As I left Jerusalem on 7 October 2023 from an ill-fated research trip to the city’s Armenian Quarter, mainstream outlets CNN, USA Today, and the Associated Press followed social media pundits in sharing a viral video of Israeli General Nimrod Aloni taken into Hamas custody.Footnote ¹ In an accompanying clip, a man in fatigues and balaclava escorts a resigned, plainclothes official to, ostensibly, be paraded around in his underwear.

Given the devastating genocide Israel has inflicted on Palestinians, its invasion of Lebanon and Syria, and rampage across Iran, this video would now be unremarkable, if not for one salient detail: it is not quite real. As social media settled into mind-numbing atrocity porn and mainstream media its usual Zionist apologia, many outlets either scrubbed this coverage or quietly published retractions, correctly identifying the video as one issued by the Azerbaijan State Security Service several days earlier. Maddeningly, outlets again misidentified the captive, this time as an Azerbaijani “separatist” or “terrorist” when, in fact, the detainee was an ethnic Armenian from the erstwhile autonomous Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabagh).Footnote ² Effectively, this language echoed official Azerbaijani propaganda heralding its successful blockade, starvation, invasion, ethnic cleansing, and wholesale epistemic purging of a region inhabited by Armenians since time immemorial. The video glibly provided self-incriminating proof of Azerbaijan’s detention of Armenian political and military leaders as well as civilians—many still in captivity—while more than 100,000 co-ethnics fled their homeland for the relative safety of the Republic of Armenia.

Just prior, I had spent several days at a glitzy conference on Islamophobia organized by Georgetown University in Qatar, where a coauthor and I presented on states of exception consistently carved out for the Muslim allies of the United States, which belies Islamophobia as a coherent frame of analysis. Provocatively, and generously, our Lebanese moderator asked how we might map the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabagh via our analyses, which, of course, we must. Jet-lagged and reeling from the eviscerating conclusion of Azerbaijan’s multiyear campaign, I rattled off irrefutable but underreported facts: Already the strongest military in the region but perhaps more reliant on foreign aid than any other state in history, Israel had long leaned on Turkish diplomatic and economic support. In return, the Israeli lobby coordinated with its Turkish and Azerbaijani counterparts to deny the Armenian Genocide, including the destruction of Armenian life and history in Nakhichevan and Nagorno-Karabagh. Israel also offered a steady supply of “battle-tested” weapons and surveillance technologies perfected in its unrelenting war on Palestine to NATO, and to a litany of authoritarian regimes of which Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev was simply the most recent bad actor. In fact, Israel provided Azerbaijan with 70 percent of the weapons (especially drones) used to realize its specious claims on Nagorno-Karabagh and sovereign Armenian territory. Alongside the fact that Turkey and Saudi Arabia have enjoyed a century of US patronage, I explained that Azerbaijan had been similarly enfolded into American largesse through the War on Terror, such that all presidents since George W. Bush had armed Azerbaijan in contravention of Section 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act. The frequent alignment of the United States, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and much of the Gulf Cooperation Council in general, but particularly their conjoined support of Israel, production of “good” and “bad” Muslims, and suppression of internal others, underscores that “Islamophobia” alone has very little analytic precision.Footnote ³

As Israel accelerated its genocide, these symbioses became even more apparent. Israel’s war machine would have long ago ground to a halt without American, British, and German weapons and a steady flow of Azerbaijani and trafficked Russian oil, via Baku and Turkey. Although many observers took Turkish President Recep Erdoğan’s blustering about Muslim solidarity, neo-Ottomanism, and a supposed trade embargo seriously, fewer reported on Israeli and Turkish military advisers and exercises in Azerbaijan and Artsakh.Footnote ⁴ Even fewer noted unfailing trade among Israel, Turkey, and Azerbaijan, frequent Israeli military transports to Nagorno-Karabagh, and the widely discussed use of Azerbaijani territory and Artsakh as a platform for Israeli surveillance and attacks on Iran.Footnote ⁵ As Israeli settler attacks and hate crimes against Armenian Jerusalemites skyrocketed, Palestinian Armenians too faced the existential threat of dispossession in the city’s ancient Armenian Quarter—prompting Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi to glibly query whether the Armenians were Hamas.Footnote ⁶

These seemingly bizarre confluences were a fitting coda to another bittersweet trip that underscored the oppression and erasure of Armenians across the region. These telling confusions underscore the irony that Armenians (myself included) only seem to register as small blips in Western collective consciousness when we are dead, mistaken for some fungible other, or interpolated alongside more well-trodden concepts like Islamophobia or Palestinian liberation. These are dire failings in journalistic and scholarly practices detached from veracity, ethics, and the progressive politics that were once the bedrock of Leftist activism and scholarship. More broadly, these slippages, framings, and blind spots underscore the disparate ways Armenian, Palestinian, and other MENA lives have been understood and valued as the result of a combination of ignorance, capitulation to state propaganda, and faddish scholarship.

