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The Rev. Vazken Movsesian of the Glendale-based church group In His Shoes reports that the new movie "Darfur Now" has a passage featuring a postcard campaign the group did to stop the genocide in Darfur.
Last year, Movsesian went to Rwanda to chronicle the African country's 1994 genocide and to bring attention to mass killings in the Darfur region of Sudan.
Actor Lane Garrison was sent to the slammer today for a December 2006 crash that left an Armenian-American teen dead. Garrison, 27, was a star in the show "Prison Break," and now comes the inevitable punch line: He'll have three years and four months in prison to try to make life imitate art.
Garrison was driving his 2001 Land Rover when it hit a curb and struck a tree. Vahagn Setian, 17, of Beverly Hills was one of three teenage passengers in the car, and he was killed.
Here is a link to a page for the Vahagn Setian Charitable Foundation, which was created in his honor after his death. Vahagn played a wide variety of musical instruments, and the foundation is dedicated to supporting students in the performing arts.
With each passing day since the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution condemning the Armenian Genocide, the chances that it will be approved by a full House vote seem increasingly unlikely. Today comes a story in the New York Times highlighting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's slow backing away from the proposal. Radio Free Europe reports that Armenian Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian begins an official visit to Washington, D.C., today and will meet with Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Apparently the Armenian prime minister will not be meeting with President George W. Bush, who yesterday angered China by meeting with the Dalai Lama. The Times article mentions that the chief House sponsors of the Armenian Genocide resolution point out the inconsistency of risking poorer relations with China but not risking a formal recognition of the genocide.
And on a totally different topic, Ellen DeGeneres is calling for a truce in the dog fiasco that she started by crying on-camera during a taping of her show at NBC Studios in Burbank. The Daily News carried a story today about the death threats that the dog agency's organizer says she is receiving as a result of DeGeneres' on-air plea.
Glendale police Officer John Balian is back from Istanbul, Turkey, the land of his birth. The Armenian-American Police Department spokesman spent a breezy three week vacation in Turkey, driving around in a rented Fiat with his dad. Balian grew up speaking Turkish and Armenian, with a couple other languages mixed in there. With animosity against Turkey running high because of its continued denial of the Armenian Genocide, it's sometimes forgotten that Turkey is still home to a sizable Armenian population.
Balian was born in Turkey and spent the first 6 years of his life there, going to an Armenian school affiliated with a church. His early years were spent in a middle class suburb of Istanbul called Green Village, and his father worked as an auto parts wholesaler. He remembers that his grandmother lived in front of the Bosphorous, and he remembers going out in a wooden rowboat to fish.
Armenians in Turkey talk less about the genocide than Armenians living elsewhere, Balian said. Given the Turkish government's hostility to any discussion of the genocide, Armenians in Turkey tend to reserve their discussions about the genocide to conversations with friends. Economically and socially, Armenians have been able to thrive in Turkey. But there is still descrimination, especially in government employment.
"In Turkey, you can't even be a parking checker unless you're a Turk," Balian said.
While vacationing in Turkey, Balian was able to meet family members he had never seen before. He said his Turkish relatives are prospering, with one cousin having been featured in magazines for her work as an interior designer. And Turkey is becoming more modern and continuing to orient itself toward Europe, Balian said. On one street in a tony part of town, Balian counted eight Starbucks in a quarter mile stretch. People wear the latest styles, and the streets are not totally empty when the sun sets during Ramaddan. Balian would like to see Turkey be more open to the neighbor on its eastern border: Armenia.
"My (hope) is one day to see the borders of Armenia and Turkey open up, so both countries can prosper," he said.
Still, there are twice weekly flights between Yerevan, Armenia, and Istanbul, Turkey, and on a personal level citizens from the two countries are interacting, even if the two nations stand politically opposed.
