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1. The shopping Center has a legal right to accept or deny any advertising. It is purely private space, and for that reason the First Amendment is not implicated – the First Amendment comes into play only when the state acts to create a public forum [like a plaza] or to promote a specific viewpoint.

   The State constitution liberty of speech clause is also not implicated because the shopping center has not made advertising space available free to the general public, thereby turning its space into a quasi public forum.

   The best result is for ANCA to buy a billboard and use it mostly to generate income, but to use the space in part to promote its viewpoint.

   • That’s a good point, and the advice is very good — sure the ANCA and other Armenian Diaspora Groups can purchase billboards, for the purpose of promoting genocide awareness. Meanwhile, people should express their disapproval, and their indignation against Americana, another words boycott Americana Shopping Center and its affiliates, without actually taking legal action.

   • I don’t know — it’d be interesting to take another look at legal options. Perhaps, their is something that prohibits ethnically based discrimination against Glendale’s Armenian American Community.

2. The shopping center may have a right to decline the advertising, but the Armenian community of Glendale also has a right to decline to patronize an establishment with this attitude. Given the number of Armenians in Glendale, I think they would feel it!

3. You are betraying your hatred or lack of concern for the Armenian Genocide when you disengeniously resort to specious and inappropriate plegalistic ratiocinations and hair-splitting under the pretext of defending human rights in the abstract. You would not DARE to use such spurious subtrefuge to try to silence any discussion of the Shoah. You are either a Turk, Azerbaijani or one of their paid lobbyists and should be ashamed for the Genocidal Turkish state’s century-old denial of the first genocide of the twentieth century which set the template for all the genocides that have proliferated since, precisely because the perpetrator of the Genocide went unpunished.

   • Edward,

     I am as Armenian as you are, but unlike you, I also know something about whether the Americana is required to allow the ad. So no, I am not Turk, Azerbaijani, or lobbyist.

     The best result is for ANCA to get its own billboard where the most people will see it. Modern billboards are electronic, and they carry more than a single message. The billboard could be a place where ANCA advises the community on issues of concern, but also advertises goods and services for pay.

     If your logic was correct, then the Turks could demand that my hypothetical ANCA billboard carry their message. We should control our messages rather than depend on third parties to do so.

4. Unfortunately for the Americana denial of the billboard is a political act itself.

   And don’t kid yourselves, the Americana would’ve easily hosted this billboard a few year ago, but since the cities gone to shit with gentrification and foreign investment it’s a husk of what the Armenians did to make it great. Let’s go sun valley! :-)

   • Agreed — Americana’s Anti-Armenian advertisement position is surely influenced by Turkish lobby interests, and perhaps those of Azerbaijan’s lobby factions as well. Perhaps, some kind of indifference, among the Non-Armenian Glendale community, has also influenced Americana’s snubbing of its local Armenian American community.

5. These Americana people may have the right to refuse the billboard, but the Armenian-American community also has a right to boycott business there. Having been to that part of CA, Americana has a lot of competition, and Armenians can make a statement that they don’t need Americana too.

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