These are exactly the failings that inspired Mischa Geracoulis’s powerful Media Framing and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage: News Narratives about Artsakh and Gaza (Routledge, 2025). Media Framing and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage is an important and remarkable work, particularly so because Geracoulis produced the monograph even as devastation continued to unfold in real time. Revealing how journalism, often treated as inferior or, derisively, “popular,” in academic contexts, is a primary battleground for genocide recognition, Geracoulis’s book sounds an urgent call for media literacy and practices that halt the denial, erasure, and complicity underwriting cultural genocide.

Her core argument is as ambitious as it is forceful: mainstream media narratives not only fail to acknowledge genocide as it occurs, but are actively complicit in obscuring root causes, privileging perpetrators’ voices, and rendering colonized peoples (and their cultural patrimony) suspect, lamentable, and inevitable casualties of colonial violence. Drawing primarily on media studies, critical theory, and genocide studies, Geracoulis sheds light on the rhyming technologies of violence and discursive sleights of hand that have shamefully abetted the destruction of Armenian and Palestinian cultural heritage. Meticulously laying out her case through extensive rhetorical and geopolitical analyses, Geracoulis constructs a taxonomy of how media normalize and reproduce cultural violence, with lucid and accessible prose suitable for both introductory and advanced courses. She distinguishes several recurrent modes of distortion, such as “straight reporting” that relies on “both-sideism” to “balance” colonized and colonizer as coequal “conflicting parties” in the name of a “diversity of viewpoints” (p. 6). Writing that “Journalistic objectivity becomes a shield for state violence,” she further notes the dangers of “stenography journalism,” the parroting of official language without context or analysis (pp. 57, 23). Each of these practices, she argues, functions as a framing technology: a set of cursory yet effective representational tools that transform self-evident violence into debatable “controversies.”

Geracoulis extends this analysis into the algorithmic sphere, showing how automated content moderation and search optimization have institutionalized biases through censorship, shadow bans, de-ranking, and removals that frustrate factual reporting. Through this analysis, Geracoulis reconceives journalism not as a neutral witness or conscience, but rather an active participant in genocide. Echoing Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Geracoulis argues “Silence is not absence. It is an active mechanism of power” (p. 106); and “When media erase culture, they do not report—they participate” (p. 89).Footnote ⁷ She insists that we cannot hope to envision or build a better world without first understanding how injustice is actually produced—in this case, through authoritarian as well as democratic regimes’ media.

In a secondary argument, Geracoulis emphasizes that the wanton obliteration of irreplaceable cultural patrimony is a crucial but often overlooked element of genocide. Drawing on the destruction of churches, mosques, cemeteries, archives, and schools in Artsakh and Gaza, she argues that genocide must be understood not solely in terms of physical extermination, but as a war on memory, narrative, and cultural continuity. Geracoulis traces the destruction of monuments and sacred sites, the renaming of towns, and erasure of records, all tools perfected by Turkish, Israeli, and Azerbaijani states, to insist that the destruction of culture is not ancillary to genocide but constitutive of it. She writes, “Cultural heritage is not collateral—it is the target” (p. 78), and later adds, “Genocide is not only about eliminating bodies, but eliminating stories, histories, futures” (p. 84). Indeed, cultural genocide has long been neglected as a frame of analysis, because although Raphael Lemkin included the intentional destruction of cultural artifacts in the draft UN Convention on Genocide, powerful member states like the United States and United Kingdom actively resisted such language, believing (correctly) that they might be taken to task for the widespread destruction of indigenous peoples and cultures.

