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Israeli diplomat Lenny Ben-David: Armenians massacred hundreds of thousands of Muslims and thousands of Jews

06 September 2007 16:51 (UTC +04:00)

In his article â€œTurkey and Armenia: What Jews should doâ€ published in THE JERUSALEM POST the Israeli diplomat said there are reports on massacres of hundreds of thousands of Muslims and thousands of Jews by Armenians, but it is still unspoken.
â€œIsrael’s government and Jews in the United States must be careful when treading through the minefield of Armenian claims against Turkey. Jewish leaders in Armenia reported that they have heard local claims that Jews organized the 1915 massacres of Armenians.
There are accounts of Armenian massacres, between 1914 and 1920, of 2.5 million of Armenia’s Muslim population.
Recently, Mountain Jews in Azerbaijan requested assistance in building a monument to 3,000 Azeri Jews killed by Armenians in 1918 in a pogrom about which little is known. AND WITHIN our own lifetime - just some 15 years ago - Armenian troops massacred hundreds of Azeri Muslims. This from Newsweek, March 16, 1992:
"Azerbaijan was a charnel house again last week: a place of mourning refugees and dozens of mangled corpses dragged to a makeshift morgue behind the mosque. They were ordinary Azerbaijani men, women and children of Khojaly, a small village in war-torn Nagorno-Karabakh overrun by Armenian forces on Feb. 25-26. Many were killed at close range while trying to flee; some had their faces mutilated, others were scalped.",â€ the article says.
Ben-David stressed in the end that the US Congress and the Jewish community should encourage historians on both sides to objectively examine what took place. /APA/