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Casey Edgarian

Casey Edgarian

Casey Edgarian is an Armenian-American writer from San Diego, who recently graduated with a Master’s in Iranian Studies from the University of Tehran. He has lived and traveled extensively throughout the Caucasus and the Middle East.
Casey Edgarian

Latest posts by Casey Edgarian (see all)

14 Comments

  1. Azerbaijan is a despicable state; no doubt about it. But charity begins at home. Let’s also talk about the abominable record of human rights and the persecution of journalists in Armenia.

  2. The US, Israel are the biggest investors in azerbaijan, it’s money, it’s arms, you name it. As for the UN the most inept and useless organisation sits back and does nothing. Very, very selective in what they do and who they do it to. No wonder azerbaijan gets away with everything under the sun.

  3. Are you kidding me ?
    Armenian citizen writing an article about intolerance in the neighbor Country ???
    What about your own country – military ally of Russia …..with no democracy in the country….with the monument of the nazi German-Armenian general Njdeh Garegin in the center in your capital city – who is responsible for killing over the 30,000 Jewish people during World War 2….with the president Serzh Sargsyan is perpetrator of Khojaly Genocide which ended up with the massacre of 613 civilians in the same neighbor country?
    Do you really think that crying wolf in the United States gonna give you any credit ?

    • Rasim, why AW weekly granted your radicule comments for us??Do you really think crying wolf in Azerbaijan will give our historical Armenian Nation lands back to invader Turks again?? Your entire Azerbaijani lands consider as part of Armenian Highlands, and you have an stolen name from Iran’s AzArbaijan!
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Highlands

    • How “nicely” a Khodjali war incident becomes a “Khodjali genocide” in the mouth of a representative of a newly popped “nation” of Azerbaijan, the very name of which was stolen from an ancient Persian province. I bet an Azeri Turk Rasim Ibrahimov has never heard what former president Mutalibov had said about that particular war incident. Guess whom Mutalibov named the culprits? And I guess Azeri Turk Rasim Ibrahimov has never heard about the Azeri barbarities in Sumgait, Kirovabad, Baku and Maragha most of which preceded a war incident in Khodjali? And of course these defied Azeri attempts to present everything on par with the Armenians. Ugh… Not even thinking deep as to what it means for Armenians, Jews, Greeks, Cambodians, etc. to go through the horrors of genocide in the true and the most gruesome sense of the term that is fully applicable to these nations. Just to keep pace with the Armenians in everything. Ridiculous people… You never could and you’ll never be able.

  4. The article imbued with bias and hatred. Outch(((
    How about the Catholic Church erected in Baku around 2005 and the Orthodox church of Mhyrr-Carrying Wives painstakingly restored by an Azeri entrepreneur. The Armenian Church is standing intact in the very downtown used as part of a library. The two synagogues were rebuilt anew after the independence, and the Lutheran church has regular cermons along with chamber orchestra performances. The preservation and adornment of Noah’s Tomb in Nakhchivan and restoration of the oldest church in Kish, Sheki are just a few other cases to mention. And all those were accomplished after independence on so-called petromoney.
    As for the ban of kids from ashura is absolutely justified due to some stupid practices of shia self-mutiliations that have nothing to do with core principles of Islam.
    The author made really poor studies in his zeal to please the Armenian lobby. No surprise, Armenians in California are trying to be better Catholics than Roman pope, yet, oddly enough, none of them wants to live in depopulate Armenia.
    For those who want to get a bettrr ifo, please come to Azerbaijan, and I will show you a bunch of places of cultural mix in Baku alone.

