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Putin: America Is Godless, Has Turned Away from Christian Values by Robert Wilde 29 Jan 2014 http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/01/29/Vladimir%20Putin-America-is-Godless-Turns-Away-from-Christian-Values Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned the West, including the United States, for eschewing Christian values and opting instead for a “path to degradation.” In his State of the Nation speech last month, Putin asserted that, “Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values… Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan.” Russia has adopted new laws that ban homosexual propaganda and criminalizes the insulting of religious sensibilities. The law on religious sensibilities was approved in the wake of a protest in Moscow’s largest cathedral by a female punk rock group, *** Riot. State-run television said the group’s “demonic” protest was funded by “some Americans.” Russia’s new-found embrace of traditional values has prompted a rise in Orthodox vigilantism. Extreme groups such as the Union of Orthodox Banner Bearers, an ultraconservative faction who adopted a slogan “Orthodoxy or Death,” are gaining prominence. It was not that long ago that the United States was accusing Russia for being a “godless nation.” On March 8, 1983, Ronald Reagan said this about Russia to an audience of evangelicals: "Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness--pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world." History supports the 40th President of the United States' remarks. According to a 1995 Russian presidential committee report, Soviet authorities executed 200,000 clergy and believers from 1917 to 1937, many of them crucified, scalped, and otherwise tortured. Thousands of churches were destroyed, and those that survived were turned into warehouses, garages, or museums of atheism. Moreover, another 500,000 religious figures were persecuted and 40,000 churches destroyed in the period from 1922 to 1980, the report said. Half the country’s mosques and more than half the synagogues were also destroyed. “Clergymen were crucified on churches’ holy gates, shot, scalped [and] strangled,” said Alexander Yakovlev, head of the Commission for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression. “I was especially shocked by accounts of priests turned into columns of ice in winter,” Yakovlev said. “It was total cruelty.”

Society for Orphaned Armenian Relief http://www.soar-us.org/news.html#prelate http://www.soar-us.org/

Another reason that the Ebionites had influenced Islam greatly in a direct way is the same view held by Ebionites and Muslims; namely that the Christian scriptures in the New Testament are corrupted and changed from its original version, and that Jesus never said He was the Son of God. Who Were the Ebionites? http://www.compassionatespirit.com/ebionites-article.htm The Ebionites (from Hebrew ebionim, "the poor") were a sect of early followers of Jesus. They were one of several "Jewish Christian" groups, early followers of Jesus who considered themselves Jews. They thought of themselves as the true followers of Jesus, but were described as heretics by many early orthodox Christian writers. Some modern writers and groups, including a number of scholars, argue that the Ebionites represented the views of Jesus and of early Christianity better than other early Christian groups. Sources There are two chief sources for our knowledge of the literature and ideas of the Ebionites: 1. Descriptions of the Ebionites and brief quotations from their writings by the church fathers, most importantly Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius of Salamis, all of whom considered the Ebionites to be heretics. The lengthiest and most complete of these comes from Epiphanius, who wrote his Panarion in the fourth century, describing and denouncing 80 heretical sects, among them the Ebionites (Panarion 30) and various other "Jewish Christian" and allied groups (Panarion 18, 19, 29, 53). 2. The pseudo-Clementine literature, especially the Recognitions of Clement and The Clementine Homilies, two third-century Christian works, are regarded by general scholarly consensus as largely or entirely Jewish-Christian and specifically Ebionite in origin. This can be found in volume 8 of the Ante-Nicene Fathers. History of the Ebionites The Ebionites were a group in the early Christian church which was "Jewish Christian" in orientation, claiming to be the descendants of the original church, observing the Jewish law as they interpreted it but also following Jesus. All of the sources specifically mentioned above agree that the Ebionites denied the divinity of Jesus and accepted the Jewish law. There is general agreement also that they believed in one God, the creator, thus rejecting the views of Marcion; and further that they rejected Paul. According to Epiphanius, they rejected orthodox Christian beliefs about the divinity of Jesus, were vegetarians, opposed animal sacrifice, and rejected certain texts in the Jewish scriptures (most especially, those pertaining to animal sacrifice). They were loyal to the Mosaic law, but had an idiosyncratic view of that law. They called themselves Ebionites (based on ebionim, "the poor") because, they said, at the time of the apostles they gave all their possessions to the early church (Acts 4:32-35). The Ebionites claimed to have the biological relatives of Jesus among their own number, described by ancient writers as the "desposynoi" ("those who belong to the master"). Epiphanius describes a group which holds views remarkably similar to those in the Recognitions and Homilies. They accepted Jesus as the "true prophet," believe that Christ was in Adam, in the virtue of poverty, reject animal sacrifices, reject the false texts in the (Old Testament) scripture, are vegetarians, and practice daily baptism. Epiphanius says that the "false texts" that the Ebionites reject have to do with commands to offer animal sacrifice; the Homilies go on to describe a number of other passages considered unworthy of God, such as those the Ebionites considered to be questioning God’s omnipotence, knowledge, love, peaceful nature, and righteousness. Epiphanius quotes their gospel as ascribing the words to Jesus, "I have come to destroy the sacrifices" (Panarion 30.16.5), and as ascribing to Jesus rejection of the Passover meat (Panarion 30.22.4), analogous to numerous passages found in the Recognitions and Homilies (e.g. Recognitions 1.36, 1.54, Homilies 3.45, 7.4, 7.8). They existed just outside of Judea, in Galilee and present-day Syria and Jordan (the Decapolis, Gaulanitis, Perea, and Nabatea, and nearby regions). The exact origin of the Ebionites is debated, but those who held views characteristic of the Ebionites existed in the first century. The Ebionites originated no later than the second century (when they are mentioned by Ireneaus) and continued to exist at least down through the late fourth century (when Epiphanius describes conversations he had with them), and probably continued into the fifth century and perhaps beyond. There are no known modern groups which are direct lineal descendants of the ancient Ebionites. Writings of the Ebionites No independent writings of the Ebionites are known to have survived to the present day. We know of such writings only because the church fathers refer to them and occasionally quote from them. Epiphanius describes a gospel of the Ebionites, an Ebionite "acts of the apostles," the "travels of Peter," and "the Ascents of James." Other church fathers, such as Jerome, sometimes quote from one or another of the gospels attributed to the Ebionites. Relationship of the Ebionites to other Jewish Christian groups A number of other groups are described by ancient writers or modern scholars as "Jewish Christian." Among these are the Nazoraeans (the spelling is uncertain), Cerinthians, Symmachians (followers of the Ebionite scribe Symmachus), Elkasaites (the spelling is uncertain), Sampsaeans, and Ossaeans. Much less is known about these other groups than about the Ebionites. The relationship of these other groups to each other, whether they existed independently of each other, and what their views are, is debated by modern scholars and ancient writers. Epiphanius clearly distinguishes between "Ebionites" and the "Nazoraeans," but Jerome evidently believes (Letter 112) that they are both the same group. It is generally agreed that the Cerinthians were not "Jewish Christian" at all, but only mistakenly described as "Jewish Christian" by the church fathers, and that the Elkasaites, the Sampsaeans, and Ossaeans — the latter two groups mentioned only by Epiphanius in ancient writings — are different names, as Epiphanius says, for the same group.

