Iranian-Americans are still coming to terms with the U.S. strikes against Iran over the weekend.<\/p>\n
What You Need To Know<\/p>\n
Iranian Americans are still coming to terms with the U.S. strikes against Iran over the weekend
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Some have been in contact with relatives who were on the ground in Iran when the U.S. bombed Iran and are currently dealing with the repercussions
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Protests against a war in Iran and demonstrations celebrating the death of Iran’s leader have broken out in recent days<\/p>\n
Cyrus McGoldrick, however, a Muslim, Iranian and Irish-American activist and author, says while many Americans were shocked by the U.S. strikes against Iran, his relatives on the ground in Iran were not.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy mother\u2019s entire family, almost, is in Iran still,\u201d McGoldrick said. \u201cMostly in the northern part of the country.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMany saw it coming and tried to leave Tehran ahead of the bombing,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n
\u201cBased on pressures on Donald Trump, pressures within the country, pressures from Israel, I think many Iranians thought that it was imminent,\u201d McGoldrick said.<\/p>\n
Protests against a war in Iran and demonstrations celebrating the death of Iran\u2019s leader have broken out in recent days, including one in Times Square on Sunday, which attorney Omid S. Irani attended.<\/p>\n
His parents are from Iran.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor us to make any decisions in western capitals and really anywhere else around the globe I think is inappropriate, and it really is irresponsible because it\u2019s the people of Iran that need to make that choice and it\u2019s the people of Iran that are going to be living with that decision,\u201d Irani said.<\/p>\n
He said many people of Iranian descent are not mourning the killing of Iran\u2019s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but are worried about civilian casualties of this conflict.<\/p>\n
\u201cI certainly did not mourn when Khamenei was, was killed,\u201d Etan Mabourakh, an organizing manager with the lobbying group National Iranian American Council, said. \u201cBut people are also terrified that their family members will be bombed. They saw an elementary school being bombed, they saw hospitals being bombed, they\u2019re seeing civilian infrastructure being bombed \u2014 and that\u2019s terrifying.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mabourakh also attended the Times Square protest on Sunday and said many Iranian Americans feel a war with Iran is not the answer to the regime change many want to see.<\/p>\n
\u201cIranians are desperate for positive change,\u201d Mabourakh said.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven those who may have hoped to see a change, there was always the hope that that change would be the result of internal reform,\u201d McGoldrick said.<\/p>\n
McGoldrick, a New Yorker from Turkey, believes anti-regime sentiments are overrepresented in Western media and Iranians\u2019 feelings are more nuanced.<\/p>\n
\u201cAyatollah Khamenei, in specific, he certainly had his enemies domestically, but he also had many supporters and even my own family was divided on this,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Iranian-Americans are still coming to terms with the U.S. strikes against Iran over the weekend. What You Need…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150329,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[5450,25,98,100,99,9,24,12,26,63,27,200],"class_list":["post-150328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-app-protests","tag-app-top-stories","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-news","tag-nia-clark","tag-nyc","tag-top-stories","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}