John Stewart and "Senior Armeniologist" Aasif Mandvi gave a "Daily Show" treatment to the Armenian Genocide last night. The report titled "This Armenian Strife" started with John Stewart mocking Connie Rice's statement that the Armenian Genocide resolution would be "problematic for everything that we're trying to do in the Middle East." Asked Stewart: "Question: What are we trying to do in the Middle East?" According to Mandvi's report, America has different standards for allies like Turkey than for its enemies. Mandvi suggests that Germany could have renamed the Holocaust the Halfacaust if only Germany had not gone to war with the United States.
Anyway, the report went on for 5 minutes. Funny stuff.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena, has released a statement on the House Foreign Affairs Committee's approval yesterday of the resolution he authored that would recognize the Armenian Genocide. In a press release, his office also outlined the strong chances for the bill's passage:
The bipartisan measure currently has 226 cosponsors – more than a majority in the House and the most support an Armenian Genocide resolution has ever received. Both Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer have voiced support for the resolution.Here's Schiff's statement:
The committee vote "clears a major hurdle in moving this resolution forward, and I hope it will move swiftly to the House floor for a vote. America must speak candidly about the past not only to help heal the wounds of the survivors and the families of the victims, but to give the United States the moral authority it needs to take action against other genocides like that taking place today in Darfur," Schiff said.
Well, there's been a lot going on in the past 24 hours, almost too much to keep up with. First off, NBC announced it is moving the "Tonight Show" and a grip of other shows out of its Burbank facility and across the border to Universal City. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is anticipating that the move will pump $3 billion into Los Angeles' economic veins. Burbank officials are glum about the move, and a few of them told me that NBC didn't bother to inform them about it before yesterday's announcement, although the move has long been talked about and the announcement came as no big surprise. Our own David Kronke and Gregory J. Wilcox did a great job of covering the announcement.
And there's more big news, as the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday voted 27-21 to recognize the Armenian Genocide. When the same proposal was approved by the Foreign Affairs Committee in 2005, the Republican House leadership blocked it from getting to a full House vote. Now it looks like a bill that would recognize the Armenian Genocide is not only heading for a full House vote, it looks like it will pass. Check out our article on the vote here.
We have a couple nationwide stories out of Glendale today.
-- First on the list is that Glendale-based IHOP is eliminating trans fats from its fryer by the end of the year. What does that mean for anyone wanting to order a big stack of pancakes? Absolutely nothing, because they don't fry pancakes (unfortunately). But IHOP wants you to know that they're not just about pancakes anymore. They fry food with the best of them, and serve three solid meals a day, plus a pretty solid nighttime snack. The problem is that the hydrogenated vegetable oil they use for frying is just a little too solid, and it clogs up the heart. So they're switching to trans fat free vegetable oils to fry up shrimp, french fries and chicken tenders and whatever else they serve that's hot and crispy. Here's my story from the Daily News. IHOP is not the first restaurant to make the switch, and it comes after the city of New York banned trans fats in restaurants there.
-- The other story with national implications, although mainly to the Armenian-American business community, is that the Glendale-based Armenian American Chamber of Commerce is considering the formation of new chapters for Greater Los Angeles, Little Armenia (Hollywood), Las Vegas and Washington D.C. The organization's Central Committee will govern all the current and future chapters of the AACC. Check out the AACC's Web site here.
The Armenian National Committee's Glendale chapter has rolled out a new Web site. Taking a cue from that "Easy Button" commercial, they even have a button that you can click for justice. Who doesn't need one of those on their desk? There's also a great picture of Glendale with the Verdugo Mountains in the background, which begs the question: do the Verdugo Mountains really do a good stand-in for Mount Ararat? I've heard different things about this over the years.
For students out there, the Web site also has information on the ANC's internship program.
Belmont, Mass., has become the third town to sever ties with the Anti-Defamation League over the organization's stance on the Armenian Genocide, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Although it's much smaller than Glendale, Belmont apparently has a sizable Armenian-American population. The Belmont Human Rights Commission took the action in protest of the ADL's opposition to legislation in Congress that would recognize the genocide. Arlington and Watertown, two suburban Boston communities, have also severed ties with the ADL, according to the JTA article. Armenian-Americans have deep roots in Massachusetts, and it's no accident that the backlash against the ADL has been centered there, or that the controversy, which has now grown quite literally into an international incident, started in the Boston area.
