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Hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan have reportedly flared up overnight, with reports of gun and mortar fire coming from the border. Both Azeri and Armenian defense ministries accused each other of provoking the escalation. Azerbaijan said Armenian troops opened fire 127 times over 24 hours along the border. They are using mortars and heavy machine guns, the statement released on Saturday said. Armenia said Azeri troops went on the offensive overnight and are using tanks artillery and military aircraft. Militias in the unrecognized Karabakh republic, the focal point of the conflict, claimed they shot down an Azeri helicopter gunboat. Azerbaijan...

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier insisted on Friday that calling Armenian massacres genocide risks belittling the Holocaust, after President Joachim Gauck broke a taboo by using the word on Thursday. Steinmeier stuck to his guns on Friday, arguing in an interview with Spiegel that “We in Germany need to be careful not to give justification to those who follow their own political agenda and say the Holocaust started before 1933.” […] Steinmeier has come in for fierce criticism this week, with one high profile politician comparing him to Germany’s First World War leadership. Both Gauck and Bundestag (German parliament) president Norbert...

Armenia, the first Christian nation in the world, and the first genocide in the 20th century Edited by Julio Severo Armenia was the first nation to become Christian during the Roman era. According to ancient tradition, Noah’s Ark rested on Mount Ararat in the Armenian Mountain Range. Armenia’s Coat of Arms has Mount Ararat with Noah's Ark on top. Armenian historian Movses Khorenatsi (410-490 AD) recounted the tradition that Noah’s son Japheth had a descendant named Hayk who shot an arrow in a battle near Lake Van c.2,500 BC killing Nimrod, builder of the Tower of Babel who was...

Lebanese Armenians wave a giant flag during a rally outside the Turkish embassy in the capital Beirut on April 23, 2016, to commemorate the 101th anniversary of the mass killings of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire in 1915. It is 101 years since Turkey’s Ottoman government began arresting minority community leaders and setting in motion a campaign of systematic slaughter that had left 1.5 million Christian Armenians dead by the early 1920s. Lebanon’s Armenians marked on Sunday the 101 anniversary of when some 250 Armenian intellectuals were rounded up by Ottoman Turks as the first step of the genocide against...

Armenian-American leaders have urged Obama each year to make good on a pledge he made as a candidate in 2008, when he said the U.S. government had a responsibility to recognize the attacks as genocide and vowed to do so if elected. Obama's failure to fulfill that pledge in his final annual statement on the massacre infuriated advocates and lawmakers who accused the president of outsourcing America's moral voice to Turkey ... It's a Turkish government veto over U.S. policy on the Armenian genocide," Aram Hamparian, head of the Armenian National Committee of America, said in an interview. "It's like...

ISLAM arose with remarkable speed and mystery. Patricia Crone’s well-stocked mind, clear prose and unflinching intellectual honesty were devoted to explaining why. She had little time for Islam’s own accounts of its origins: “debris” as far as historians were concerned, and hopelessly inconsistent. Far better, she reckoned, to fill the gap with contemporary sources and knowledge of other cultures, from messianic Maoris to Icelanders. That required both personal and intellectual bravery. The central beliefs of Islam, such as the way the Koran took shape, the life of Muhammad and Islam’s relations with other religions, are sensitive subjects. Outside scrutiny can...

This is a highly contentious issue for Turkey which has refused to recognise the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians as genocide. Ankara insists that between 250,000 and 500,000 Armenians as well as thousands of Turks were killed when they clashed during World War 1. Armenians say that their people died or were deported under Turkish Ottoman rule.

Turkey’s president has lashed out at country leaders who have recognized the killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide on the centenary of the massacres. Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday accused France, Germany, Russia and Austria—whose leaders or parliaments recently described the killings as genocide—of supporting “claims constructed on Armenian lies.” He accused the United States of siding with Armenia, although President Barack Obama stopped short of using the term in his annual message. …

ANKARA: Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened France with trade sanctions if it adopts a bill making it illegal to deny that the 1915-17 massacre of Armenians in Turkey was "genocide," a Turkish newspaper said Sunday. "Patience has its limits. We do not have hatred (toward France) but we will impose our sanctions," the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet quoted Turkey's prime miniter as saying at a summit of Muslim countries on the Indonesian island of Bali. French lawmakers were due to consider next week a bill from the opposition Socialists which would make anyone denying the existence of the "Armenian...

Earlier this week a news report unwittingly demonstrated how Turkey—once deemed the most “secularized” Muslim nation—is returning to its Islamic heritage, complete with animosity for the infidel West and dreams of the glory days of jihadi conquests.

Nearly everyone but the Obama administration has heard of the genocide of TurkeyÂ’s Armenian minority in which as many as 1.5 million Armenians were deliberately murdered by the Turkish government. While the Armenians were targeted for their ethnicity, what is widely overlooked is the fact that the Armenians were Orthodox Christians who inconveniently enjoyed conspicuous success in an Islamic nation. Now that the Turks have essentially finished off the Armenians, they have been hard at work eliminating the remaining Christians. On the eve of World War I, over 20% of Turkey was Christian. Now it is less than 2%. This...