There was a spiritual religious sect located in Yemen, this sect, who called their worship God "Rahim" or "Rahman", was a peaceful group hating violence. Those who brought forth the Muslim religion's written text, took those peaceful verses from the writings of this sect group whose God was "Rahmen Rahim" they were verses dipping with sugar and honey, then they added to them other verses, verses of blood/killing, rape, plunder, torture and terror as we see today in Koran. Take note, in code language, Muslim writing puts the mountain where Noe's ark rested as being located in Yemen. "Gerd R. Puin, a German authority on ancient Koranic manuscripts. Puin was the head of a restoration project commissioned by the Yemeni government to examine and catalogue a vast hoard of Koranic and non-Koranic fragments discovered in Sana’a in 1972. Amongst the material was a palimpsest which appears to contain the oldest Koranic texts in existence. Significantly, the older of the texts can be radio-carbon-dated to no later than 660 AD. ... it exhibits significant textual variations that suggest a process of formation of the Koran that differs markedly from the traditional account, and is especially challenging for Muslims who believe that the Koran is the eternal word of God and arrived in this world perfect and fully formed. Based on this and evidence derived from the other material, Puin and his associates concluded that the proto-Islamic religious movement must have been in constant flux in its early years and that the Koran is an amalgam of texts from various sources that were apparently not fully intellectually assimilated even at the time of Muhammad, and may date from at least a century before. In particular, Puin detected a Christian substrate in the material from which may be derived an entire 'anti-history' of the origins of Islam." Then there is of course the influence of the Ebionite Jewish sect on formulation of Koran. In order to know about the Ebionite you have to google that word. They considered themselves "Christians orthodox-Jews" but did not believe in the divinity of Jesus, for them He was just a wise teacher man (as Islam does); moreover they insisted on keeping the laws of Moses, 613 of them (Islam is also based in doing work and keeping laws for attending salvation); those things Jesus did not teach according to the New Testament. Those Ebionites also considered St. Paul as being an apostate. No wonder they made enemies both of Jews because they believed in Jesus and of Christians because they did not confirm to the teachings of Jesus. As to their book, or their only gospel, it was "an incomplete, falsified, and truncated" copy of the gospel of Matthew. After 200 CE not much is heard of this sect because they went underground against strong opposition and apparently made their way into Arabia, and most likely even to Yemen. 'Koranic' member of this forum says: "As far as the Koran's divine origins or not, I think this is a question of faith", but faith based on falsehood is false faith. I am of the opinion that the Kurash tribe that governed Mecca then came up with a plan to have their own empire as the Persians and Byzantine did. When those two empires have exhausted themselves in wars against each other and were weakened consequently, the Arabs saw their chance and the path for an Arab empire was cleared. Those Arabs were clever, they decided to have their own religion, like "the people of the book" did. Arabs have a wide imagination as was shown later on in One-Thousand-and-One-Tales book, it was not hard for them, with the help of the Ebionites and others, to compose an oral tradition of a desert Arab prophet, a tale that was put later on in writing that came to be known as Koran. They apparently took and plagiarized scriptures fromYemen then added to it their own. Only one version of the text was canonized and declared to be true and antithetic, all other variations of those oral tales and written forms were made null and destroyed. Now I like to direct the attention to an inflammatory research that an American man, Craig Winn, did on Islam, I do not agree with all of his work, in fact I did not read it in entirety because this guy has a grotesque style of writing and is not a scholar. So I would advise to keep away from his work if not able to take ugliness and unscrupulousness. His work is entitled-- Prophet of Doom: Islam's Terrorist Dogma in Muhammad's Own Words – April 25, 2004 by Craig Winn (Author) http://www.amazon.com/Prophet-Doom-Islams-Terrorist-Muhammads/dp/0971448124 This guy, Craig Winn, was not a scholar, nor he is of any spiritual caliber, but he was mad after 9/11 destructive terror at New York; so he asked himself why Muslims would do a thing like that? He went to the Middle East in search for answers --he would have saved himself the trip if he just studied the Armenian Genocide-- nevertheless he went, then afterward he did studies in Islamic books and came with his answers in the book that he wrote: Prophet of Doom. His book is not well-known in England (where I think you, koranic, is located) but it's popular in USA, I even saw it in public libraries of USA. The author has a webpage where he offers his work free to be read --both written and in audio versions: http://prophetofdoom.net/ Craig Winn writes: "There is but one Islam, a singular correct view of Muhammad, his religion, and his god. It is the one found in the Qur'an and Hadith. There is no independent record of Muhammad in history from which a variant view may be drawn. The Hadith and Qur'an are the sole repository of information on this man, his times, means, and mission. The Muhammad of Islam, the god of Islam, and the religion of Islam must be as these sources present them. Prophet of Doom is dedicated to exposing Islam's scriptures and what Muhammad had to say about himself, his ambition, religion, and god..." Actually there is an independent record I think it was done by an Armenian Christian of Jerusalem in Armenian language in that city. Amazon.com Review by Shawn Carkonen: "Craig Winn's controversial and inflammatory work, Prophet of Doom, begins with this statement: "Islam is a caustic blend of regurgitated paganism and twisted Bible stories. Muhammad, its lone prophet, conceived his religion solely to satiate his lust for power, sex, and money. He was a terrorist." Needless to say, the book is certain to offend Muslims for it disparages nearly every aspect of Islam. Winn attempts to deflect such criticism upfront by claiming that he is merely quoting the Qur'an and other Islamic texts and is therefore "just the messenger." Further, he claims that he is unconcerned about being offensive because his goal is to educate people about the root causes of terrorism and the inherent dangers of Islam in the same way that early translators of Mein Kampf tried to warn an unsuspecting world of Hitler's intentions. "If we don’t shed our ignorance of Islam, many more will perish," he writes. "Admittedly, prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001, Winn knew little about Islam. According to the author, the tragic events of that day led him to investigate why Muslims were so intent on killing Infidels, Americans in particular. He also claims to have interviewed members of al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, and Hamas, and studied Islamic texts, referring to five different translations in the process. Blending these translations in order to express the nuances of the writing to further his premise, Winn selectively quotes from the Qur'an, various Islamic texts, and the biography of Muhammad, to make his case that that Islam is the "world's largest and most violent organization" and "rotten to the core." Rather than educate readers about the Islamic faith, the book's sole purpose seems to be to shock and inflame readers---and in that regard it succeeds. --Shawn Carkonen" Since 9/11 so much books have been written about Islam and terror that a person, if spend his whole life reading them, will not be able to finish all.

My first thought it was Hameshtine Armenian but I have listed to some of their tapes and speak and this one does not looked Hameshtine to me. It is more likely the SASOUNTSI Armenian, of course nobody hears today of Sasuntsi Armenian dialect because almost most were massacred in the 1915 genocide. So this is from that region: Sasun & Dikranakert (today's Diarbeker).

h.n. jan what kind of vids are those? I mean you should not be meddling with the Kurds specially the revolutionary ones. It you want my opinion this is Armenian Dikragatezti dialect, its an Armenian song but its sung by the Kurds. The letters of lyrics looks to me Turkish, the Kurds have their own letters but are not allowed to write by it in Turkey. I may be mistaken so wait for another comment from someone else. By the way do you ever sleep or you are 24 hours a day on front of the computer?

Identify and trace a person by picture https://www.google.com/search?q=identify+and+trace+a+picture+of+person&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

This is reference to the year 1905 when the Armenian forces organized by the Tashnak party were defending their city Baku (yes Baku then was mostly Armenian) against Turk attack, the Turks were successful in taking Baku from the Armenians when the British forces joined and helped them to overcome the Armenian defense in Baku.

I would like to add to the sentence: They, both Turks&Tartars, believe the way to achieve this is by deception" --Yes by deception and worst still they believe this will be achieved by eliminating most of the Armenians of the region, by slaughter, by exile and by subjugation the remaining few who do not prove to be threat to them and to their new pan-empire.

To my sentence "They, both Turks&Tartars, believe the way to achieve this is by deception" I would like to add: For this reason there NEVER is going a peace singed or established in Artsakh, or the singed protocols between Turkey & Armenia made real and effective. This is the reason that when just the PMs or FMs of Azrbaijan & Armenia have a meeting to talk about peace there is an Azeri attack on Artsakh or on Armenia to make the talks fail. The recent case was when some 40 Azeri commandos storming the Artsakh border in deep winter of January, they were repulsed but a heroic Armenian soldier was killed, this all happened just before the two ministers were about to meet. This same sabotage have previously happened each time when the two presidents of Armenia & Azerbaijan were about to meet. How stupid people can be to imagine that the Turks&Azers are after real genuine peace! They never are after peace despite the talks and the fake words; they are just playing the tactics of foxes, and the wolves, with the Armenians; to establish their own empire by deception.