This controversy broke out last month, and it shows no sign of letting up. As many readers no doubt know, it started when the ADL's director of the Boston branch was fired after puplicly breaking with the ADL's reluctance to call the genocide a genocide. He was subsequently reinstated. In the meantime, ADL National Director Abe Foxman issued a statement saying that the 1915-23 massacres of Armenians were "tatamount to genocide," but that Congress should not pass a resolution to that effect, effectively creating a situation where the ADL has been open to attack from Turks and Armenians at the same time, and has made friends in neither camp. As the JPA article points out, twelve Jewish organizations, including the Union for Reform Judaism, are supporting the legislation in Congress. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena, was also highly critical of Foxman.
In light of the controversy, here are a few articles from both the Jewish and Armenian perspective. The Forward broke it down along lines of realpolitik and morality, saying that now that Jews have a country in Israel, it comes with the territory that moral positions have to be tempered with more material considerations. The Armenian Weekly of Watertown, Mass., had an open letter to Foxman from Newton Human Rights Commission member Michael Mensoian, who laments that the "ADL for whatever reason preferred not to seize the moment."
As long as we're on the subject, why not check out the ADL statement that started the firestorm. Harut Sassounian, publisher of The California Courier, an Armenian-American publication, has a response. I couldn't find the California Courier online, so here is a version of the article from the Western Diocese of the Armenian Church. The article also gives a good blow-by-blow of how the controversy developed.
And locally, the Jewish Journal has had a number of opinion pieces about the controversy. UCLA professor David Myers wrote that the ADL should have gone farther, saying that Jews have a responsibility to "act against ethnic cleansing or genocide, whether committed by friend or foe." The paper carried a less argumentative essay from David Harris, executive director of the influential American Jewish Committee, who raises the interesting question of what would happen if Saudi Arabia or Iran sought to make "denial of the Holocaust a condition of doing business." My former colleague, Brad Greenberg, now writes for the paper and runs the God Blog. Scroll down and find an article Greenberg wrote about the genocide back when he was with the Daily News.
via City of Glendale:
RE: Scheduled Outage on Tuesday, August 7th
GWP has notified customers in the addresses stated below of a scheduled outage for Tuesday, August 7th between 8 pm to 11 pm. The outage is necessary to restore the service configuration in this area from an event in 2005. Customers don’t need to call to report the outage. If outage lasts later than 11:00 p.m. customers should call 818-548-2011
· Burchett: 500 block
· Patterson: 500-700 blocks
· Fairmont: 600-700 block
· Chester: 600 block
WHO: GLENDALE WATER & POWER
WHAT: SCHEDULED OUTAGE TO RESTORE SERVICE CONFIGURATION
Denialist -- a word that could get you run out of Glendale. Hoagland's nomination -- an object of scorn for the ANCA was withdrawn today.
via U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena, links by me:
Washington, D.C. – Today, Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA) expressed his support for the White House’s withdrawal of the nomination of Richard E. Hoagland’s to be the next U.S. Ambassador to Armenia. Mr. Hoagland had been nominated to replace Ambassador John Evans who was pushed to retire from his post by the Bush Administration. Congressman Schiff and many of his Congressional colleagues believe Ambassador Evans was recalled for his comments made in February of 2005 in which he publicly recognized the Armenian Genocide.“The President was right to withdraw Mr. Hoagland’s nomination,” Schiff said. “During his confirmation hearings, Mr. Hoagland continued to deny that the massacre of a million and a half Armenians between 1915 and 1923 was genocide, thereby compounding the injury done to the Armenian people and, especially, the few remaining survivors of the first genocide of the Twentieth Century. I hope that the President will soon nominate a new ambassador who will be more forthcoming in discussing the Armenian Genocide”
Here's more of the release -- and just so you know the score, Adam Schiff is no denialist...