Armenians in Turkey who opted to live as Muslims to avoid mistreatment are recovering their true identities in collective baptisms. The latest such baptism came in May when 12 Armenians from Dersim (Tunceli) recovered their identities. The saga of Armenians who were compelled to live as Muslims goes back to 1915 massacres. Armenian children were adopted by Muslim families, women married Muslim men and some families converted to Islam to save their lives. These Armenians, who for a century were forced to conceal their identities, are trying to return to their roots. This activity is more prevalent among Anatolian Armenians,...

-excerpt- As far as the Islamic Republic is concerned, anti-Americanism may be even more important than professing Islam. This is why Tehran has forged close ties with the handful of regimes across the globe that, each for a reason of its own, shares that visceral hatred of the US. -exceprt- In the dispute over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, Iran supported Christian Armenia against Shia Muslim Azerbaijan. The reason was Armenia's close ties with Russia, while Azerbaijan had become an ally of the US and established full diplomatic ties with Israel. What mattered for the Khomeinist regime was not Islam but...

Syria Deeply spoke with displaced Assyrian families who fled to Beirut after Jabhat al Nusra and ISIS arrived in their hometown of al-Hasakah. Many of them have relatives presently held hostage by ISIS.Beirut, Lebanon – “We are searching for the quickest way to go to Europe or Canada, maybe America,” said Jack Zayya, an Assyrian Christian refugee from Syria who arrived in Beirut two months ago. Standing in front of a local Assyrian church, he recalled the difficult journey from his hometown of al-Hasakah, situated in northeastern Syria and home to many Christians and Kurds.Before the war, Zayya led a...

According to reports from Syria and also the Turkish press, ISIS has bombed two churches in Syria, the St. Odisho Assyrian Church in Tel Tal and the St. Rita Tilel Armenian Church in Aleppo. The churches were bombed yesterday. Located on the Khabur river in the Hasaka province in Syria, Tel Tal is one of the 35 Assyrian villages that was attacked by ISIS on February 23. ISIS captured nearly 300 Assyrians in those attacks and subsequently released 23, all from the village of Tel Goran. The remaining Assyrians are still being held captive. The entire Assyrian population of these...

resident Obama will once again avoid using the word “genocide” at a ceremony to designed to memorialize more than a million Armenians murdered by the Ottaman Turks 100 years ago. During his 2008 campaign, then-Senator Obama repeatedly promised he would label the massacre a genocide as president. The LA Times reports the decision to avoid using the word genocide was revealed Tuesday after the White House held a meeting with Armenian groups. The ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the deaths of as many as 1.5 million people will be held this Friday. ... Rep. Adam Schiff of California has...

Pope Francis and Kim Kardashian made headlines recently by calling attention to what happened to the Armenian people 100 years ago. It was genocide at the hands of the Turks in what was then the Ottoman Empire, according to the pope, the reality show star and many historians. In Minnesota, the push to recognize the deaths of Armenians a century ago as the first genocide of the 20th century is being led by a small, new St. Paul church. In the past month, St. Sahag Armenian Church has put up billboards on Interstate 94 in St. Paul and Interstate 494...

Nearly 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, during World War I. Turks by and large do not believe mass killings were planned. CUNGUS, Turkey — The crumbling stone monastery, built into the hillside, stands as a forlorn monument to an awful past. So, too, does the decaying church on the other side of this mountain village. Farther out, a crevice is sliced into the earth, so deep that peering into it, one sees only blackness. Haunting for its history, it was there that a century ago, an untold number of Armenians were tossed...

The Marxist/Nazi/Ottoman/Islamist ISIS pogrom against Christianity continues to this day “Around the world, Christians are facing violence, persecution, brutality in a way we have not seen in generations.” – Rey Flores, “The Wanderer” The hypocritical “war on women” movement is deafly silent, no real effort to save the captives, and good men are doing nothing when faced daily with photographs of Christian hostages on their knees, clad in orange jumpsuits, about to be beheaded, when women and girls are kidnapped, raped, genitally mutilated by ISIS, and driven into a life of slavery as forced converts to Islam. One year later,...

Pope Francis, recently referring to horrific slaughter of Armenians a century ago, set off a diplomatic incident with Turkey when he used the word genocide.* Considering that the Vatican lobbies the Turkish Government for better treatment of its small Christian minority, this is a brave and perhaps costly decision. The controversy holds an unexpected lesson for American conservatives.Armenians call it Metz Yegern, or The Great Evil. In a level-headed article, an Armenian English-language daily wrote: “The killings are recognized as genocide by a number of countries around the world, but Turkey’s allies Italy and the United States have avoided...