Arthur Derounian
[10] He was born to Boghos Derounian and Eliza Aprahamian in Dedeagach, Adrianople Vilayet, Ottoman Empire (today Alexandroupoli, Greece).
[citation needed] He died of a heart attack on April 23, 1991, while researching at the library of the American Jewish Committee on East 56th Street.
Deeply shocked, Derounian spent the rest of his life opposing the Dashnaks as well as other violent radicals - in particular, fighting fascism and all forms of racism.
[13] "Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America - The Amazing Revelation of How Axis Agents and Our Enemies Within Are Now Plotting To Destroy the United States" became a best seller when published in 1943.
[14] In a speech Representative Arthur G. Klein attempted to give in the US House in 1944 and which was printed in The Nation, Klein praises Derounian's book Under Cover: They (Americans) fail to understand, for instance, the reasons for and the character of the attack on John Roy Carlson, whose book, Under Cover has opened the eyes of so many to the existence of subversive propaganda and propagandists in our own midst.
Jeremiah Stokes had let his law practice slide and was devoting the major portion of his time to the writing of "patriotic" tracts.
In general, everywhere he visited in the Arab world, Carlson presented extreme anti-Jewish views, whereby he could hear from his conversation partners, be it Arab civilians and military men, Nazi-German mercenaries or the Grand Mufti's Bosnian volunteers, their extreme views and their aspiration to put an end to Jewish existence in Palestine.
[citation needed] In January 1948, Carlson arrived in London, where he presented himself as Charles L. Morey, "sales manager of the Homestead Farm Appliance Corporation, with offices and plant in St. John, Indiana" - an identity he had used already in 1945, in his correspondence with "every British hate-monger and anti-democrat" he read or heard about.
Not far from Be'er Sheba, Carlson saw for the first time a Jewish communal settlement – Kibbutz Beit Eshel - "contrasted sharply with the squalor of Arab villages".
On April 13, 1948, the Hadassah medical convoy massacre took place, after which Carlson says the Arabs claimed "they had been falsely informed of large concentrations of Jewish bands gathering near the Hospital and University."
[20] On their way back from Egypt to Palestine, the volunteer fighters' truck drove near the ruins of Kibbutz Kfar Darom, towards Gaza City.
Holding a small American flag he crossed just in time to cover the departure of Alan Cunningham, the High Commissioner for Palestine and Transjordan.
[24] He experienced the siege of the Jewish part of Jerusalem from within, and depicted the inhabitants' hardships, shortage, hunger, continuous bombardment and grief over the dead.
[28] Carlson's last visit in the Arab side of the conflict was to Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, which astonished him with its modernity in comparison to the simplicity of Amman and Damascus.
[30] His attempt to interview Fawzi al-Qawuqji failed, when Qawuqji decided to leave angrily after being asked about his lies about his victories and his sojourn in Germany.
[31] Carlson's journey amongst the Arabs ended when, through Nicosia, he reached Haifa on a ship along with 280 Jewish displaced persons, Holocaust survivors from the Cyprus internment camps.
How similar the tortured background of these two ancient peoples, how common their yearning for liberty ... How natural, then, for one of Armenian birth to find inspiration in Israel!
As I moved and dreamed from one end of Israel to the other, in my mind's eye I found myself substituting Armenian for Hebrew characters in the alphabet.