I did not see one, keep looking yourself. Since this is a new one one, hopefully someone in Yerevan will do the English subtitle or give a transcript in English of this documentary. Note that the word"Azer, Azeri" is a Persian word that means fire since in the region between south of Baku and Iran there are volcanic areas where fire flames filters out of the ground. And the Persians choose Azer, Azerbaijan for their province of Azerbaijan (both in Baku and in north Iran) because it had similarity with word "Atropatine", like Azropajine. Those were an ancient people living in northern Iran, and in west-northern Iran. Alexander the Great conquered them; when certain Turk tribes conquered Iran and ruled there they forced the Turkish language and Islam religion on those people that still live in western north of Iran in the Iran two provinces of Iran, provinces of west & east Azerbaijan, the Baku Azerbaijan is different than those two Iranian provinces. Those certain Turkish tribe that ruled Iran were expelled from Iran and the Persians again took power in their land. Some of those expelled Turks moved further north of Iran and Tartar tribes coming from north of modern Baku, from deep of eastern-central Russia knows as Tartaristan also came to Baku region and to the fertile valleys of river Kura where mostly previously were Armenians by the river Kura as this river was the boundary between Albania and Armenia. So the region known presently as Azerbaijan with its capital of Baku was populated by various ethnic people, some 10 or 15 ethnics groups like: Armenians (the biggest one before the war), Russians, Lezgins, Talysh, Tats (both of Muslims & Jewish religion), Avars, Georgians, Persians, Ashkenazi & Khazars Jews and others. To those should be added of course the descendants of ancient Albania and Media who lost their identity and language, the Albanians were converted to Islam when conquered by Arabs. To those of course should be added the Turks who came from the direction of Iran who came to Iran from the direction of central Asia into the Middle East, and the Tartars who came from the direction of the north from lands located between China & Russia where they had their homeland, they came looking for greener pastures and they settled and stayed there. Now, early 20th century and late 19th century the nationalist movements in the region of modern Azerbaijan (of Baku) were after a name for their country, and since the Turks & the Tartars become strong there (with the British and Europe backing them because of the oil in the Baku region which they were after), and after the Armenian Tashnak forces lost its war with them, the Turks& Tartars choose the name of the Azerbaijan (or stole it from north Iranian one) for their new country in the hope that the region of Azerbaijan in north Iran whose people were already Turkified and Isramilized previously will join forces and establish there a big Pan-Azerbaijani state, however the real Azerbaijani or Atrepothians of northern Iran did not embrace the new state made by the Turks&Tartars. But Baku still even today after their imagined Pan-Azerbaijani state consisting of the two Iranian provinces of Iran with the name east&west Azerbaijan, that of Atrsakh and that of Yerevan of Armenia --all joined with the modern Baku Azerbaijan in one empire in cozy relations with modern Turkey with eventually merging with modern Turkey. They, both Turks&Tartars, believe the way to achieve this is by deception. If you look at the map of Armenia of Tigran the Great, after he was defeated by the Romans which Armenia is smaller that Tigran's Armenian empire, you see the kingdom of Media-Atropatine is in east of that Armenia. On top of it you see the Baku region (land extending like an eagle's peak into sea) that region was known then as Albania or Caucasian Albania who were Christians and friends of Armenians then but when Arabs conquered their land they were Islamized that is converted to Islam and they lost their identity. If you look at a map of the Empire of Tigran the Great (before his defeat by Romans) you see the name of Albania/Caucasian Albania where now is located modern Azerbaijan of Baku that is ruled by Tartars and Turks, actually the father of the currant president of Azerbaijan was either a Turk who was born in Nakhichevan, or an Atropatian speaking Turkish and following the Muslim religion; or an Armenian whose family converted to Islam long time ago. I did not do genealogy research for his family but any one of 3 of those assumptions is possible. You can research those maps in Wikipedia.

Armenia to produce unmanned aircrafts for EU and Northern America by Arthur Yernjakyan January 30, 2014 Instigate CJSC, Armenia, will invest nearly $1 million in production of multifunctional unmanned aircrafts and automated control systems for them, Karine Minasyan, Deputy Minister of Economy, said in the Government, Thursday. The Government has licensed Instigate Robotics CJSC (subsidiary of Instigate CJSC) for exploitation of free economic area Alliance in the territory of Mars RAO. The deputy minister said the company plans to create 25 highly-paid jobs. The production space of the free economic area Alliance will total 200 square meters. Sitronics Armenia CJSC will lease the given area for $8 per sq m for a period of 10 years. The output will be exported to Northern America, Europe, Middle East and the former Soviet countries. The company plans to export up to $1.9 million products, the deputy minister said. The company has already mastered the technology of production of two models of unmanned aircrafts Educotper and Photocopter. Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan, in turn, said the Government has approved rather serous economic programs, including manufacture of Armenian tablets that will be launched already in the current year. It is the second solid investment program, he said. Instigate Robotics is a spin-off company of Instigate CJSC launched in 2013. Instigate Robotics is specialized in robotics and industrial automation solutions such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), 3D printers, CNC devices and robotics kits for schools. Instigate cjsc is an engineering company with hardware and software teams based in Yerevan and four other cities of Armenia. The company is represented in the US, EU, Israel and Georgia. The company is specialized in Electronic System Level design and modeling, EDA software design, software acceleration and parallel programming, using modern technologies such as AMD/NUMA and NVIDIA/CUDA. Instigate cjsc was founded on July 6, 2005. The subsidiary of Sitronics OJSC, SITRONICS ARMENIA CJSC, created the first free economic area in Armenia on 1 August 2013. The subsidiary has been created in order to centralize the management of the CJSC Mars plant and three scientific research institutes, and the management of a free economic zone, which is created on these sites. The residents of the free economic are will act on the principle of 'one window' and enjoy favorable tax field.

In this quote from the article of Bernhard Zand we see the Pan-Arabism in our modern times started in 1915 with the vision of "Hussein Bin Ali, the Sharif of Hejaz and of the holy city of Mecca when he and his sons, Ali, Faisal and Abdullah -- together with the Damascus elite -- dreamed of founding an Arab nation state stretching from the Taurus Mountains in southeastern Turkey to the Red Sea and from the Mediterranean to the Iranian border." However because of British deception it failed; the British had also promised to the Kurds the same homeland they promised to the Armenians minus the Black Sea connection. This Pan-Arabism was activated again when Gamal Abdel Nasser came unto power in Egypt after toppling the monarchie. The efforts of Gamal Nasser were met by failure and the idea of a Pan-Arabic state was put into sleep. The Arabs were not ready then mentally, economically, emotionally and physically (and they will never be and any new attempt by them will result in shedding more blood). However this new attempt may come again in the coming years; an attempt to make a super Islamic state in the Middle East. Today Pan Arabism is represented by Assad's Syria, Nasrallah's Hezbollah, and Iran despite the Iranians not being Arabs but are linked with them because of religion, because of Islam. Iraq may join them soon. Against this Pan-Arabism is a contra force that wants to keep the Middle East in its present separate pathetic micro-states. Among those foremost contra-force is Turkey since the vision of the Sharif of Hejaz does extends from the Taurus Mountains which currently are in modern Turkey. Some say that the would be president of Egypt, General Sisi, has Gamal Abdel Nasser as his role model, if this prove to be true then he is most-likely to strengthen this Pan-Arabic coalition and join them thereby starting a new Pan-Arabic adventure in the region the consequences of which can be World War 3. Three attempts, three knocks, that of Sharif of Hejaz, of Gamal Nasser and of Sisi. Will the third attempt ignite the third world war? And what of Armenia with her geographically close location to those Arab countries and a history of invasions? What of hundred thousands of Armenians who live in those Arab countries? Something to ponder about!

The currant conflict with modern Turkey where we see the closer of the borders between Turkey & Eastern Armenia is also the result of western policies regarding the Middle East after the conclusion of World War 1. Eastern Armenians, although now relatively free under Russian protection and indirect rule of Russia, still suffer as the results of those selfish policies of the British and French. Tigran the Great had his Romans to deal with while Armenians after WW1 had the British&French to deal with. The Romans at least let Tigran the Great rule over an Armenia, though much reduced from his former empire stretching from sea to sea; as to the the British&French they gave our land and the whole Western Armenia to Turkey or have let Turkey have it.