    • Mr Akhundov – where are the around 100 medieval Armenian churches and monasteries in Nakhchivan that were standing intact in the 1980s? Are they still standing intact, as churches, libraries, orchestra halls or whatever? No – not a single one survives. Where are the thousands of medieval Armenian gravestones at Julfa that were there in the 1980s – are they still standing? No – every one is gone. Video showing them being smashed up by Azeri soldiers (who would probably prefer to have be smashing the skulls of living Armenians), with the fragments then removed by trucks, is easily found on Youtube. Azeri intolerance is so extreme that they could not allow, even in the remotest and least seen corner of their territory, the graves of Armenians dead some 500 years to survive. So I guess your “invite” to come to Azerbaijan will not include an invite to explore Nakhchivan.

  5. In reply to a stupid comment by an Azeri spokesman, even more stupidly deleted by someone at Armenian Weekly: Mr Akhundov – where are the around 100 medieval Armenian churches and monasteries in Nakhchivan that were standing intact in the 1980s? Are they still standing intact, as churches, libraries, orchestra halls or whatever? No – not a single one survives. Where are the thousands of medieval Armenian gravestones at Julfa that were there in the 1980s – are they still standing? No – every one is gone. Video showing them being smashed up by Azeri soldiers (who would probably prefer to have be smashing the skulls of living Armenians), with the fragments then removed by trucks, is easily found on Youtube. Azeri intolerance is so extreme that they could not allow, even in the remotest and least seen corner of their territory, the graves of Armenians dead some 500 years to survive. So I guess your “invite” to come to Azerbaijan will not include an invite to explore Nakhchivan.

  6. And to Armenian Weekly. Stop playing into the hands of propagandist by deleting their posts. The best way to stop lies and silence them for good is to examine them and properly expose them for what they are, not to just delete them.

    • Dear Steve,

      We apologize if it seemed as though we had removed a comment, it turns out that was not the case. Rather, we have a large backlog of comments at any given time, and a very small team with which to moderate them. If a comment does not appear immediately, that is why. The comment in question has since been approved. But in the future, if you don’t see a comment, it is either: 1) waiting to be approved, or 2) has been deemed unsuitable for our site. We are in the stages of preparing a “Comments Guidelines” section to our website, so you will know what constitutes an “unsuitable” comment.

      We encourage a wide range of views, conversations, and debates in our comments section—that is what it is for. We will never censor a healthy debate, but we will not tolerate racism, hate speech, or Genocide denial on our site.

      Thank you for understanding,

      Karine Vann
      Assistant Editor

    • I was replying to the comment by Akhundov (the only comment the article had at the time) – Akhundov’s post must have already been approved since it was there when I started writing the reply. By the time I had finished typing and pressed post comment, Akhundov’s comment had vanished. So it did look as if somebody had unapproved the initial approval. I gather what you are explaining is that it was just temporarily not visible while a number of newly approved comments were added. I hope being intolerant of, say genocide denial, does not always mean automatically not approving posts containing such material. Yes, genocide denial is not a real viewpoint because it is a position deliberately and knowingly constructed from lies – but lies are not exposed by deleting them.

  7. Excellent article by Casey Edgarian! And as usual, our Azerbaijani guests cannot tolerate hearing the facts about how extremely intolerant and horribly savage their country truly is.

    “Nazi German-Armenian general Njdeh Garegin…who is responsible for killing over 30,000 Jewish people during World War 2.”

    Are you kidding me? Garegin Nzhdeh was nowhere close to being a Nazi. His cooperation with Nazi Germany was due to his deep concern that a victory by Germany in World War 2, which certainly appeared to be very likely in the late 1930’s to early 1940’s, would result in a second Armenian Genocide as well as the complete destruction of Soviet Armenia. Furthermore, because of the friendly relations between Nazi Germany and Turkey, a German victory in the war would have enabled Turkey to finish off the remaining part of Armenia.

