BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 18. Anti-Semitism in Armenia has been gaining momentum over the past year. We have all witnessed numerous anti-Semitic incidents in this country. What is most disturbing is that most of these incidents have been completely ignored by Yerevan. Furthermore, the level of hatred and anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish sentiment in the Armenian social media segment has increased significantly recently, especially since the beginning of the Gaza conflict.
Armenia's only synagogue has been the target of three arson attacks since September 2023. Behind the last two arson cases stands the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), a recognized terrorist organization, which has threatened to attack rabbis and Israelis around the world. At the same time, local security services did nothing to protect the synagogue, with authorities claiming that ASALA no longer existed because it had allegedly been disbanded.
Another barbaric attack on a synagogue in Yerevan was carried out by this organization on October 4. Armenian terrorists said that "even more daring operations are coming soon."
"Jews are sworn enemies of the Armenian state and the Armenian people. This is a warning: our successful operation on October 3 in Yerevan is only the beginning. Every rabbi will be on our radar," said the message.
The latest attempt to set fire to the synagogue was carried out by some unidentified persons who arrived in Armenia from Russia and left the country on the same day. No evidence was provided and no attempt was made to catch the perpetrators, probably because ASALA leaders who fought against Israel in Lebanon in the 1980s alongside Palestinian terrorists are considered Armenian national heroes.
Anti-Semitism in Armenia is not limited to this. Vladimir Poghosyan, a former adviser to the chief of staff of Armenia's armed forces and assistant to the former chief national security adviser to the Armenian president, has expressed anti-Semitic views, saying he would support Hamas and Hezbollah in persecuting Jews. Poghosyan, a well-known "national security expert" in Armenia, said that he denies the Holocaust and added that Jews are destructive elements who have no right to stay on this Earth.
Earlier this year, Arkady Karapetyan, the so-called "first commander of the defense forces" of the former Armenian separatist regime in Karabakh, stated that Israel allegedly tested its weapons on Karabakh Armenians "by the hands of Azerbaijan". Many Armenian media outlets, both inside and outside Armenia, support this viewpoint. The English-language 'Armenian Weekly' claimed that Baku and Tel Aviv are "working together" on the so-called "ethnic cleansing" of Armenians in Karabakh.
This anti-Semitic environment that has developed in Armenia over the past year has been mentioned by Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Anti-Semitism in its official reports, with the latest one published on September 25, 2023.
In its document, the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs indicated that Armenians continue to use the Holocaust theme for propaganda purposes, comparing the mass murder of Jews during World War II to "the situation in Karabakh." Images of the liberation of Jewish prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp in 1945 are used in an attempt to draw comparisons between the lives of Jews during the Holocaust and the lives of Armenians in Karabakh. According to the document, "Armenian social media segment continue to accuse Israel and Jews of supporting Azerbaijan, while using anti-Semitic motives."
Earlier that month, the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs noted that when the prominent Jewish organization Rabbinical Center in Europe asked Armenian officials to stop using the Holocaust for propaganda purposes, "there was a noticeable increase in anti-Semitic rhetoric in Armenia's social media, which included calls for violent actions against Jews."
These are just a few examples of Armenian anti-Semitism over the past year. Many more cases have been documented by various professional media outlets, Israeli government agencies and think tanks such as the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy and the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
According to the Index of Anti-Semitism published by the Anti-Defamation League in May 2014, more than half (58 percent) of the adult population in Armenia had some form of anti-Semitic stereotypes. Meanwhile, 72 percent of respondents were certain or did not rule out that Jews have too much power in the business world; 68 percent believed that Jews have too much power in international financial markets; and the traditional accusations that Jews "control the U.S." and "control global affairs too much" were shared by more than half of respondents nationwide, while nearly 40 percent believed that "Jews are responsible for most of the world's wars."
According to a 2016 survey on anti-Semitism conducted in 18 European countries by the U.S.-based Pew Research Center, 32 percent of Armenian respondents would not be willing to accept Jews as fellow citizens - the highest percentage of any country studied in the survey. Only 18 percent of Armenian respondents were willing to accept Jews as members of their family.
Armenia has maintained hostile feelings toward other nations for decades, which is expressed not only in Turkophobia and Azerbaijanophobia, but also in the manifestation of anti-Semitic sentiments.
Despite the fact that a quarter of the XXI century has already passed, and the world community has begun to respect differences and take into account each other's points of view, neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic tendencies, which have historical roots, still persist in the mono-ethnic country of Armenia. As a result, Armenia today stands out in the world as the country with the highest number of anti-Semitic appeals.