For Iranian-Americans, a potential U.S. attack on the regime brings complex feelings
Nearly 20 years ago, Iranian-American comedian Maz Jobrani set out with other entertainers on an Axis of Evil comedy tour, hoping laughs could subvert stereotypes.
Being Iranian, he jokes, is like a Facebook relationship status: It's complicated.
Perhaps never more than in the past week, as Israeli munitions have pounded the country where he was born, where 90 million people live as inheritors of a proud history – but under the rule of an authoritarian Islamic regime.
'We love our land. We love our history and we don't want that destroyed. We don't want our people destroyed, either,' Mr. Jobrani said in an interview Friday. Born in Tehran, he knows how people have suffered under what he calls 'a brutal dictatorship.' His own cousins are among those who have fled the Iranian capital in recent days, seeking safety in more distant places.
Still, he has little hope that bombs and missiles will win their liberty from oppression.
'War has never helped solve anything – not in the 21st century,' he said. 'We haven't really come out of a war, especially in the Middle East, and gone: 'See? It worked!''
Roughly a half-million Iranian-Americans live in the U.S., a population whose largest concentration lies in Los Angeles – 'Tehrangeles' – but whose numbers reach across the country. Turmoil in the country of their birth has accustomed them to anxiety. 'I had a bit where I said, I just wish I was Swedish, life would be so much easier,' Mr. Jobrani said. 'Being Iranian, it's constant – they're always in the news and always the enemy.'
Analysis: Collapse of Iranian regime could have unintended consequences for U.S. and Israel
Yet many, like Mr. Jobrani, see little gain in using military force to attack the regime that has ruled the country since 1979. In the days before Israel launched strikes against Iran last week, the National Iranian American Council, or NIAC, commissioned a poll that showed 53 per cent of Iranian-Americans opposed U.S. military action against Iran, while nearly one in two said diplomacy represents the best path to preventing the country from obtaining nuclear weapons.
Only 22 per cent said military operations are the best hope to forestall a nuclear-armed Iran.
'The strong outcry in the Iranian community is, 'Don't get involved in this. Stop the war. Stop the bombing. Let the Iranian people breathe and give them a chance to chart their own future,' said Ryan Costello, a policy director with NIAC.
'The movement for democracy in Iran has to be one that's led by Iranians, not a hostile government.'
For others, however, the attacks on Iran have also brought a flourish of hope. In the NIAC poll, 36 per cent of respondents said they supported U.S. military action against Iran.
Now, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordering military strikes against the country where she lived until her late 20s, Farnoush Davis cannot suppress a feeling of hope.
'It's very exciting,' she said.
Opinion: Iranians deserve a path to freedom that is also free from violence
Ms. Davis grew up with little love for the ruling authorities who demanded she cover her head, made Western music illegal and lay U.S. flags on doorsteps for people to tread on. As a young woman, she rejected the hijab, stepped carefully around the flags, developed a fondness for Michael Jackson – and ultimately left for the U.S., where she now lives as a citizen in Idaho.
For people in Iran, the downpour of Israeli munitions, offers a fresh chance 'to take down the Islamic republic, get their lives back and go for freedom,' she believes. For nearly a half-century, she added every attempt to demand change from within has failed.
'We need to have some help from outside,' she said.
'I appreciate what Netanyahu is doing.'
For those whose lives are intertwined with Iran, the past two years have given even greater cause for fear. Professor Persis Karim, the Neda Nobari Chair of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University, said she can only imagine how terrified people in Iran must feel because they have watched Israel's military campaign in Gaza.
Analysis: Trump's two-week pause on Iran puts him at centre of world's biggest drama
She has family members in Tehran and spoke with a cousin after the first night of bombing. Her cousin lives with her elderly mother and didn't want to leave. 'Two days later, I got a text and she said: 'We're leaving,'' Prof. Karim said, speaking Friday from a hotel room in Los Angeles after a Thursday night screening of a film she co-directed and executive produced about Iranian-Americans.
Sadly, she says, few people attended, likely because they are worried, sick and anxious.
Prof. Karim said she is 'ashamed' of the U.S.'s behaviour and that of President Donald Trump especially. 'I think the whole thing is absolutely disgusting in terms of international leadership,' she said.
She also criticized Israel for suggesting it is time for Iranian people to rise up, calling it 'completely nonsense.'
'People cannot rise up and liberate themselves from an oppressive government when bombs are being lobbed at them, especially at civilians and civilian sites,' she said. 'I think what it's doing, it's going to harden the Islamic Republic.'
Mr. Jobrani, meanwhile, has found himself placing his hopes for a better Iranian future not in Mr. Netanyahu or Mr. Trump, but in others who he sees as more determined to seek peace – perhaps European diplomats, perhaps Chinese negotiators, perhaps even Russia's Vladimir Putin or U.S. conservatives like Steven Bannon and Tucker Carlson, who have publicly opposed U.S. entry into war with Iran.
'Maybe these other ideologues from his party can convince him not to escalate,' Mr. Jobrani said.
It is, he said, 'a surreal time and situation.'
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