Part 2: Imperialistic Dealings The Arabs fulfilled their part of the agreement. In June 1916, they began their insurgency against the Ottomans -- a decisive aid to the British advance from Sinai to Damascus via Jerusalem. Their revolt was energized by the British archeologist and secret agent Thomas Edward Lawrence, who would go down in history as "Lawrence of Arabia" [this greedy British agent and hater of Armenia will be known in Armenian history as a British scumbag prey, much far away from the heroic figure that was portrayed in the movie by his name, since he was of the mindset that when Armenia is cleared of Armenians the Armenia's mineral wealth would easily be taken or fall into the hands of the British]. Britain, though, did not fully live up to its part of the deal. In a dispatch sent in early 1916, Lawrence wrote that the Arab revolt would be useful to the British Empire because, "it marches with our immediate aims, the break-up of the Islamic 'bloc' and the defeat and disruption of the Ottoman Empire." But in no way were the British thinking of the kind of united Arab state that Hussein and his sons dreamed of. "The states the Sharifs would set up to succeed the Turks would be … harmless to ourselves…. The Arabs are even less stable than the Turks. If properly handled they would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of small jealous principalities incapable of cohesion." Far more important to the British than their Arab comrades in arms were the French, with whom their troops were fighting and dying in untold numbers on the Western Front. "The friendship with France," British Prime Minister David Lloyd George later told his French counterpart Georges Clemenceau, "is worth ten Syrias." France was a colonial power that had long laid claim to the Christian provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Great Britain would have preferred to control the region alone, but with their common enemy Germany bearing down, London was prepared to divide the expected spoils. Even as McMahon was corresponding with Sharif Hussein, British parliamentarian Sir Mark Sykes was negotiating a contradictory deal with the French diplomat François Georges-Picot. It foresaw the division of the Arab provinces which still belonged to the Ottomans in such a way that France would get the areas to the north and the British those to the south. "I should like to draw a line from the 'e' in Acre to the last 'k' in Kirkuk," Sykes said as he briefed Downing Street on the deal at the end of 1916. The so-called Sykes-Picot Agreement was an unabashedly imperialistic document. It took no account of the wishes of the peoples affected, ignored the ethnic and confessional boundaries existing in the Arab and Kurdish world and thus provoked the conflicts which continue to plague the region 100 years later. "Even by the standards of the time," writes James Barr, "it was a shamelessly self-interested pact." The Balfour Redesign The document initially remained secret. And by the time the Bolsheviks completed their revolution in Moscow in 1917 and made the Sykes-Picot Agreement public, the British had already signed another secret deal -- one which neither the Arabs nor the French knew about. On Nov. 2, 1917, Foreign Minister Arthur James Balfour promised the Zionist Federation of Great Britain "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." There were several factors motivating the British to grant the oppressed Jews the right to self-determination and to give them a piece of the Ottoman Empire for that purpose. One of the most important was the accusations of imperialism against London that had grown louder as the war progressed. Not that the imperialists in the British cabinet shared such concerns. But it bothered them, particularly because one of the critics, Woodrow Wilson, had just been reelected as US president. "Every people should be left free to determine its own polity, its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid," Wilson intoned in January of 1917 on the eve of America's entry into the war. At the time, Wilson was unaware of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, but the British suspected that they would ultimately have to come clean with their new ally. As such, the Balfour Declaration can be seen as an effort to guard against the expected US reaction to Britain's arbitrary redesign of the Middle East. In the meantime, the British -- with the help of the Arabs -- were establishing military facts on the ground. Against stiff Ottoman and German resistance, they advanced across the Sinai and Palestine to Damascus. At the same time, they progressed up the Euphrates to Baghdad and occupied Iraq. Between 1915 and 1918, there were more than 1.5 million soldiers fighting in the Middle East, with several hundred thousand casualties -- not including the around one million Armenians who were killed or starved to death in the Ottoman Empire. In October of 1918, World War I came to an end in the region with the Armistice of Mudros. The Ottoman Empire had been defeated and, with the exception of Anatolia, was divided among the victors and their allies. The "peace to end all peace" was forced upon the Middle East -- for an entire century. [Armenia was promised a free independant country with its six provinces plus the connection land to the black sea, Armenians who fled Turkey were promised a safe return to this their historical free country in eastern Turkey, promises that were never kept, as the promises to the Arabs were not kept in its entirety but in parts only. In case of Western Armenia it was given back to the Turks.] When US President Wilson arrived in Paris in early 1919 for peace negotiations with British premier Lloyd George and French leader Clemenceau, he became witness to what for him was an unexpected show. The heads of the two victorious powers were deeply divided and engaged in a biting oratorical duel. The French insisted that they be given the mandate for present-day Lebanon and for the region stretching to the Tigris, including what is now Syria. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, after all, guaranteed them control over the area. Asking the People The British, who were mindful of their own mandate in Palestine and who had just received more exact information regarding the immense oil riches to be had in Mesopotamia, were opposed. Granting France the mandate over Syria, after all, was in contradiction to the promises they had made to the Arabs at the beginning of the war. Furthermore, the British had fought the war in the Middle East essentially on their own, with almost one million soldiers and 125,000 killed and injured. "There would have been no question of Syria but for England," Lloyd George said. Wilson proposed a solution. The only way to find out if the residents of Syria would accept a French mandate and those of Palestine and Mesopotamia would accept British rule, the US president said, was to find out what people in those regions wanted. It was a simple and self-evident idea. For two months, the Chicago businessman Charles Crane and the American theologian Henry King travelled through the Middle East and interviewed hundreds of Arab notables. Although the British and the French did all they could to influence the outcome of the mission, their findings were clear. Locals in Syria did not want to be part of a French mandate and those in Palestine were uninterested in being included in a British mandate. London had been successful in preventing the Americans from conducting a survey in Mesopotamia. In August, King and Crane presented their report. They recommended a single mandate covering a unified Syria and Palestine that was to be granted to neutral America instead of to the European colonial powers. Hussein's son Faisal, who they describe as being "tolerant and wise," should become the head of this Arab state. Today, only Middle East specialists know of the King-Crane Report, but in hindsight it represents one of the biggest lost opportunities in the recent history of the Middle East. Under pressure from the British and the French, but also because of the serious illness which befell Wilson in September of 1919, the report was hidden away in the archives and only publicly released three years later. By then, Paris and London had agreed on a new map for the Middle East, which diametrically opposed the recommendations made by King and Crane. France divided its mandate area into the states of Lebanon and Syria while Great Britain took on the mandate for Mesopotamia, which it later named Iraq -- but not before swallowing up the oil-rich province of Mosul. Between Syria, Iraq and their mandate area of Palestine, they established a buffer state called Transjordan. Instead of the Arab nation-state that the British had promised Sharif Hussein, the victorious powers divided the Middle East into four countries which, because of their geographical divisions and their ethnic and confessional structures are still among the most difficult countries in the world to govern today. Fatal and Long-Term Consequences And they knew what they were doing. Just before the treaties were signed, the question arose as to where exactly the northern border of Palestine -- and thus, later, that of Israel -- was to run. An advisor in London wrote to the British Prime Minister Lloyd George: "The truth is that any division of the Arab country between Aleppo and Mecca is unnatural. Therefore, whatever division is made should be decided by practical requirements. Strategy forms the best guide." In the end, the final decision was made by a British general assisted by a director from the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The Arab world, of course, wasn't the only place where borders were drawn that local populations refused to accept. It happened in Europe too. But three factors in the Middle East led to fatal and long-term consequences. First: Whereas many Europeans had begun to develop national identities and political classes by the beginning of the 19th century at least, World War I yanked Arabs out of their historical reverie. The Ottomans took a relatively hands-off approach to governing their Middle Eastern provinces, but they also did little to introduce any kind of political structure to the region or to promote the development of an intellectual or economic elite. On the contrary, at the first sign of a progressing national identity, the Ottoman rulers would banish or execute the movement's leaders. This heritage weighed on the Middle East at the dawn of the 20th century, and the region's pre-modern conflation of state and religion further hampered its political growth. Second: The capriciousness with which France and Great Britain redrew the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire's former Arab provinces left behind the feeling that a conspiracy was afoot -- a feeling which grew into an obsession in the ensuing decades. Even today, the legend lives on that the mysterious buckle in the desert border between Jordan and Saudi Arabia is the result of someone bumping the elbow of Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill as he was drawing the line. That, of course, is absurd -- but it isn't too far removed from the manner in which Sykes, Picot, Lloyd George and Clemenceau in fact carved up the region. Thirdly: In contrast to Europe, the tension left behind by the untenable peace in the Arab world was not released in a single, violent eruption. During World War II, the region was not a primary theater of war. But the unresolved conflicts left behind by World War I, combined with the spill-over effects from the catastrophic World War II in Europe -- the founding of Israel, the Cold War and the race for Persian Gulf resources -- added up to a historical burden for the Middle East. And they have resulted in an unending conflict -- a conflict that has yet to come to an end even today, almost 100 years after that fateful summer in 1914. Translated from the German by Charles Hawley

