Azerbaijan Is Ethnically Cleansing Armenian Christians — Where Is The Outrage?

NOTE: This article may include commentary reflecting the author’s position.
Armenia has a long history with Christianity.

Church tradition says that two of Jesus’s disciples, Thaddeus and Bartholomew traveled to Armenia to preach the Gospel in the first century.

In 301 A.D., Armenia became the first Christian nation.

Despite the two-thousand-year history of Christianity in the nation, let’s just say that Armenia’s barely hundred-year-old Muslim neighbor, Azerbaijan, isn’t exactly a fan.

The nations have been at war since late 2020.

This is — as is so common in the “Old World” — a land dispute that spans generations.

Here’s a map of the region:

Here’s a quick primer on the current conflict:

The Islamic scimitar is rattling with Christian blood again.
In late 2020, war broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Two months later, peace was achieved on condition that the ancient Christian nation cede a portion of its ancestral land to its Muslim neighbor, namely Artsakh, since the twentieth century known as “Nagorno-Karabakh.”
The peace bought by such appeasement has been fickle at best. Just yesterday, Azerbaijan launched yet another full-scale military attack on the Armenians of Artsakh — after having besieged and starved them for nine months—prompting yet another “genocide alert.”
The fact is, no amount of appeasement short of total capitulation will ever satisfy Armenia’s powerful Muslim neighbors, Azerbaijan and its “big brother,” Turkey.
Appropriating Artsakh has always been only the first step of a larger project. As Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev once openly proclaimed, “Yerevan [the capital of Armenia] is our historical land and we Azerbaijanis must return to these historical lands.” He has also referred to other ancient Armenian territories, including the Zangezur and Lake Sevan regions, as “our historic lands.” Taking over those territories “is our political and strategic goal,” Aliyev maintains, “and we need to work step-by-step to get closer to it.”
But as Tigran Balayan, spokesman for Armenia’s foreign ministry, responded: “The statement about territorial claims of the president of Azerbaijan, a state appearing on the political map of the world only 100 years ago … yet again demonstrates the racist character of the ruling regime in Baku.”
Source: Raymond Ibrahim

To add insult to injury, it seems that historic churches are being destroyed and mosques are being built in the Azerbaijani-occupied territory.

5/23/2024 Armenia/Azerbaijan (International Christian Concern) – Months after the fall of Artsakh, Azerbaijan destroyed the St. John the Baptist Church in the town of Shusi and the entire Karintak village.
Azerbaijan is also building a large mosque in Karintak, known as Dashalti in Azeri. Both the church and the village were in the Shushi province of Artsakh, which is now integrated into the Shusha province of Azerbaijan following the conquest of Artsakh in September 2023.
Azerbaijan had conquered the Shushi province during the 2020 conflict over Artsakh. In 2021, an Azerbaijani legislator posted to Twitter/X a photo of Christian clerics praying at the St. John the Baptist Church in Shushi, citing “the national cultural diversity existing in Azerbaijan” and “the atmosphere of ethnic and religious tolerance.” The fall of Artsakh in 2023, however, and the continuing destruction of Armenian Christian heritage proves otherwise.
Source: Persecution.org

And so, the thousand-year jihad against the oldest Christian nation in the world continues with barely a headline.

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Also included in this book, Psalms of War, are reproductions of the author’s original art from his Biblical Badass Series of oil paintings.

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