On March 21, at an Appropriations hearing before the Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs, Schiff pressed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on her opposition to recognizing the Armenian Genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923. In his pointed questioning, Schiff repeatedly asked the Secretary of State if she believed that the murder of 1.5 million Armenians could be characterized as anything other than a genocide. The Secretary did not directly respond.
Three-story Targets are all nice and good, but for Echo Park blogger Hexdous, it's all about Armenian beer at the Galleria food court.
The real story about the Glendale Galleria is the food court. Not talking about Pollo Campero here, I am talking about the fact that you can buy beer in the food court. What a concept, I know - but I don’t think most malls sell beer - do they?Anyways, the International Grill sells kebabs, but they also have a fridge full of Erebuni beer from Armenia. So go there, knock back a few and then buy a bunch of stuff in the Apple store.
According to brewer Kotayk's Web site -- "It’s harmony in strength and flavour makes Erebuni the beer of choice."
i-blog.
"In gaining 218 cosponsors today, we have demonstrated that a majority of the House strongly supports recognizing the facts of the Armenian Genocide,” said Congressman Adam Schiff. “While there are still survivors left, we feel a great sense of urgency in calling attention to the attempted murder of an entire people. Our failure to acknowledge these dark chapters of history prevents us from taking more effective action against ongoing genocides, like Darfur.”“The Affirmation of the U.S. Record on the Armenian Genocide” resolution (H. Res. 106) calls on the President to "ensure that the foreign policy of the United States reflects appropriate understanding" of the 'Armenian Genocide' and to “accurately characterize the systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1,500,000 Armenians as genocide.”
The final chapter in that LATimes editor killing an Armenian Genocide story flap from April that got all the Armenian American activists out of the woodwork to denouce the paper -- LAObserved reports that Times Managing Editor Doug Frantz, who spiked Times scribe (and Armenian American) Mark Arax's genocide story, has resigned.
Apparently, the now-former Number Two in the Times newsroom was expected to walk even before all the ruckus started a few months back. When the flap was at its worst, critics were branding Frantz (once a correspondent in Turkey) and his paper with the "D" word -- denailist -- as in "I deny the Armenian Genocide ever happened, which makes me a denialist."
*Update 4:49 p.m. -- Frantz is heading back to Istanbul as the Wall Street Journal's Middle East bureau chief. LAObserved
And that's the Majesty Of Rock! The Mystery of Roll!
This SUNDAY-SUNDAY-SUNDAY! LIVE at the GLENDALE CIVIC AUDITORIUM! It's the ARMENIAN ROCK FESTIVAL GLENDALE 2007!!!!!
Where RAWK and a 1600-year-old alphabet meet!!!!!!!
Via 29th district U.S. Rep Adam Schiff --
Resolution Recognizing Armenian Genocide Hits 200 CosponsorsWashington, D.C. – Today, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) announced that the resolution recognizing and commemorating the Armenian Genocide has garnered more than 200 cosponsors – the most it has ever amassed. Rep. Schiff introduced the resolution in January along with Reps. Pallone, Knollenberg, and Radanovich.
“Two-hundred cosponsors is an important milestone,” said Congressman Adam Schiff. “This overwhelming support for the resolution is evidence that Members of Congress and their constituents believe that recognizing the Armenian Genocide, which claimed more than a million and a half lives, is a moral imperative.”
“The Affirmation of the U.S. Record on the Armenian Genocide” resolution (H. Res. 106) calls on the President to “ensure that the foreign policy of the United States reflects appropriate understanding” of the “Armenian Genocide” and to “accurately characterize the systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1,500,000 Armenians as genocide.”
It appears the flap between the Times and its senior Armenian American reporter Mark Arax, whose story about the Armenian Genocide was spiked by an editor and caused weeks of rancor in the community, has been settled behind closed doors...LAObserved, plus folo today.
