Armenia, The Spanish Inquisition And The Modern-Day Pharaohs

What the Spaniards did to the Jewish and Muslim community later on served as a role model for modern day oppressors like Armenia, who sought to follow in the footsteps of the Spaniards by rooting Muslims and Jews out of their country, and subsequently destroying Muslim mosques and cemeteries inside of Armenia. Ulviyya Zulfugar, the representative of the Western Azerbaijani community, declared that Armenia turned into a mono-lithic country after the deportation of Azerbaijanis between 1988 and 1991: “More than 300,000 Azerbaijanis were forced to leave their homes and 216 Azerbaijanis were killed.”

In today’s Armenia, the Blue Mosque in Yerevan is the only mosque among 300 places of worship still intact in Armenia.  And according to Zulfugar, the Armenians present this Azerbaijani mosque today as Persian: “While the destruction of 300 mosques is a crime, it is also inhuman to present the heritage of one country as the heritage of another.”

Although in 1959 10,000 Jews lived in Armenia, less than 100 Jews live in Armenia today.  The widespread violence that accompanied the dissolution of the Soviet Union that included the ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijanis caused most of the Armenian Jewish community to leave.  According to the World Jewish Congress, there have been “manifestations of anti-Semitism” targeting the local Armenian Jewish community since the country has obtained independence.  The Holocaust Memorial in Yerevan has been desecrated on more than one occasion.

Thus, as Jewish people prepare to celebrate Passover, we should never forget how more modern oppressors have targeted the Jewish people and the plight of other nations like the Azerbaijanis, who were targeted merely because they were Azerbaijanis and non-Christian.  

Today, we should cry out that the victims obtain justice, for as Exodus 23:9 proclaims, “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, since you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”