard Shahgeldyan
2. Arsen Gharakhanyan
3. Benik Hakobyan
4. Elena Hakobyan
5. Serzhik Vardanyan
6. Ella Vardanyan
7. Genadi Petrosyan
8. Yurik Asryan
9. Misha Movsisyan
10. Anahit Movsisyan
11. Nina Davtyan
12. Misha Melkumyan

Servicemen

13. Erik Mkhitaryan
14. Gagik Mkrtchyan
15. Arayik Poghosyan
16. Vardges Ghazaryan
17. Yuri Adamyan
18. Artur Manvelyan
19. Narek Babayan

Colonel-General Movses Hakobyan, a former head of the Military Oversight Service at the Armenian Defense Ministry, has been summoned to the Investigative Committee on Monday. After the interrogation, charges have been brought against the former military official, Hakobyan informed. 

In his words, criminal case has been initiated according to Article 306 of the Criminal Code which is divulging a state secret.

To note, Hakobyan, who was dismissed from his post of the during the recent Artsakh war, came up with number of revelations after the war, blaming Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of making disastrous decisions that allowed Azerbaijan to make major territorial gains during the war in Nagorno-Karabakh.

By Jill Jacobs

The far-right Jewish extremists rampaging violently against Palestinians are backed by a complex network of funding sources in both Israel and the United States. It’s our moral duty to defund them

Many of us watched in horror as right-wing Jewish youth marched from Zion Square to the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah two weeks ago, chanting “Death to Arabs” and assaulting Palestinian residents, in an event organized by Lehava, a violent Jewish extremist organization.

This violence was planned, in part, on WhatsApp groups whose administrators include newly elected Member of Knesset Itamar Ben Gvir of the Otzma Yehudit political party connected to Lehava. 

In one widely-circulated video, Palestinian children cry in fear  as Jewish rioters threw stones at their home. In another, a young Jewish woman explains to an interviewer that she, personally, does not call explicitly for burning [Arab] villages, but “I say ‘you will leave and we will come to live there.'”

In the course of one violent night, more than 100 Palestinianswere injured, with close to two dozen hospitalized.

These events followed weeks of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, including attacks by Palestinians on Jews in Jerusalem and Jaffa and nightly clashes between Palestinian youth in East Jerusalem and police after the unexplained closing of the stairs near the Damascus Gate, a longtime gathering place for Palestinian teens and young adults during Ramadan (the police barriers were eventually removed after two weeks of closure).

There is no excuse for assaults on Jews or any other civilians. At the same time, we must distinguish between the actions of individuals and those of organized groups with representation in the Knesset and a complex network of funding sources in both Israel and the United States.

On social media, American Jewish organizations have rushed to condemn the Jewish extremists. Avi Meyer, the Israel-based Director of Global Communications for the American Jewish Committee wrote, “I am ashamed and repulsed by the hate-fueled violence taking place a mile and a half from my home in Jerusalem. The individuals perpetrating it are as foreign to me and my Judaism as are skinheads, white supremacists, and other racists around the world. They have no place here.”

• ‘Death to Arabs’: Palestinians need international protection from Israel’s racist Jewish thugs
• Far-right party leader Smotrich: ‘Arabs are citizens of Israel, for now at least’
• Israel’s medieval, anti-woman party is more powerful than ever, and channeling Erdogan
• Intimidation. Extortion. Eviction: This is the brutal reality for Palestinians in Silwan, Jerusalem

The ADL tweeted, “Violence & hate are never the answer and do nothing to ease an already fraught and tense situation. We are disturbed extremist voices like Lehava are filling the vacuum. Both Israeli and Arab leaders need to forcefully condemn these actions and stop fanning the flames of hate.”

But casting the right-wing Jewish rioters as marginalized outsiders erases the roles of both the Israeli government and American Jewish funders in enabling and encouraging such violence.