Meanwhile, not a peep yet from the Armenian activists...
Internet Explorer ate my post! Let's start over...
Oppressed in their native Ukraine, Konstantin and Mayya Grigoryan came to the United States a dozen years ago in search of the American dream.They didn't speak English, struggled to pay the bills and relied on family and friends to make ends meet. Eventually they found jobs and began to acquire wealth, opening a restaurant, starting a string of medical clinics and finally buying a $661,500 home in a gated community in Altadena.
But this American dream was built on a crooked foundation, authorities say. Indicted by a federal grand jury in 2004, the couple was convicted of leading a Russian-Armenian organized crime ring that paid kickbacks to doctors, recruiters and patients and defrauded the U.S. government out of $20 million over five years.
His spiral notebook of rap lyrics depicts McGhee as a 21st century American psychopath, devoid of conscience, who used the Atwater Village area as an urban killing field.In the words of Andy Teague, the now-retired LAPD detective who tracked him, "It's his high, and he does it for kicks."
"Here I come last chance to run," McGhee writes in one set of lyrics. "Killer with a gun out to have some fun/ In my dreams I hear screams/ Pleasure I feel is so obscene."
McGhee, after all, is believed to have killed one young man - 16-year-old Ryan "Huero" Gonzales in 2000 - simply because he thought Atwater Village wasn't big enough for two people with the same nickname.
It is the kind of violent rampage for which McGhee came to be called in his neighborhood "the Monster of Atwater." Some cops even compared his murderous nature to that of Charles Manson.
And finally, one of Glendale's blingy-est residents, rapper The Game, was arrested late Friday after LAPD searched his home in the hills for three hours. He was booked for making criminal threats, then bailed out for $50,000 Saturday morning. Here's YouTube video of KABC7's report, with The Game himself mugging for the cameras.Fruit topping with your museli...
In the Mayor’s letter, he states that “[T]he Turkish Consul General of Los Angeles recently sent me, as gifts, two books denying the Armenian Genocide. [The Turkish Consul General] also sent a letter protesting my support of House Resolution 106 and my request to Speaker Nancy Pelosi to bring the Resolution to a vote as soon as possible.“I would like to donate the books to the [ANCA] so that your organization can study them and ensure that any attempts to diminish the gravity of the Armenian Genocide are met with factual retorts."
And finally in today's boy band news -- former 'N Sync star Lance Bass turned gas pump attendant in Burbank Thursday morning as Star 98.7's morning intern. He apparently lost a bet when boybandmate Joey Fatone had a mediocre showing.Good morning ...
The Armenian American community is trying to keep the Times editor spiking reporter's Armenian Genocide story alive. The Western Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church, based in Burbank, is organizing members to press for the resignation of Times Assistant Manager Editor Douglas Frantz. via LAObserved
Meanwhile, the Amerian American media are still at it: Harut Sassounian of the California Courier rebuts Times Editor Jim O'Shea's and other Times memos addressing the issue.
Continue reading "Rumble to Remove Times Editor in Armenian Genocide Flap Still Simmering" »
Happy reading ...
Another day, another leaked memo to LAObserved about the whole Times-Arax-Armenian Genocide flap -- this time from Mark Arax, the Armenian-American senior staff writer at the center of this mess.
And how could another day go by without more on the Times-spiking-Mark-Arax's-Armenian-Genocide-story-community-outrage hulabaloo?
Frantz was a longtime correspondent based in Istanbul for both The New York Times and the L.A. Times. As Sassounian noted, Frantz is scheduled to be back in Istanbul next month to moderate a panel for the International Press Institute’s World Congress that is titled, “Turkey: Sharing the Democratic Experience.” Among the panelists is Andrew Mango, who Sassounian describes as a “notorious genocide denialist.”And then there’s the matter of Frantz’s coverage of the Armenian genocide while at The New York Times. In January 2001 the paper ran a correction on Frantz's reporting, for downplaying the genocide. A month later, the Armenian National Committee of America put out an action alert again accusing Frantz of downplaying the genocide and casting it as merely an Armenian allegation. The paper never ran a second correction. Frantz joined the L.A. Times as a reporter in Istanbul, brought on by his friend, then-managing editor Dean Baquet, who left the paper in spectacular fashion late last year and then rejoined The New York Times.