http://cdn2.spiegel.de/images/image-651551-galleryV9-mbzh.jpg There is a mistake in that map at left of 1914. The regions of Kars & Ardahan were then part of the Russian Empire and not of the Ottoman Empire as indicated wrongly in the map. It was later on that Lenin gave it to the new Turkey along with Mt. Ararat region when Turks deceived him by telling him that they will make Turkey a communist country. Lenin not only gave Armenian lands and Mt. Ararat to Turkey but also gold and armament to Kemal Ataturk to destroy and defeat Armenia. One hundred years ago WW1 started; this article is a recap of that war. "Between 1915 and 1918, there were more than 1.5 million soldiers fighting in the Middle East, with several hundred thousand casualties -- not including the around one million Armenians who were killed or starved to death in the Ottoman Empire." Century of Violence: What World War I Did to the Middle EastBy Bernhard Zand anuary 31, 2014 http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/world-war-i-led-to-a-century-of-violence-in-the-middle-east-a-946052.html Part 1: What World War I Did to the Middle East .....the tensions unleashed on the Arab world by World War I remain as acute as ever. Essentially, the Middle East finds itself in the same situation now as Europe did following the 1919 Treaty of Versailles: standing before a map that disregards the region's ethnic and confessional realities. In Africa, Latin America and -- following the bloodletting of World War II -- Europe, most peoples have largely come to accept the borders that history has forced upon them. But not in the Middle East. The states that were founded in the region after 1914, and the borders that were drawn then, are still seen as illegitimate by many of their own citizens and by their neighbors. The legitimacy of states in the region, writes US historian David Fromkin in "A Peace to End All Peace" -- the definitive work on the emergence of the modern Middle East -- comes either from tradition, from the power and roots of its founder or it doesn't come at all. Only two countries in the broader region -- Egypt and Iran -- possess such a long and uninterrupted history that their state integrity can hardly be shaken, even by a difficult crisis. Two others continue to stand on the foundation erected by their founders: The Turkish Republic of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, finally united by Abd al-Asis Ibn Saud in 1932. These four countries surround the core of the Middle East, which is made up of five countries and one seemingly eternal non-state. Fromkin calls them the "children of England and France:" Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Israel and Palestine. No group of countries, particularly given their small sizes, has seen so many wars, civil wars, overthrows and terrorist attacks in recent decades. To understand how this historical anomaly came to pass, several factors must be considered: the region's depressing history prior to World War I, the failure of the Arab elite and the continual intervention by the superpowers thereafter, the role of political Islam, the discovery of oil, the founding of Israel and the Cold War. A Peace to End All Peace Perhaps most important, however, was the wanton resolution made by two European colonial powers, Britain and France, that ordered this part of the world in accordance with their own needs and literally drew "A Line in the Sand," as the British historian James Barr titled his 2011 book about this episode. It is still unclear where the Arab Spring will take us and what will ultimately become of the Middle East. Apocalyptic scenarios are just as speculative as the hope that that the region will find its way to new and more stable borders and improved political structures. But where does this lack of legitimacy and absence of trust which poisons the Middle East come from? How did we arrive at this "Peace to End All Peace," as Fromkin's book is called? Istanbul, the summer of 1914: The capital of the Ottoman Empire seems half a world away from the sunny parlor in the Imperial Villa in Ischl where Emperor Franz Joseph I signed his manifesto "To My People" on July 28 and unleashed the world war by declaring war on Serbia. For centuries, the Ottoman Empire had controlled the southern and eastern Mediterranean, from Alexandretta to Arish, from the Maghreb to Suez. But Algeria and Tunisia fell to the French while the British nabbed Egypt; in 1911, the Italians established a bridgehead in Libya. By the eve of the Great War, the empire had shrunk to include, aside from today's Turkey, only the Middle East, present-day Iraq and a strip of land on the Arabian Peninsula stretching down to Yemen. It is these regions, south of present-day Turkey, that became the focus of the Middle Eastern battles in World War I. For 400 years, the area had wallowed deep in history's shadow. But in the early 20th century, it rapidly transformed into the arc of crisis we know today -- a place whose cities have become shorthand for generations of suffering: Basra, Baghdad, Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, Gaza and Suez. The protagonists of World War I were not fully aware yet that the Ottoman Empire's backyard was sitting atop the largest oil reserves in the world. Had they known, the fighting in the Middle East would likely have been even more violent and brutal than it was. At the time, however, the war aims of the two sides were determined by a world order that would dissolve within the next four years: Great Britain wanted to open a shipping route to its ally Russia and to secure its connection to India via the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf. The German Empire wanted to prevent exactly that. Shifting to the Periphery It remained unclear for a few days following Franz Joseph's declaration of war whether the Ottoman Empire would enter the war and, if it did, on which side. But shortly after the conflict began, Istanbul joined Berlin and Vienna. On August 2, the Germans and the Ottomans signed a secret pact; a short time later, two German warships -- the SMS Goeben and the SMS Breslau -- began steaming from the western Mediterranean toward Constantinople. Once they arrived, they were handed over to the -- officially still neutral -- Ottoman navy and renamed Yavuz and Midilli; the German crews remained, but donned the fez. With the arrival of the two battleships in the Golden Horn and the subsequent mining of the Dardanelles, the casus belli had been established: The Ottomans and the Germans had blocked the connection between Russia and its allies, the French and the British. Shortly thereafter, the Goeben, flying the Ottoman flag, bombarded Russian ports on the Black Sea. At the beginning of November, Russia, Great Britain and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire. In London, strategists began considering an attempt to break the Dardanelles blockade and take Constantinople. The result was the arrival of a British-French fleet at the southern tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula three months later. The attack, which began with a naval bombardment but soon included an all-out ground-troop invasion, failed dramatically. The Ottoman victory led to the resignation of Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill and provided the foundation for the rise of the man who would later found modern Turkey: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The bloody battle also became a national trauma for Australia and New Zealand, thousands of whose soldiers lost their lives at Gallipoli. The Allies' defeat at Gallipoli marked a strategic turning point in the war in the Middle East. Because their plan to strike at the heart of the Ottoman Empire failed, the Allies began focusing on its periphery -- targeting the comparatively weakly defended Arab provinces. It was a plan which corresponded with the Arab desire to throw off the yoke of Ottoman rule. In July 1915, Sir Henry McMahon, the High Commissioner of Egypt, began secret correspondence with Hussein Bin Ali, the Sharif of Hejaz and of the holy city of Mecca. He and his sons, Ali, Faisal and Abdullah -- together with the Damascus elite -- dreamed of founding an Arab nation state stretching from the Taurus Mountains in southeastern Turkey to the Red Sea and from the Mediterranean to the Iranian border. In October 1915, McMahon wrote Hussein a letter in which he declared Great Britain's willingness -- bar a few vague reservations -- "to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs within the territories in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sherif of Mecca." Part 2: Imperialistic Dealings