Over the past several years, T’ruah, the organization I direct, has made several complaints to the IRS about US tax-exempt foundations that funnel money to Lehava. These complaints are based on the fact that Lehava is the successor to the Kach movement, founded by the American-Israeli terrorist and former Knesset member Meir Kahane in the 1980s.

Kach was banned by Israel as a terrorist organization in 1988. In the 1990s, the State Department classified both Kach and its offshoot, Kahane Chai, as  Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

While Lehava does not have its own tax status in Israel, investigations by the Israel Religious Action Center and the Democratic Bloc have demonstrated that the group receives money from other registered Israeli non-profits.

These groups, in turn, are funded by American foundations and individuals including American Friends of Yeshivat HaRa’ayon HaYehudi (‘Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea’), whose partner organization the State Department explicitly lists, by its English name, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, and Charity of Light Fund, named in tribute to Kahane.

Both foundations are headed by Levi Chazan, a notorious Kahanist, who was convicted in a 1984 attack that wounded seven Palestinians on a bus. Other funding comes from the Florida-based Falic family, owners of Duty-Free Americas.

Central Fund of Israel, the largest by far of the U.S. foundations channeling funding to Israeli extremists, made close to $40 million in grants in the last year for which tax information is available.

Grantees include Hemla, one of the major pass-throughs for funding to CFI; Honenu, which defends Israelis arrested for terrorism and has also given direct cash to Israelis convicted of terrorism; Od Yosef Chai, a yeshiva infamous for violence against Palestinians, one of whose rabbis was recently convicted of incitement; the Israel Land Fund, which uses semi-legal or non-legal means to acquire Palestinian property; Mishmeret Yesha, which trains and outfits vigilantes in the West Bank; and Im Tirtzu, which incites against Israeli human rights leaders.

In 2016, following a T’ruah complaint about Central Fund of Israel’s support for Honenu, based on an Israeli television station’s exposé of the group’s direct cash payments to Israeli terrorists, the IRS investigated and temporarily restricted these payments. Honenu’s English-language website now indicates that US donations can only be directed to legal defense. We have not yet received a response to our other complaints against CFI or the other named foundations.

Most American Jews do not support, financially or otherwise, the foundations that make grants to extremist groups in Israel. However, some of the organizations considered mainstream play a role in channeling funds to Central Fund of Israel.

In 2018, the San Francisco Federation made a public commitment to end donor-advised grants to Central Fund of Israel, after one such grant became public. Yet in 2020, the Jewish Community Foundation of New York, which manages donor-advised funds, sent CFI more than $2 million. Jewish National Fund-USA, in their most recently-reported tax year, granted CFI $50,000.

The Merona Leadership Foundation, led by Adam and Gila Milstein — who are major donors to the Israeli-American Council, Zioness, and other groups that consider themselves pro-Israel — gave $167,000, and the Milstein Family Foundation contributed another $10,000. Past donors have included the Houston Jewish Federation, as well as secular donor-advised funds such as the Boston Foundation and Fidelity.

It is not enough to issue statements against the violence of the extremists, or to pretend that they represent a marginal perspective. Those of us committed to the human rights of both Israelis and Palestinians also must insist that the institutions to which we are connected do not contribute to the groups that promote genocide and organize Jews to take part in violent rampages.

Some basic steps might include creating values statements that prohibit funding groups that promote violence or extremism, as the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation has; and insisting that individual donors such as Adam and Gila Milstein and the Falic Family, who actively invest in violent extremism, not be honored or given leadership positions in our community.

Cutting off funding to these extremist groups will not be sufficient to end the violence, which emerges in the context of more than five decades of occupation. Millions of additional private American dollars, from both Jews and Christians, flows to building settlements and supporting right-wing policy in Israel. The Israeli government is pursuing de facto annexation, inciting against Palestinian citizens and progressive activists, and coddling extremists.