Excerpt from the O'Shea memo:
First of all, the allegation that the story was killed is not true. Doug Frantz did place a hold on the story about a pending congressional resolution in which the Congress would recognize as genocide the massive deaths of Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turks. The editorial policy of this paper is to recognize the Armenian genocide as a historical fact, although the Turkish government does not.
Continue reading "Times Editors Respond to Arax-Genocide Flap" »
Larry Mantle of KPCC's Airtalk discussed the issue this morning with guest Harut Sassounian, publisher of the California Courier, who broke the story, reported earlier by LA Observed.
And here's another take on the whole affair from USA Armenian Life Magazine's Appo Jabarian -- scheduled to be published in Friday's edition. Excerpts:
In recent years, the Los Angeles Times officially adopted a journalistically accurate editorial policy regarding the veracity of the Armenian Genocide. Readers welcomed Times’ highly commendable editorial position. In fact, the Times illustrated how much it values its professional integrity. Over the next few years, the common expectation that Times will no longer question the veracity of the genocide, metamorphosed into a sigh of relief. But alas, that sigh of relief turned out to be a false sense of security when a very disturbing development emerged only recently.
Continue reading "More on the Times-Arax-Armenian Genocide Flap" »
Two more items:
Here's an extended interview with the 96-year-old Rev. Dulgarian conducted yesterday afternoon. Click here for the Daily News story on the 92nd anniversary of the Armenain Genocide.
The video also is available in a higher-quality stream, along with other genocide remembrance coverage at the Daily News Web site
Update 8:40 p.m. -- Jason interviews local Armenians on remembrance day.
LA Observed has this item on a brou-ha-ha between the Times and Harout Sassouian, publisher of California Courier -- an Armenian American paper -- and noted genocide activist. Apparently, Times editors have blocked publication of an Armenian genocide story by a staff writer of Armenian descent because of an alleged bias. Whoa.
KPFK is doing special coverage today about the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. The station aired a special edition of "Uprising" earlier, and will have another special at 4 p.m., hosted by Serge Tankian, the lead singer of the rock band System of a Down, whose documentary, "Screamers," pushes to have the genocide acknowledged across Europe and the U.S. Our own reporter, Brad Greenberg, wrote earlier today about a conservative Encino synagogue that has begun pushing for Jewish recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
To listen to KPFK's report, click here.
I was informed that the station's audio archives were down earlier, but listeners can download audio from the archives later by clicking here.
Today, Armenians around the world remember the 1.5 million victims of the Armenian genocide.
"The garbage wagon - all the bodies just piled up - the blood was flowing for three days," Dulgarian, 96, said Monday as he recounted memories of a massacre of Armenians in Izmir in 1922. The city on Turkey's Aegean coast, then held by Greeks, was set ablaze by invading Turks.
More ...
Just in time for lunch -- the Times digs into the mysterious Armenian Tahini cookie. Excerpt:
They were tan domes with a tight spiral pattern on top, making them look a bit like snail shells lying on their sides. The pastry had a distinctive taste, more wholesome than cookie dough, followed by a little blast of richness from that spiral, which turned out to be a filling of sesame tahini. It tasted like peanut butter without peanut butter's funky edge.In other words, these were cookies we could eat a lot of, and we proceeded to do so. But not before I saved one or two to explore their mystery.
There are plenty of pictures, a few recipes and even a list of the top 10 Armenian bakeries in SoCal -- definitely a clipper.
Some deep thoughts to digest with your coffee...
More to come...