Friday, January 24, 2014 The World's Most Ancient Christian Communities Are Being Destroyed -and no one cares By Michael Brendan Dougherty | January 23, 2014 http://theweek.com/article/index/255403 The author of this article, Michael Brendan Dougherty, is senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is the founder and editor of The Slurve, a newsletter about baseball. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, ESPN Magazine, Slate and The American Conservative. Like many Coptic Christians in Egypt, Ayman Nabil Labib had a tattoo of the cross on his wrist. And like 17-year-old men everywhere, he could be assertive about his identity. But in 2011, after Egypt's revolution, that kind of assertiveness could mean trouble. Ayman's Arabic-language teacher told him to cover his tattoo in class. Instead of complying, the young man defiantly pulled out the cross that hung around his neck, making it visible. His teacher flew into a rage and began choking him, goading the young man's Muslim classmates by saying, "What are you going to do with him?" Ayman's classmates then beat him to death. False statements were given to police, and two boys were taken into custody only after Ayman's terror-stricken family spoke out. Ayman link: http://www.aina.org/news/20111030133621.htm Ayman's suffering is not an isolated case in Egypt or the region. The Arab Spring, and to a lesser extent the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, were touted as the catalysts for a major historic shift in the region. From Egypt to Syria to Iraq, the Middle East's dictatorships would be succeeded by liberal, democratic regimes. Years later, however, there is very little liberality or democracy to show. Indeed, what these upheavals have bequeathed to history is a baleful, and barely noticed legacy: The near-annihilation of the world's most ancient communities of Christians. The persecution of Christians throughout the Middle East, as well as the silence with which it has been met in the West, are the subject of journalist Ed West's Kindle Single "The Silence of Our Friends." http://www.amazon.com/The-Silence-Friends-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B00HDOF1DW?tag=viglink122733-20 The booklet is a brisk and chilling litany of horrors: Discriminatory laws, mass graves, unofficial pogroms, and exile. The persecuted are not just Coptic and Nestorian Christians who have relatively few co-communicants in the West, but Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants as well. Throughout the Middle East the pattern is the same. Christians are murdered in mob violence or by militant groups. Their churches are bombed, their shops destroyed, and their homes looted. Laws are passed making them second-class citizens, and the majority of them eventually leave. In Egypt, a rumor that a Muslim girl was dating a Christian boy led to the burning of multiple churches, and the imposition of a curfew on a local Christian population. Illiterate children were held in police custody for urinating in a trash heap, because an imam claimed that pages quoting the Koran were in the pile and had been desecrated. Again, the persecution resulted in Christian families leaving their homes behind. the rumor link: http://www.npr.org/2011/03/11/134440532/in-new-egypt-christians-face-old-discrimination polic custody link: http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Egypt,-two-Coptic-Orthodox-children-aged-9-and-10-risk-jail-on-blasphemy-charges-27271.html In Syria, the situation is even worse. In June 2013, a cluster of Christian villages was totally destroyed. Friar Pierbattista Pizzaballa reported that "of the 4,000 inhabitants of the village of Ghassanieh... no more than 10 people remain." report link: http://ncronline.org/news/global/shadow-war-targets-christians-syria Two Syrian bishops have been kidnapped by rebel groups. Militants expelled 90 percent of the Christians in the city of Homs. Patriarch Gregorios III of Antioch says that out of a population of 1.75 million, 450,000 Syrian Christians have simply fled their homes in fear. kidnapped link: http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2013/12/03/syrian-bishop-says-nuns-kidnapping-has-shocked-christians/ Antioch says link: http://www.acnuk.org/news.php/447/syria-uk-parliament-hears-patriarchs-peace-appeal In Iraq, the story is the same but more dramatic. According to West, between 2004 and 2011 the population of Chaldo-Assyrian Christians fell from over a million to as few as 150,000. In 2006, Isoh Majeed, who advocated the creation of a safe haven for Christians around Nineveh, was murdered in his home. The number of churches in Iraq has declined to just 57, from 300 before the invasion. The decline of Iraq's Christian population since the first Gulf War is roughly 90 percent, with most of the drop occurring since the 2003 invasion. murdered link: http://www.aramnahrin.org/English/Isoh_Majeed_Haday_22_11_2006.htm The U.S. and the U.K. bear some responsibility in this catastrophe, since they oversaw the creation of Iraq's postwar government and did little to protect minority faiths. West's book touches on the clueless and callous behavior of Western governments in these episodes. U.S. reconstruction aid to Iraq is distributed according to Iraqi laws that discriminate against Christian Iraqis. The U.S. pours billions of foreign aid into Egypt, and yet the Christians in that country are not allowed to build churches (or even so much as repair toilets in them) without explicit permission from the head of state, almost never granted. Last September, the U.S and Britain attempted to make their support of Syrian rebel groups explicit and overt, but at the same time some of these militias were executing a pogrom against Christians. explicit permission link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamayouni_Decree pogrom link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24051440 A Christian shopkeeper in Ma'loula summed it up in a quote to the BBC: "Tell the EU and the Americans that we sent you Saint Paul 2,000 years ago to take you from the darkness, and you sent us terrorists to kill us." In an email to The Week, Ed West says there are things America and its allies can and should do to aid persecuted Christians: "Western countries should make clear that our friendship, cooperation, aid, and help depends on: 1) Religious freedom, which includes the right to change or leave religions; 2) A secular law that treats all people the same. That was not the case in Mubarak's Egypt, which the U.S. helped to prop up with $500 million a year. That is not the case in Iraq, which under U.S. control instigated sharia into its constitution. That shouldn't be acceptable. In 2022, Qatar will host the World Cup, a country where death for apostasy is still on the statute books. Why aren't we all boycotting it?" The last request does put the plight of Middle Eastern Christians in global context. Western activists and media have focused considerable outrage at Russia's laws against "homosexual propaganda" in the lead-up to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. It would only seem fitting that Westerners would also protest (or at the very least notice) laws that punish people with death for converting to Christianity. And yet the Western world is largely ignorant of or untroubled by programmatic violence against Christians. Ed West, citing the French philosopher Regis Debray, distils the problem thusly: "The victims are 'too Christian' to excite the Left, and 'too foreign' to excite the Right." Church leaders outside the Middle East are afraid to speak out, partly because they fear precipitating more violence. (Seven churches were fire-bombed in Iraq after Pope Benedict XVI quoted an ancient criticism of Islam in an academic speech in Germany.) Oddly, unlike Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Russia, the U.S. and the U.K. are the only powers acting in the Middle East that do not take any special interest in the safety of those with whom they have a historical religious affinity. These are the lands in which Jesus' apostles and their disciples made some of the first Christian converts. In an interview, West pointed out that these communities "were Christian when our ancestors were worshipping trees and stones." Now they are in danger of imminent extinction. In 2013, Raphael I Sako, the Chaldean Patriarch of Baghdad, said the following at his installation homily, "Still the shadow of fear, anxiety, and death is hanging over our people." He warned: "If emigration continues, God forbid, there will be no more Christians in the Middle East. It will be no more than a distant memory." West's book is a sobering reminder that Western policy has helped shape this grim fate for Middle Eastern Christians — and Western silence allows it to continue.

if the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia have survived...then it would have been exporting oil & gas by now.. http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3WPJNJxm2GA/UuQjUdZNxZI/AAAAAAABEWg/MpK6gnAO4tY/s1600/Cyprusoil2.jpg Կիլիկիոյ Հայոց Թագաւորութիւն was located between modern Mersin & Iskenderun. http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-51oh4GiLBAQ/UuQjUdZFT5I/AAAAAAABEWc/afcJTrwUvDI/s1600/cyprus-israel-natural20gas_1.jpg

Christian persecution? No. Annihilation! 'We are faced with a potential extinction of the church' by Alyssa Farah WND EXCLUSIVE http://mobile.wnd.com/2014/01/christian-persecution-no-annihilation/#Mvw3EikszVWmSEca.99 WASHINGTON – The first delegation of Syrian Christian church leaders to visit the U.S. since civil war broke out in March 2011 spoke Monday at the Heritage Foundation, issuing a stunning warning that the nation’s Christian population could vanish. “Today we are faced with a potential extinction of the church,” Patrick Sookhdeo, chairman of the Westminster Institute, warned. “Not just in Syria. We’ve seen it in Iraq. The church could fall in Lebanon.” The panel discussion, “Marked for Destruction: The Plight of Syria’s Christians,” featured Syrian Christian leaders Rev. Adib Awad, the general secretary of the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon; H.E. Bishop Elias Toumeh, Orthodox bishop of Pyrgou-Syria; Rev. Riad Jarjour, former general secretary of the Middle East Council of Churches; H.E. Bishop Dionysius Jean Kawak of the Syrian Orthodox Church; Bishop Armash Nalbandian of the Armenian Church of Damascus, and Bishop Julian Dobbs. Dobbs said Syria “used to be one of the easiest places in the Arab world to be a Christian across the Middle East. “The church has existed there since biblical times,” he said. “Christians were respected by the Muslim majority and were able to practice their faith with little interference. But, this has largely changed since the civil war broke out.” He described the persecution Christian Syrians have faced since the conflict erupted, and he criticized the West for largely ignoring their plight. “Christians in their homelands have been attacked and invaded, houses have been ransacked, Christians have been kidnapped for ransom and brutally murdered,” Dobbs said. “Yet much of the Western World, the church, the media have remained silent about this situation.” According to reports, there were more than 1,200 Christian martyrs in Syria in 2013 alone, while tens of thousands have been displaced. Jarjour took to the podium to explain the plight of Christians still in Syria. “Our Christian community is a broken community; it’s a suffering community. We have thousands and thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) not in their homes, not knowing what to do,” he said. The delegation was hosted by the Westminster Institute and Barnabas Aid, a group that gives aid to oppressed Christians worldwide. Kawak spoke of the horrific risk church leaders face in Syria particularly. He said the kidnapping of 12 Orthodox nuns, bishops and a priest by Syrian rebels “instilled fear in the hearts of Christian leaders” in Syria. All speakers ultimately warned of the dangers of persecuted Christians fleeing Syria and leaving it as a nation with virtually no Christian population, drawing parallels to Iraq. Awad noted that prior to the Iraq war, the Christian population in Iraq was 5 percent of the population, with more than 1.5 million. Now, just a decade later, there are as few as 400,000. “Due to persecution, due to pressures, due to killings, we are all together less than 20 percent of the Syrian population,” Awad said. Adib commented on the title of the discussion, “Marked for Destruction,” saying: “We can accept being marked for destruction if it’s by our Lord. But we will not accept it if it is by terrorist, whether Saudis, or from Qatar or any other nation.” Sookhdeo urged the Western media to stop turning a blind eye to the plight of Christians in Syria. “We plead for your media to break the silence,” Sookhdeo said. “Why is it that the media of the Western world choose not the address what happens to the minorities? Whether it being Shiites or Sunnis or moderate Muslims or Christians that are being butchered?” The lecture coincided with United Nations-hosted peace talks on the conflict in Syria in Geneva. According to reports, the talks appeared to be in deadlock Monday. The talks in Geneva are being overseen by U.N. special envoy to Syria Lakdar Brahimi, who told reporters on Monday that the talks “haven’t produced much".

