USAN CONDEMNS THE STATEMENT BY SAMANTHA POWER AGAINST SEN. CLINTON, COMMENDS SEN. OBAMA FOR FORCING DR. POWER’S RESIGNATION AS HIS ADVISOR

USAN CONDEMNS THE STATEMENT BY SAMANTHA POWER AGAINST SEN. CLINTON, COMMENDS SEN. OBAMA FOR FORCING DR. POWER’S RESIGNATION AS AN ADVISOR TO HIS CAMPAIGN

In a predictable turn of events, Ms. Samantha Power, who served as an advisor to the Presidential Campaign by Sen. Barack Obama, has resigned from that position today, on Friday, March 7, 2008, after a string of upsetting and ill-serving advice to Sen. Obama, and culminating in making several disparaging public comments against Sen. Hillary Clinton in her interview with The Scotsman.

In the interview, also published today, Ms. Power labeled Sen. Clinton as a “monster”, resorting to “deceit”, “stooping to anything”, and “you just look at her and think, ‘Ergh’”. Such disparaging remarks are consistent with the generally extremely biased worldview and intolerance toward anyone with a dissenting opinion concerning historic and contemporary events, that Ms. Power, a Pulitzer-prize winning author and Harvard professor, displayed over and over again.

Earlier in the year, on January 25, 2008, the USAN has protested <http://www.usazeris.org/usanpr3.htm> the highly deplorable and unfortunate statement posted on Sen. Obama’s campaign website, about matters concerning Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Armenia, specifically about crimes against humanity, aggression, occupation, ethnic cleansing, and embargoes. The statement was the result of Dr. Power’s ill-served advice, which completely overlooked geopolitical and historic facts in favor of pleasing the Armenian special interest lobby groups.

Ironically, despite making this unfortunate statement, which was presumably calculated to attract supposedly active Armenian-American voters, it failed its objectives completely, by showcasing the greatly exaggerated ability to influence voter turnout attributed to the Armenian-American lobby, while at the same time only galvanizing the Azerbaijani-American and Turkish-American voters to get out the vote and show their unity against such unacceptable and appalling remarks. As USAN’s February 6, 2008 press release <http://www.usazeris.org/usanpr5.htm> observed in the aftermath of the Super Tuesday voting: “[Obama] campaign actually suffered more decisive losses in the states with a large portion of Armenian-American voters, such as California, New Jersey, Massachusetts and, earlier, in Michigan, as well as the state of New York with a large Turkic-American population. USAN views this failure as a result of miscalculation on behalf of policy advisers for Senator Obama, who tend to place the limited agenda of ethnocentric political groups over the interests of the United States.”

Furthermore, USAN remarked, “On behalf of Azerbaijani- and Turkic-American voters, who were deeply offended by Senator Obama's remarks, USAN encourages his campaign to take a more sensitive stance properly reflecting the interests of American people and the position of the United States as a fair broker of the international conflicts.”

USAN welcomes the resignation of Dr. Power and hopes she will do-away from her bias mixed with insufficient knowledge of facts and selective approach in treating historic and contemporary events in the Caucasus and Anatolian regions. Likewise, USAN commends Sen. Obama and his campaign staff for making the right decision quickly and hopes he will become more open for correct assessment of issues relevant to the Turkic-American communities.

The U.S. Azeris Network (USAN) is a registered non-profit, non-partisan, non-sectarian genuine grassroots advocacy and voter education network that is facilitating political activism and efforts by the Azerbaijani-Americans and other Turkic-Americans and their associations, organizations, councils, conferences, and other formal, semi-formal and informal groups, on federal, state and local levels. Through the auspices of the U.S. Azeris Network, the voice of the Azerbaijani-Americans is becoming unified and strengthened. USAN is the first nationwide grassroots organization uniting Azerbaijani-Americans, conducting successful fundraisers and being created by the grassroots, for the grassroots.