In the course of her useful elaboration of media strategies and failings, Geracoulis also provides exhaustive documentation of largely ignored connections between Artsakh and Gaza: from the Israeli state’s Hebraization of Palestinian toponyms and destruction of indigenous sites, and Azerbaijan’s demolition of 28,000 Armenian monuments in Nakhichevan alone, to concerted international bribery, blackmail, and public relations campaigns to curry favor. Similarly, she argues, “The framing of indigenous Armenians as ‘separatists’ [as well as terrorists] mirrors how Palestinian resistance is labeled ‘terrorism,’ occluding the long history of dispossession” (p. 38). And, despite multiple alarms sounded by the Lemkin Institute, global institutions such as UNESCO, once vocal against the devastation of cultural patrimony in Iraq and Syria, have remained conspicuously silent on the obliteration of Armenian sites. In a choice that can only be described as abhorrent, UNESCO selected Azeri First Vice President Mehriban Aliyeva to serve as a UNESCO goodwill ambassador from 2004 to 2022 and has repeatedly elected Azerbaijan to seats on its World Heritage Committee and Committee for Protection of Cultural Property, all while Azerbaijan has made concerted, systemic efforts to destroy Armenian heritage. In fact, just this year, the UNESCO Silk Roads Programme published an interactive map, developed by Azerbaijan, China, Germany, Kazakhstan, and Oman but since scrubbed, that simply erased Armenia entirely.Footnote ⁸

By foregrounding media’s role in equivocating on violence and selectively producing visibility, Geracoulis challenges readers to confront genocide not as a singular event, but as a persistent technology increasingly employed to effect the fantasy of homogenous ethno-nationalist states. Rather than temporally or regionally isolated phenomena, these tragedies occur within a historical continuum linking the Armenian, Assyrian, and Palestinian genocides, as well as the horrific German decimations of the Herero-Nama and European Jews. By challenging the dangerous notion of the Holocaust as a singular historical paradigm, one that Israel and its supporters have shamefully (and shamelessly) weaponized to act with impunity, Geracoulis joins others in decrying the regurgitated discourse of indigenous people as threats whose very existence invites their own destruction. This refusal to acknowledge the intertwined fates of Armenians, Palestinians, European Jews, and others within the same frame obscures the foundational traumas that have shaken the MENA region for the past hundred years.

Sadly, Geracoulis notes that brave scholars pleading for consciousness-raising, intervention, and solidarity have largely fallen on deaf ears, whether Christine Maranci’s exhortations in Time (2023) or Arshak Makichyan’s assertions on Democracy Now! that the world’s indifference to the ethnic cleansing of Armenians emboldened further atrocity in Gaza.Footnote ⁹ Similarly, a reem of articles in the Journal of Genocide Research, particularly those of Elyse Semerdjian, Ronald Grigor Suny, and Eldad Ben Aharon, countered such silences, just as two-time president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Armenian American scholar Henry Theriault, spearheaded that body’s belated statement characterizing Gaza as genocide.Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, these interventions come at a moment when, as Taner Akçam notes, the field of Genocide Studies faces an existential crisis, because its unwillingness to name, let alone condemn, Israel’s obviously genocidal actions risks undermining the entire field’s legitimacy.Footnote ¹¹

Although a full rehearsal of denialism is beyond the scope of Geracoulis’s work and this review, these dynamics beg the question: Why have journalists, academics, and intellectuals refused to stand in solidarity and been so easily conscripted into this epistemic denial when the shared genealogies of colonial violence in the Middle East are so self-evident to those living them?

In this provocation, I encourage scholars to take up how Geracoulis’s analyses of media and cultural genocide might “travel” to Middle East studies to confront our methodological nationalisms and imbrication within various nationalist projects. First, despite our professional and research bona fides, academics anywhere, but especially in the West, cannot help but be influenced by popular culture and media, particularly by absorbing assumptions in arenas beyond their ken. As scholars like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian argue, Western media has taught Americans and US-based academics both what to think and what to care about.Footnote ¹² These gravely deformed moral geographies in popular media, academia, and epistemology have frequently sustained the impunity of Turkey, Israel, and Azerbaijan, as well as those Gulf states in close collusion with Western governments. Moreover, government influence over and control of media in Russia, Turkey, Qatar, Azerbaijan, Israel, and increasingly the United States are now exported abroad via social media, a dramatic expansion of the reach of state propaganda. These states run massive public relations, bribery, and pressure campaigns, and, as Geracoulis notes, in November 2024, Azerbaijan “convinced” the Royal Film Commission of Jordan to withdraw its Oscar nomination for My Sweet Land, directed by Jordanian Armenian Sareen Hairabedian, because the film frankly depicted the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh.

Even within the academy proper, scholars would do well to heed Geracoulis’s diagnosis of the failure to link Artsakh and Gaza as a corrective to blind spots in our fields, particularly by linking the coeval formations and interconnected evolutions of Middle East and ethnic studies. Notably, some scholars have interrogated how the confluence of Cold War geopolitics, Third World solidarity, and people of color paradigms impacted the very objects and subjects of “Middle Eastern” scholarship. For example, scholars like Zachary Lockman and Timothy Mitchell have identified that the earliest decades of Middle East studies dealt only diffidently with the Ottomans, as well as multiple, once ubiquitous indigenous peoples—especially Armenians—who had been more fully hailed by Oriental and Near Eastern studies.Footnote ¹³ Even MESA’s mission and self-definition demonstrate a bias toward an Arab-Islamic world and empire in general, because these texts somewhat arbitrarily (and uncertainly) define MESA’s purview around the advent of Islam, which has always treated the Arab conquests as defining.

