‘It’s not an invasion, it’s a liberation’: LA’s Iranian community speaks out after US strikes Tehran | Los Angeles

A Ten years ago, when Iran signed a deal with the Obama administration and five other countries to give up its nuclear ambitions, Alaleh Kamran was staunchly left-wing and welcomed the prospect of peace in her homeland.

But today, as Israel and the United States launch punitive airstrikes against Iran, Iran finds itself in a radically different space.

“It’s not an invasion, it’s a liberation,” she says. “My support is 100% behind this.”

Kamran, a criminal lawyer in Los Angeles, home to the world’s largest Iranian community outside of Iran, was once at odds with more conservative members of the Iranian Jewish community here, who opposed the nuclear deal from the start.

Today, she agrees with them when they say that there can be no negotiation with an authoritarian government that they consider mere murderers. She and other community members the Guardian spoke with believe a majority of Iranians also agree, particularly in the wake of last month’s killing of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of street protesters seeking to overthrow the regime. As the US and Israeli bombings approached, some members of the protest movement openly appealed for help from the outside world.

“It’s unprecedented for a nation to take to the streets and ask a foreign country to bomb them so they can be freed,” Kamran said. “They have been incarcerated and dominated for the last 47 years by an occupation regime…It is a cancer, and Trump is doing what Trump needs to do. As a Jew, I stand behind him and behind Bibi. [Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu]. Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m supporting Bibi, but here I am.

The desire to see an increasingly ruthless Iranian regime collapse has intensified both in Iranian expatriate communities, like the one in Los Angeles, and in the country itself, Kamran and other community members said. In online forums, family chats and street protests, opinion has shifted toward a plan that not long ago would have seemed fanciful, perhaps even absurd: that Americans and Israelis must end the Islamic Republic once and for all — and that Reza Pahlavi, exiled crown prince and son of the Shah who was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, should take over as interim leader.

In the absence of polls, it is difficult to quantify the numbers or the level of support for Pahlavi. But Iranian experts, including staunch opponents of the war, say the dominant tenor of online community conversations — both at home and in the diaspora — is about forging unity at a time of peak despair. Even Iranians who in the past might have opposed an unprovoked attack on a sovereign state are quietly telling their friends that something must be done to stop the government from massacring its own people.

In mid-February, a demonstration in favor of outside military intervention drew thousands to downtown Los Angeles and featured extraordinary giant posters reading “Reza Pahlavi is our choice” and, beneath an image of Donald Trump: “We are locked and loaded.” Any memory of the hatred Iranians had for the Shah when he was in power or of his notoriety for widespread human rights violations, including his own violent crackdown on street protesters, seems to have been cast aside or forgotten.

A similar crowd gathered Saturday afternoon in Westwood, the heart of Los Angeles’ Iranian Jewish community, to celebrate the news that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed in an airstrike. They waved Pahlavi-era imperial flags in the street and from their cars, honking their horns and shouting “Javid Shah!” (Long live the king!)

“I see more and more people who don’t support the monarchy and don’t like Pahlavi running under this banner in the name of unity,” said Melody Mohebi, a Los Angeles-based expert on Iranian civil society with the pro-democracy group Democracy 2076. And the thinking, she reported, has become very clear: “The mentality now is that anyone who doesn’t support this single vision is now supporting the regime. »

Mohebi and others say the community has not forgotten that past U.S. military incursions to bring about regime change — in Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011 — did not go well, but those who support the war argue that this time will be different because, they say, Iranian society is more united and less likely to fragment. Like Kamran, people talk about the Iranian government as an occupying force – in part to justify the idea of ​​another outside force coming to overthrow it.

However, there is reason to question the extent of the unity campaign outside the confines of the Internet. Los Angeles’ Iranian community, or Tehrangeles as it is often called, is known for its multiple fault lines separating conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, Muslims, Jews and Baha’is. Divisions often appear within the same families, particularly between those born in Iran before the revolution and those born afterward in the United States. “Being Iranian-American is like a relationship status on Facebook – it’s complicated,” comedian Maz Jobrani recently joked.

Among Iranian Jews, political sentiment has certainly drifted to the right since the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the war in Gaza that followed. Kamran said she sees similarities between the “existential crisis” faced by Jews who endured massacre at the hands of Hamas — and who have since felt threatened by anti-Semitism — and Iranians who endured massacre at the hands of their government. But the political drift of the rest of the community is much less clear.

Shervin Malekzadeh, who teaches political science at Pitzer College in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles and has studied the Iranian protest movement, said he was skeptical of how Iranian opinion was being driven online. “It can be very toxic,” he said. “It is supported by a very vehement and often very hostile part of the population. »

If the plan were to rely on Trump, Netanyahu and Pahlavi, Malekzadeh saw it as a symptom of the people’s despair, not hope. “This is the nadir, the abyss of despair,” he said. “They think it’s better to be devoured by a magnificent lion than to be torn to pieces by a horde of foul wolves.”

Some organizations have spoken out forcefully against any external military action, even at the risk of being labeled pariahs for this reason. The Iranian American National Council, which has long advocated for human rights, said pursuing regime change would have “a high cost in blood, with no guarantee of a better future for Iranians…Ultimately, state collapse, civil war and an overhaul of authoritarian governance in Iran are far more likely to result from the bombings than from human rights and democracy.”

Mohebi said she is concerned about what she sees as a form of groupthink online, not only because it leaves little room for alternative approaches to opposing the regime in Tehran, but also because it bodes poorly for the prospects of democracy, even if the regime is toppled. “We are leaving an authoritarian system, but this authoritarian mindset has not left us,” she said. “If we don’t imagine something better, we leave the door open for another authoritarian regime to arrive, and this cycle will continue. »