The Armenian podcasters
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Closing an interview about Israeli lobbying contracts registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, John Kiriakou offered an anecdote from the week before as a measure of how the disparity looks from the outside.

The coincidence

He had been in Los Angeles for a series of podcasts. What struck him, he said, was that three of the podcasters he spoke with over the course of the week were not merely Armenian-American but naturalised American citizens from Armenia, and that, independently of one another, all they wanted to talk about was the Turks.

Their complaint, as he reports it, was a lobbying complaint rather than a historical one: that the Turks are getting away with murder, that the Turks do not register under FARA, that the Turks have all the best law firms and the best lobbying firms, and that against all that the Armenians do not stand a chance.

His answer

Kiriakou answered from his own second nationality. "Look, I'm a Greek citizen. I'm a dual US-Greek citizen," he told them. Greece has money and is western in orientation, he said, and it still cannot compete against the Turks.

The conclusion he drew for his interviewer followed from that. "Well, imagine having to compete against the Israelis," he said. "It's just not possible. There's not enough money, especially when the deck is so stacked that it's not just Israeli money we're talking about here. It's probably American taxpayer money as well. This is a tough uphill fight."

The use of the story

The anecdote functions as a scale comparison. Kiriakou is not adjudicating the Armenian grievance or the Greek one; he is using two diaspora lobbies that consider themselves outgunned to establish a floor, and then placing the contracts under discussion far above it.

See also

See also

- John Kiriakou
- AIPAC
- AIPAC and foreign-agent registration