Azerbaijani textbook introduces Armenian freedom-fighter as Azerbaijani soldier 27.Jan.2014 http://www.tert.am/en/news/2014/01/27/Sargis-hacpanyan/ A few days ago, freedom-fighter (participant in the Nagorno-Karabakh war) Sargis Hatspanyan found out that his photo with an 81-year-old woman, Sheikha Khanum - which was taken after the liberation of Qarvachar in 1993 and published with Paruyr Sevak’s poem “Mother’s hands” – has been published in an Azerbaijani textbook, which introduces Sargis Hatspanyan as an Azerbaijani soldier. “Just a few days ago I found out that I was an Azerbaijani and Sheikha Khanum’s grandson. I learnt about it from an Azerbaijani girl four days ago. She bet an Armenian boy that I was a Turk [Azerbaijani]. The boy sent some links to her and she was astounded to see me speaking Armenian, Azerbaijani and French. She called their editorial office and told them, ‘why are you lying?’” The photo entitled ‘Old Azerbaijani woman and Armenian freedom-fighter’ was for the first time published by the Libération daily.

http://www.hayzinvor.am/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/45-8-1-12-300x185.jpg Azeri grandma to Armenia soldier: "we all know this is the country of Armenians" This Karvachar Azeri woman and her companions were lucky; not so for the Azeri population of Khojaly when the Armenians let them go toward the Azeri lines as that line was not too far but unfortunately the Azeri forces opened fire on them, either suspecting them to be Armenian soldiers disguised in civilian clothes, or from fear they made a mistake and in panic opened fire. According to Azeri sources, 613 civilians died, including 106 women and 83 children. Of course the Azeri falsely claim that it was the Armenians who opened fire on the civilians (something totally wrong-said in the whole Artsakh war, since its totally against Armenian character to do things like that). Azeri know the truth because those civilians were killed while approaching the Azeri battle lines with their back to the Armenian forces, all were killed from bullets coming unto their face, to their front and not to their back. This Muslim lie is very common, we see now Jihadists in Syria blowing up Muslim mosques and taking film while being blown up and distributing those films in Islamic countries to recruit other Jihadists to travel to Syria, they are saying see how muslim mosques are being destroyed by the Syrian government and we need you to come here to fight the government. During the Armenia genocide, some photos were taken by Turks of Armenians massacred in mass and then told those are Turks killed by Armenians. Even nowadays when a mass grave of bones are discovered in Turkey the official explanation is those are bones of Turks killed by Armenians in 1915. Its clear those sayers of lies belong to the father of lies and there is no true in them. ONE PHOTO’S STORY http://www.hayzinvor.am/en/17743.html In the Internet I paid attention to one photo: an old woman hugs a young man in a military uniform. In the bottom it was written: “Azeri grandma and Armenian fighter”. I sent this photo through the net and asked people to give me some information about this photo. Istanbul University teacher Alber Keshish reacted. He told me that the soldier is his classmate – Sargis Hatspanyan, Artsakh war participant. And now I talk to Sargis. -How was the photo made? -It was in April 1993, during Karvachar liberation. There were hundreds of peaceful inhabitants, men ran away leaving them helpless. We approached a group of women. One 80 years old woman asked me with reproach: “Why are you so late? Very soon the Armenians will enter the city. Our men said – we leave, we’ll send helicopters after you. They went leaving us here”. I understood that the woman took us for their people. “Armenians are already here”, – said I. I was responsible for the prisoners. All were instructed to be respectful to the population. We gathered all of them and told them that their life and honour were safe, and we were not against the peaceful population. In contrast to Azeri soldiers we don’t use weapon towards unarmed, we don’t humiliate them. There was an 81-year-old woman – Sheikha Khanum who was respected by everybody. She was a poet. I liked talking to her. She used to say: “This war is not the war of our two people, we like Armenians, we all know that this is the country of Armenians, there are Armenian graves everywhere, cross-stones, everywhere there are marks of Armenian culture”. And during this talk Zaven Khachikyan unnoticeably took our photo. -How old were you during that time? -30. After that the French newspaper «Liberation» publishes that photo and writes that the Azeri woman likes the Armenian-volunteer more than her son. They publish also an article where they quote Azeri prisoners’ words about the humane attitude of the Armenians. The next day the Turkish newspaper «Milliyet» writes that against tens of thousand peaceful inhabitants of Karvachar violence is being used, and they publish the same photo. Inscription says that the Azeri woman kisses her grandson (i.e. me) and says – go and take revenge from Armenians for your killed and humiliated relatives. In Paris one of my friends sees this newspaper, accidentally he reads also the article in the «Liberation», takes both newspapers and sends to the European Union as a striking example of Turkish falsity and slander.

GTech]: Hope and Opportunity for 2014January 27, 2014 GTech’s staff recently got together to ring in the new year. Executive Director Amalya Yeghoyan welcomed all new members, wishing them success, health and happiness for 2014. And on behalf of GTech she expressed her gratitude to FAR and to GTech’s other supporters for giving a hope and opportunity to the people of Gyumri. http://blog.farusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/GTech_Staff.jpg [GTech]: GTech Named Best Provider of IT Education in the CaucasusJanuary 9, 2014 GTech was recognized as the best provider of IT education in the Caucasus region during a recent conference on Information Technology and Cyber Security in Tbilisi. The event “Partnerships for Competitiveness, Innovation and Cyber Security,” aimed to establish and promote effective cooperation among public and private sectors, associations and other IT-related organizations in central and eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, with the ultimate goal of promoting competitiveness, innovation and security. The awards credited both government and private entities for their good work and practices and encouraged all to invest their time and energy in further development of the IT field in these regions. GTech staff also presented on GTech’s positive impact on economic development in the region, which has been made through its unique trainings and high quality education program.