Those of us committed to the human rights of both Israelis and Palestinians must challenge all of these forces. Refusing to fund those who preach genocide, or to honor funders of these extremist movements, would be one powerful step toward demonstrating that the American Jewish community stands behind our verbal rejection of the recent violence.

Rabbi Jill Jacobs is the Executive Director of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, which organizes and trains more than 2000 rabbis and cantors to advance human rights in the U.S., Canada, Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territories. Twitter: @rabbijilljacobs

The Independent Deputy of Iraq, Mensur Beêcî, has reacted to the TAF’s (Turkish Armed Forces) latest operation in the Medya Defence Zones in Iraqi Kurdistan, saying, “These lands are not Turkey’s gardens or villages, they cannot establish a military base wherever they want.”

As the operation against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) continues in the Metina, Avaşin, and Zap regions (also known as Medya Defence Zones) in Iraqi Kurdistan, various groups, parties and politicians from all around the world are criticising Turkey’s offensive.

Independent Iraqi MP Mensur Beêcî is the latest to weigh in on Turkey’s lack of respect for Iraqi territories, reports Hawar News.

“The establishment of a military base in Kurdistan without the government’s approval is an official invasion of Iraqi territory,” said Beêcî. “This cannot be accepted.”

Beêcî urged Iraq to take action: “The Iraqi government should immediately react to the Turkish state’s new military base. We are not part of Turkish territory.”

AYKAN ERDEMIR

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan stunned his country’s Christians and Jews by publicly using the slur “gavur” (infidel), a pejorative designation for non-Muslims, to criticize his political opposition. Such name-calling reflects the systematic discrimination Turkish Christians and Jews face, and can only accelerate their ongoing exodus from a land where they have lived for two millennia. Ankara needs to change not only its rhetoric but also its policy to reverse the alarming trends that have brought religious minority communities to the brink of extinction.

Erdogan’s use of the slur was not a slip of the tongue; it represented deeply ingrained prejudices about non-Muslim minorities among Turkey’s ruling circles. Back in 2016, then-deputy prime minister Numan Kurtulmus, who now serves as the deputy chair of Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party, said, “For us, independence is being able to call infidels ‘gavur.’”

Kurtulmus’s comment was a not-so-subtle reference to the Tanzimat reforms Ottoman Sultan Abdulmejid I introduced in 1839, which Muslim subjects of the empire resented for leading to a purported ban on using the slur “gavur” in addressing the empire’s Christian and Jewish underlings. Today, many among Turkey’s ruling Islamist-ultranationalist coalition believe that the Ottomans capitulated to the West by granting certain civil liberties to religious minorities in the 19th century, a trope that continues to fuel anti-minority sentiment and the portrayal of Christians and Jews as fifth columns in the service of Western meddling.

Pastor Andrew Brunson of North Carolina—who spent almost two years in a Turkish prison on false charges of military espionage, terrorism and coup plotting—became the public face of the harassment Christian faith leaders have experienced since the country’s failed coup attempt in 2016. Among the long list of ludicrous accusations Brunson faced was the claim that he conspired to create a Christian-Kurdish state in Turkey. A secret witness testified that a member of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), whom Brunson had regularly invited to speak at church services, would cut a cake each week “with a PKK flag with a cross on [it]”—a bizarre accusation that made headlines even in mainstream Turkish newspapers.

Brunson was not the only Christian faith leader targeted by such government-orchestrated smear campaigns. Turkey’s pro-government dailies also slandered the Greek Orthodox ecumenical patriarch with accusations of “plotting” the 2016 failed coup alongside the CIA, and went so far as to publish a fabricated Vatican passport to allege that the coup’s alleged mastermind was a Catholic cardinal. A pro-government columnist claimed that the coup’s instigator has a Jewish mother and an Armenian father, and is a member of the Catholic clerical hierarchy. Another suggested that coup plotters might be hiding in churches. As expected, hate crimes targeting churches and Christians spiked.

