Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 26
By Fikret Dolukhanov – Trend:
The four California state elected officials, illegally visiting the Armenian-occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, are performing as what Vladimir Lenin infamously called “useful fools” or “useful idiots”, Raoul Lowery Contreras, an American political scientist, said in his article titled “Opinion: Do California Legislators Support Militarism & Terrorism?” published in The Daily Caller.
Contreras said that assuming the American officials didn’t pay for the trip themselves, they help spreading Armenian corruption in California’s state capital.
“The most significant feature of modern Armenia is its continual loss of population as Armenians leave for Russia or Los Angeles in order to escape pervasive poverty… The second massive feature is political corruption as evidenced by wide-spread criminal charges being pressed by the new government of Armenia. Unfortunately, Armenian corruption has spread out from Yerevan to Los Angeles and, it appears, to California’s capital, Sacramento,” the author says.
According to Contreras, the worst is that State Senator Anthony Portantino thumbed his nose at official and long-standing bi-partisan United States foreign policy by undermining its Caucasus-region policy.
“The United States recognizes the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Republic of Armenia. The United States does not recognize an occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region as an independent state as it is proclaimed by occupying foreign Armenian forces,” Contreras underlined.
He reminded that no country in the world, including Armenia, officially recognizes the occupational regime in Nagorno-Karabakh.
“Portantino didn’t just visit Armenia; he left Armenia and illegally crossed into the internationally recognized sovereign territory of Azerbaijan without a visa from its government. Just like the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan et al, Azerbaijan requires any visitor to have an official visa to visit its territory,” the author said.
Contreras noted that Portantino has done this twice before and, like previous American politicians, he has been banned from visiting Azerbaijan.
“Hosted and “taken care of” by ANCA (Armenian National Committee of America) — Armenia’s political arm and “lobby” in the United States — does Portantino know about or care about the corruption in Armenia that paid for his junket? Or about the state-directed terrorism Armenia supports against its next door neighbor?” the author wrote.
He emphasized that Portantino’s previous visits to Armenia and the occupied territories in Azerbaijan were organized by corrupt government of former Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, who was not only a wartime leader of Armenian forces when they invaded Azerbaijan in the early 1990, but was also guilty of war crimes committed by his forces in the massacre at Khojaly (town in Azerbaijan) in February 1992.
The author concluded his article by wondering, whether support for a country that favors massive terrorism and illegal military occupations and aggression the United States opposes should define American elected officials in the California Legislature in Sacramento?
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Follow the author on Twitter: @FDolukhanov