    “In order to be able to influence Nazi policy, Njdeh aligned himself with Germany and offered his services in exchange for putting an end to the anti-Armenian campaign in the German press. In cooperation with Armenian intellectuals, he presented evidence proving the Armenian people’s Indo-European (Aryan) origins, and recruited Turkish Armenians, who were familiar with the geography of the Marmara Sea Coast, to help the Germans in case of a war with Turkey. A quintessential diplomat, Njdeh wanted to make sure that regardless of the turn of events, he could either guarantee the security of Armenia in case of a possible Turkish invasion of the Caucasus or liberate Western Armenia if Germany attacked Turkey. In addition, through his ties with the Germans, he advocated for the release of more than 20,000 Armenian prisoners of war, who would have perished if not for the efforts of the General. As always, Njdeh’s main concern was the safety of the Armenian people and the advancement of its interests, and his cooperation with the Nazis was a calculated step aimed at achieving those goals. When Hitler’s armies began to lose (Stalingrad, 1943) and the Turkish-Nazi threat to the Armenians disappeared, Njdeh ended his collaboration with Germany.”

    As for the soldiers which Nzhdeh recruited to help the Germans in case of a war with Turkey, they did not kill one single Jew. As a matter of fact, those soldiers actually prevented the extermination of several thousand Jews.

    “The president Serzh Sargsyan is perpetrator of Khojaly Genocide which ended up with the massacre of 613 civilians in the same neighbor country.”

    Are you kidding me? The International Association of Genocide Scholars does not recognize any sort of thing called the “Khojaly Genocide.”

    Your claim that 613 Azerbaijani civilians were massacred in Khojali, is over four hundred more than the official count given by Human Rights Watch and Memorial Human Rights Center, which listed it at 161-200 murders. Anyway, even if we were to go along with your false figure of 613 murders, that’s still nowhere close to being a genocide. In order to qualify as a genocide, you must have the deliberate destruction of a large part of a cultural, racial, national, or religious group. Out of the entire Azerbaijani population, back in 1992, 613 murdered Azerbaijanis represents what percentage? It doesn’t even represent one percent. Therefore, the Azerbaijani government did not commit a genocide against its own people; what they committed was a massacre, and then they attempted to frame the Armenian soldiers for this particular massacre.

    Former Azerbaijani president, Ayaz Mutalibov, had stated that, “The shooting of the Khojaly residents was obviously organized by someone to take control in Azerbaijan.”

    “Tamerlan Karayev, at one time Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Azerbaijan Republic, bears witness: ‘The tragedy was committed by the authorities of Azerbaijan,’ and specifically by ‘someone highly placed.'”

    In addition to the horribly savage massacres of Armenians in Sumgait, Baku, and Kirovabad, what about the massacre of over 100 Armenian civilians in Maragha, in 1992? What about the 243 Armenian civilians who were massacred in Stepanakert by Azerbaijani artillery and rocket fire, between 1991-1992? What about the slaughter of thirty thousand Armenian civilians in Baku, by a combination of Azerbaijani and Turkish soldiers, in September of 1918? What about the slaughter of 25 thousand Armenian civilians in Shoushi, by a combination of Azerbaijani and Turkish soldiers, in May of 1920?

    It’s really amazing how enormously talented the Azerbaijanis are at massacring innocent civilians, and doing it in the most shocking, barbaric manner.

  8. Armenian weekly should be called Armenian weakly. You don’t represent Armenians. You delete one post after another to control the narrative. I consider you useless to the Armenian Nation and cause. Traitor!

    • Hi Joe,

      Thanks for your comment. Like every major newspaper in the United States, the Armenian Weekly moderates the comments sections on its articles. This is not to “control the narrative,” but to keep readers’ comments focused on the actual content of the article. Our comments section should be places where thoughtful, intelligent discussion and healthy debate takes place, but without moderation, it’s at risk of disintegrating into a volley of vulgar insults and racist diatribe, which serves no one. This is why we moderate.

      We are in the process of publishing a set of guidelines, so our readers can know ahead of time what constitutes a comment that is “unsuitable” for publishing on our site.

      Thanks for your patience,

      Karine Vann
      Assistant Editor

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