ANCA protests Azerbaijani Ambassador’s anti-Armenian remark at AIPAC conference

The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), giving voice to the Armenian American community’s growing alarm over anti-Armenian tirades by Azerbaijani leaders and diplomats, officially registered a protest with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) regarding remarks made by Azerbaijan’s Ambassador to the United States Elin Suleymanov, at the organization’s recently concluded annual conference.

According to news reports, Azerbaijani Ambassador Suleymanov, during a breakout session at the AIPAC Policy conference titled “New Allies: Israel and the Caucasus Region,” threatened supporters of Israel not to “fall under the influence of pro-Armenian lobby groups.”

In the March 7th ANCA letter, Executive Director Aram Hamparian explained that: “Strengthening the relationship between the United States and Israel need not involve support for dictatorial regimes.  Nor should supporting Israel require providing a platform for those, like Ambassador Suleymanov, who engage in the very sort of hateful, conspiratorial rants that have, for far too long, been used to demonize Israel and her supporters worldwide.”

Hamparian specifically asked AIPAC to “reevaluate the moral and practical dimensions of your organization’s association with Azerbaijan’s war-mongering President, Ilham Aliyev, a dictator who, echoing the venomous Holocaust-era rants of Adolf Hitler against Jews, has announced openly that, “all the Armenians of the world” are his enemies.”  He added that Aliyev, by saying that “Armenia as a country is of no value… it is actually a colony, an outpost run from abroad, a territory artificially created on ancient Azerbaijani lands,” was “attacking Armenia’s very right to exist in language chillingly similar to those who seek to destroy Israel.”