What’s Behind All the Pro-Azerbaijan Articles?

 Nanore Barsoumian

Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev has opened another battlefront thousands of miles away from Baku, in the pages of local and national newspapers and news sites in the US. Much like the Syrian mercenaries Baku recruited and deployed with the help of Turkish defense contractors to target Armenians, Azerbaijan’s US-based lobbyists are at the forefront of an “information warfare” that costs millions of dollars annually. 

One important aspect of the work of these lobbyists is to place, disseminate and promote anti-Armenian narratives. Their tactics have evolved into a relentless smear campaign through US media outlets, painting Armenia as a close ally of Iran that undermines Western policies and Armenians as intolerant and anti-Semitic. At the same time, Azerbaijan is depicted as a beacon of tolerance, an ally of Israel and a champion of religious rights.

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Brenda Shaffer (1)

Notes by "Armeniaca"

 

We have posted this fine piece of "political art" posing as political science only because The New York Times allowed itself to forget that a "newspaper of record" must have facts checked before running something, including giving away op-ed space to a lobbyist for a foreign country. Therefore, we took that task upon ourselves. Neither the First Amendment nor a Ph.D. degree should validate freedom to blatant lies. This article was published three days after the same newspaper ran an important report on foreign influence over American think tanks on its front page, including the following comment: "The government of Azerbaijan hired a Washington-based public relations and lobbying firm in 2012 with the explicit purpose of expanding its relationships with think tanks here to try to reinforce public opinion in the United States and to make it clear that this Central Asian nation is an important security partner. It is a campaign that produced real results" (The New York Times, September 7, 2014). Is the purpose of this piece anything different?