Azerbaijan is "a model of true affection" between Muslim majority, Christian, Jewish communities - State Department

State Department of Friday praised Azerbaijan's role as a "model of true affection" between religious communities, in a response to a question about Armenian diaspora's recent anti-semitic attacks on Israel due to the latter's support for Baku on Karabakh fighting , TURAN"s Washington correspondent reports.

"I have publicly said this and I’ll say it again:  Azerbaijan is in so many ways a model of interethnic and interfaith not only tolerance but true affection – true affection between its Muslim majority and its Christian community and its Jewish community," Elan S. Carr, US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat antisemitism, told TURAN's correspondent, in a teleconference at the State Department.

According to the Jewish Journal, a Los Angeles-based community weekly newspaper, the Armenian Youth Federation – a youth wing of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation – recently staged a protest against Israel in front of the Israeli Consulate in West LA.

The protest was intended to "intimidate and bully Israel and the Jewish community for supporting Azerbaijan," where protesters accused Israel and Jews of "being the same as Nazis".

Asked whether the State Department was concerned about anti-semitic attacks at home against Jews due to their support for Azerbaijan. special envoy Carr refrained from commenting on the particular incident.

Intead, he spoke about Azerbaijan's role as a model of "true affection between different ethnic and faith communities", adding that he was "particularly touched" by a story in which a Jewish community was either building or renovating a synagogue in the country when "as they ran out of money, the leader of the Muslim community, personally intervened and provided additional funding to renovate the synagogue."

"These kinds of stories have to be told. I said before that there’s a lot of good news in the world on this front. There really is a lot of good news throughout the world, including in the Middle East, including in the Muslim world, and including in Europe.  And so we really need to be telling these stories because they’re so important in providing inspiration for all of us and the kind of future we’d like to see – a future, again, not only of tolerance but of true affection between different ethnic and faith communities," he said, adding that he was "actually all set to come to Azerbaijan. "I had a very nice invitation to visit, and, of course, COVID-19 intervened and made all travel impossible."

The State Department last week held its first-ever conference on fighting online antisemitism by noting results from Israel’s tracking system: In the first eight months of 2020, 1.7 million messages on Twitter and YouTube were identified as promoting hatred toward Jews.

"Anti-Semitism has been rising throughout the world for more than a decade now largely because of its propagation online." Carr said. "We sought to address this global challenge while upholding America’s bedrock free speech protections." 

Last week, the 12 separate sessions of the conference were released to the public through the Department website and can now be viewed at www.state.gov/anti-semitism-conference.

Asked whether Washington has been better at countering anti-Semitic Russian propaganda, Carr told TURAN's correspondent that in general, "some malign actors, some governments exacerbate the crisis by fomenting anti-Semitism across the world for a number of reasons – destabilizing democracies, undermining their neighbors, and we’re seeing a number of countries do this."

"I think chief among them is the world’s chief state sponsor of both terrorism and anti-Semitism, and that is the Islamic Republic of Iran."And so I think it is very, very important to counter those governments that are exacerbating what is already a crisis," he added.

The deluge of anti-Semitism online and social media is "a bad enough without these malign governmental actors supporting this and propagating it further.  So that is a very important part of this," he said.

A.Raufoglu

Washington D.C.