Although almost five years have passed since Turkey’s abortive coup, the harassment of Christians has not waned. In fact, the deportation of Protestant faith leaders has picked up steam. Since 2016, Ankara has intensified its use of the N-82 code—designating foreign nationals as a national security threat—to deny entry or residence permits to Protestant faith leaders. Turkish authorities expelled 30 Protestants in 2020 and 35 the year before. More recently, Ankara started deporting foreign spouses of Turkish Protestant clergy, hoping the move would also drive out Turkish Protestants, who do not want the state to separate them from their loved ones.

The Turkish government also seems to be discouraging the return of members of various Eastern Christian denominations to their ancestral lands in the country’s Kurdish-majority southeast. On April 8, a Turkish court imposed a 25-month prison sentence on Syriac Orthodox priest Sefer Bileçen, known as Father Aho, a longtime Istanbul resident who had returned to Mardin to become the caretaker of the 1,500-year-old Mor Yakub Monastery. Turkish authorities first arrested Father Aho in January 2020 on charges of “membership of a terrorist organization,” but released him on parole after public pressure.

Two days after Father Aho’s arrest, a Chaldean Catholic couple who had resettled in their ancestral village on the Turkish-Iraqi border disappeared. The mutilated body of the wife appeared two months later, but the husband remains missing, prompting the opposition’s criticism of negligence and insufficient efforts on the part of Turkish authorities.

The Erdogan government’s conversion of Hagia Sophia from a museum into a mosque last July was one of its most threatening moves with regard to Turkey’s religious minorities. The Turkish president’s evocation of the Ottoman “spirit of conquest” and officials’ references to the “right of the sword” to legitimize the conversion of Hagia Sophia—as well as several other churches—have relegated Turkey’s Christian citizens to the inferior status of conquered minorities. Elpidophoros, the archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America—and a native of Istanbul—warned last year that “a mentality of the conqueror, and claiming conqueror’s rights…changes the relationship of the state to its citizens.” He urged the Turkish state not to “have the mindset of the conqueror,” adding, “I want to feel in my own country as an equal citizen.”

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom stated in its 2021 Annual Report that “religious freedom conditions in Turkey continued to follow a troubling trajectory” and once again recommended that the country be listed on the State Department’s Special Watch List for “engaging in or tolerating severe violations of religious freedom.” It also raised the alarm over the hostile conditions for religious minorities in the areas Turkey and its Islamist proxies control in Syria.

As Ankara’s policies swing back and forth between scapegoating of minorities and spectacles of tolerance that showcase the Turkish government’s “generous” efforts to restore churches and synagogues, minority communities continue to dwindle, nearing extinction. If Turkey does not want to end up with well-maintained churches and synagogues that cater only to tourists—rather than to indigenous communities with two millennia of history—Ankara needs to bring an end to its prejudicial rhetoric and discriminatory policies.

Nadine Maenza is President of Patriot Voices where she focuses on religious freedom and working family policy. She also serves as a Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Follow her on Twitter @nadinemaenza. Aykan Erdemir, is a former member of the Turkish parliament and senior director of the Turkey Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He also serves on Anti-Defamation League’s Task Force on Middle East Minorities. Follow him on 

Dozens of protesters were arrested in Istanbul on Saturday as they tried to mark May 1 against a ban imposed by the government due to COVID-19 restrictions. 

At least 100 were arrested as they tried to reach Taksim Square and other public spaces in the city, with photographs showing police firing tear gas and dragging protesters to the ground. 

May 1 is marked in many countries as International Workers’ Day, Labour Day – or simply May Day – and is a public holiday in some nations, including France. In Turkey, it has traditionally brought critics of the government out on the streets and regularly provokes police crackdowns. 

The Istanbul Contemporary Lawyers Association told AFP that the number of arrests could be as high as 170 people. There have also been at least 11 arrests in Ankara. 

Turkey has had a strict lockdown in place since April 29 due to a deadly third wave of COVID-19.