Read narrowly, this framing marginalizes pre-Islamic Semitic peoples, those Armenians, Greeks, Zoroastrians, Syriacs, Copts, Jews, and Kurds who resisted Arabization, Islamization (and later, Turkification), as well as important political formations like the Crusader states, Armenian Cilicia and melikdoms in the Caucasus, Byzantium, and other Turkic, Georgian, and Mongol polities that persisted into the modern era. In practice, these dynamics meant that although some of MESA’s earliest presidents could expound on Zionism as colonialism, as George Hourani did, related critiques of Turkish colonialism and genocide of Armenians and Assyrians were undermined by presidents like Kemal Karpat and Charles Issawi.Footnote ¹⁵

These occlusions are still routinely mourned in MESA conference sessions, and, more to the point, MESA’s complicity in minimizing or denying the Armenian Genocide runs deep: from commendations awarded to apologists like Stanford Shaw, Karpat, or Issawi;Footnote ¹⁶ MESA’s outrageous 1982 resolution defending Shaw’s denial of the Armenian Genocide;Footnote ¹⁷ and lack of reflexivity or transparency about the funding of certain states when MESA members have spilled much ink about funding from the United States, Israel, Iran, and various Arab states.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, we still need a fuller accounting of the prominence of Israel, Iran, and certain Arab states as strategic assets during the Cold War; the political agendas of prominent MESA members; and how other funding sources converged to constitute and influence Middle East studies.Footnote ¹⁹

More recently, a special roundtable in this very journal, organized by Sossie Kasbarian and Bedross Der Matossian, traced the marginalization of all things Armenian in Middle East studies, building on a 2010 roundtable in the same publication on the need to stop marginalizing Middle Eastern Christians.Footnote ²⁰ Based on a roundtable sponsored by the Society for Armenian Studies at the 2021 MESA annual meeting entitled “Fault Lines and Fractures in the 2020 Artsakh/Nagorno Karabakh War,” Der Matossian, Kasbarian, and scholars like Tamar Shirinian and Tsolin Nalbantian thoughtfully trace and rightfully condemn the inexplicable refusal of the MESA board even to issue a statement on Azerbaijan’s blockade and bombardment of Artsakh’s Armenians.Footnote ²¹

That said, MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom is to be applauded for rising to defend scholars like Keith Watenpaugh and Taner Akçam from Turkish threats, as is the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association for celebrating works more honestly examining the Armenian Genocide and diversity in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish state.Footnote ²² Similarly, recent synthetic works, such as those by Ussama Makdisi and Cyrus Schayegh, have better integrated late Ottoman history’s diversities and uncertainties, the Armenian Genocide, and competing nationalisms as foundational to the modern history of the region.Footnote ²³ Still, a tendency to treat “minorities” as ahistorically fixed, self-evident, demographic peripheries, rather than core, indigenous constituents of the social, political, and cultural fabric of the region means that Middle East studies has a long way to go. When these fields’ occlusions are routinely replicated across introductory courses on the modern Middle East, scholars fail to give students adequate tools to understand the region’s plurality, and how spaces like Gaza or Nagorno-Karabagh came to be through Byzantine, Arab, Turkic, Mongol, Persian, and Armenian histories.

In sum, Geracoulis demonstrates that the refusal to name genocide in Gaza or Artsakh reflects not a failure of evidence, but a shameful failure of will. Geracoulis’s work exposes the absurdity both of equivocating on clear and present cases of cultural genocide, and of discussing Gaza or Artsakh without the other. Insisting on these linkages neither distracts from nor dilutes the work of halting the genocide of Palestinians—it is a strategic sharpening. In this moment of intense crisis, rather than remain silent or insular, MESA’s leadership and membership must clearly and courageously speak truth to power should we hope to retain any ethics, credibility, scholarly integrity, or import. In this case, that means by formally, and finally, affirming the veracity of the Armenian Genocide and condemning the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh, as their afterlives continue to play out in the war now engulfing the region. Genocide has been and remains a key, interconnected tool of social engineering in the region, and we cannot hope to teach others about our worlds unless we firmly and clearly name this reality. I join Media Framing and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage in demanding that journalists, academics, and all readers of conscience, particularly in Middle East studies, simply do better.