Muslims Destroy 248 Christian Churches By Ted on January 24, 2014 By Theodore Shoebat There used to be 300 churches in Iraq, and now they are only 52, which means the Muslims have destroyed 248 churches in the country of Iraq, alone. While the modern minded people (who think they are intelligent), give seemingly pious objections against Russia’s anti-sodomite laws, they do not lift a finger against the real and blood oppression that are occurring every day in nations like Iraq and Syria. As one commentator has said: "The U.S. and U.K., which oversaw the transition of Iraq from a dictatorship to a democracy, did nothing to ensure the protection of Christian minorities there. Now, Christians face persecution and death, and most have fled ancient communities." We, the Shoebat Foundation, are lifting more than fingers. We have dedicated our lives to rescuing the persecuted saints. Also, please watch this video of Muslims in Kosovo destroying Serbian churches to the sublime singing of Pavle Aksentijevic (a favorite of ours). The video is at the link: http://shoebat.com/2014/01/24/muslims-destroy-248-christian-churches/

Dear Muslim member Koranist, thanks for your post and never mind member Arpa who likes to play the rabid dog, the watchdog in this forum, sniffing and attacking any new member, with bites and profanities, to see if they are a Turk or a sect member (sects to him are all others than his Armenian Apostolic church), he is old of age now and toothless so no need of fear but he gets mad if something none-Armenian or not related to Armenian nation is posted in this forum and correctly so because this forum is about all things Armenian, so if you do not have anything Armenian to discuss here then please do not post. The watchdog is apparently a mason because as masons he believes not in the name of Jesus and wants to change that name to the name of god of the masons. Here in the link below: http://visitbethelchurch.com/why-i-am-not-a-freemason Pastor Mike Hoggard created this video (Why I Am Not a Freemason) in response to popular request as a tool for witnessing to Freemasons. Just click to play in one hour video, it will open your eyes. And since you, dear Koranist, brought the subject of the Islamic law, kindly go to this link to expand on that subject and you would not need reading some excerpts that I quoted from that link articles, here... https://www.google.com/search?q=mohamad+did+not+ecsist&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=fflb "The scholarly insurgency in Islamic Studies challenging the traditional orthodoxy made its breakthrough about four decades ago, after an extended period of intellectual stagnation amongst traditionalists, in a classic example of a paradigm revolution. As Harald Motzki notes in his review of “Alternative Accounts of the Qur’an’s Formation” in The Cambridge Companion to the Qur’an (2006), there was very little development in Western scholarship concerning Islam until 1970 when some very important work emerged to challenge the accepted wisdom about the early history of the religion. A revolutionary paradigm had emerged suddenly to challenge the dominant one." https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2012/07-08/the-revisionist-case-that-muhammad-did-not-exist/ "Another scholar drawn into the revisionist camp was Gerd R. Puin, a German authority on ancient Koranic manuscripts. Puin was the head of a restoration project commissioned by the Yemeni government to examine and catalogue a vast hoard of Koranic and non-Koranic fragments discovered in Sana’a in 1972. Amongst the material was a palimpsest which appears to contain the oldest Koranic texts in existence. Significantly, the older of the texts can be radio-carbon-dated to no later than 660 AD. This was after the canonical Koran was supposedly settled, and yet it exhibits significant textual variations that suggest a process of formation of the Koran that differs markedly from the traditional account, and is especially challenging for Muslims who believe that the Koran is the eternal word of God and arrived in this world perfect and fully formed. Based on this and evidence derived from the other material, Puin and his associates concluded that the proto-Islamic religious movement must have been in constant flux in its early years and that the Koran is an amalgam of texts from various sources that were apparently not fully intellectually assimilated even at the time of Muhammad, and may date from at least a century before. In particular, Puin detected a Christian substrate in the material from which may be derived an entire “anti-history” of the origins of Islam. "Professor Suliman Bashear was a leading Arab scholar (Studies in Early Islamic Tradition, 2004) who was badly injured after being thrown out of a classroom window by fundamentalist students enraged by his revisionist argument that Islam evolved as a religion within the matrix of Judeo-Christian monotheistic thought that prevailed in the Middle East in Late Antiquity, rather than appearing abruptly as the result of a prophetic revelation. Professor Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd also ventured too far into this type of inquiry (Rethinking the Qur’an: Towards a Humanistic Hermeneutics, 2004). He was one of Egypt’s leading Koranic scholars and a very rare liberal Islam theologian who developed a humanistic form of Koranic hermeneutics that he used to argue that Islam could accommodate itself to modernity. Consequently, and despite his exemplary scholarly achievements, he was refused promotion at his university, declared an apostate from Islam, forcibly divorced from his wife, sentenced to death by Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and driven into exile. Mention might also be made of Professor Muhammad Sven Kalisch, a German convert to Islam who taught Muslim theology at the University of Munster, but saw his career and his faith evaporate when he announced that his research had convinced him that Muhammad never existed. https://www.google.com/search?q=mohamad+did+not+ecsist&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=fflb "Robert Spencer (a Jew) in his book: Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origins, builds on the work of earlier dissenting scholars, including Aloys Sprenger (1813–93), Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), Henri Lammens (1862–1937) and Joseph Schacht (1902–69), as well as more contemporary figures whose work is discussed below. His book also complements several recent sets of related essays and readings, including those edited by Karl-Heinz Ohlig and Gerd R. Puin on The Hidden Origins of Islam (2010), and by the pseudonymous Ibn Warraq on The Quest for the Historical Muhammad (2000), Which Koran? (2007), and Virgins? What Virgins? (2010). These have sought to raise the profile of the revisionist perspective and to challenge the rather inertial state of scholarship in this vital field. "Marshall Hodgson asserted in The Venture of Islam (1974), the revisionists offer a more prosaic scenario. As Warraq says: "Islam, far from being born fully fledged with a watertight creed, rites, rituals, holy places, shrines, and a holy scripture, was a late literary creation, as the early Arab warriors spilled out of the Hijaz [the Western region of Arabia containing Jeddah, Mecca and Medina] in dramatic fashion and encountered sophisticated civilizations—encounters that forced them to forge their own religious identity out of the already available materials, which were then reworked to fit into a mythical Hijazi framework." "This included a holy scripture to supplant those of the Jews and the Christians, and a prophetic figure to supersede Jesus Christ. The profound implications of this paradigm shift have been summed up by one leading proponent of the traditional position as follows: “If the hypothesis of Wansbrough and others in his group turns out to be true, it would serve to destroy the very basis of Islamic civilization” (Massimo Campanini, The Qur’an: The Basics, 2007). A Muslim is NOT free to leave their religion, they are binded and shackled hand and foot to their religion and are subject to death if they change their religion by their human relatives and not by God. The real God is one of freedom to those living on earth. Thereby you should know the true from the false. Jesus said: "...night is coming when no one can work to spread My message" John 9:4 and you see nowadays, after the Arab Spring, how Christians in the Middle East are being killed by the night in order to extinguish the Light of Jesus Christ. And particularly to us Armenians whose whose life and land was subjected to genocide by Muslims and we do not like to see an apologist attitude from muslims, we know and have details of what happened; so first go and study the Armenian Genocide.

Do "food" and the Bible mix? Apparently yes...read on: January 18, 2014 8 Ways to Live Well from Biblical Times http://refreshingnews99.blogspot.in/2014/01/8-ways-to-live-well-from-biblical-times.html Apples, grapes, olive oil, honey, onions, pomegranates, fish, and spices like ginger are considered super-foods and found throughout the Bible. Gain understanding and live well, according to God’s Word! The Olive Leaf The olive leaf oil was used in Biblical times to promote healing for cuts and used as an antiseptic. Nuts Walnuts, pistachios, and almonds can lower bad cholesterol, are full of protein, fiber, and can also maintain weight. “Then their father Israel said to them, “If it must be, then do this: Put some of the best products of the land in your bags and take them down to the man as a gift—a little balm and a little honey, some spices and myrrh, some pistachio nuts and almonds.” Genesis: 43:11 Spelt Spelt has more protein than conventional wheat, B2, copper, fiber, and is digested easier. Spelt can help prevent diabetes with its low glycemic index. “Take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt; put them in a storage jar and use them to make bread for yourself.” Ezekiel 4:9 Onions Onions improve vitamin C production, reduce inflammation, regulate blood sugar, and can prevent certain cancers. “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost—also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic.” Numbers 11:5 Vinegar Vinegar works well as an antiseptic, body cleanser, and has vitamins A, B1, B2, and B6. It could also boost cognitive function, and suppress the appetite. Look up vinegar in the Book of Ruth. Pomegranates Pomegranates can lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol, ward off cancer, and help people suffering from depression. Beans Beans lower cholesterol, reduce the risk of heart disease, and osteoporosis. The variety of beans seems endless such as lima, navy, pinto, white beans and kidney beans. Psalms 90 "Oh! Teach us to live well! Teach us to live wisely and well! Come back, GOD—how long do we have to wait?— and treat your servants with kindness for a change. Surprise us with love at daybreak; then we’ll skip and dance all the day long. Make up for the bad times with some good times; we’ve seen enough evil to last a lifetime. Let your servants see what you’re best at— the ways you rule and bless your children. And let the loveliness of our Lord, our God, rest on us, confirming the work that we do. Oh, yes. Affirm the work that we do!"