Los Angeles City Councilman Adrin Nazarian, who was born in Iran, shared his thoughts on the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran Saturday, agreeing with the need for regime change but lamenting that the Trump administration didn\u2019t wait for political and economic pressure to prompt the change more organically.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no question about the need for the regime to change. This regime has kept Iranians in the dark for the last 50 years,\u201d Nazarian told City News Service in an interview Saturday afternoon.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust to provide some context, my mother and I fled in 1981 and my father (much later). It took my family six or seven years to finally be reunited in Los Angeles,\u201d he continued. \u201cMany folks who went through that experience harbor a great deal of resentment. So there\u2019s no question (the prospect of regime change) brings people great joy. \u201cBut that being said, when you look at it from the perspective of the Iranian public, millions of people, since \u201978, \u201979 when their revolution was in full swing, there\u2019s been continuous hardship and death.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nazarian stressed that for the first 10 years of the regime, Iran fought a brutal war with neighboring Iraq, and said \u201cSince then, there\u2019s been one uprising or revolution after another, and each one has been violently quelled by this regime.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you were born in Iran in the 1970s, all you\u2019ve witnessed over the course of a lifetime has been one devastating war after another. It\u2019s a difficult circumstance of living, raising a family \u2026 and I really feel for the Iranian people for having gone through that, because Iranians are a very peaceful-natured people,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
While he wants the current regime of Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei \u2014 who was killed in the U.S.\/Israel strikes \u2014 deposed, Nazarian said Saturday\u2019s military action wasn\u2019t the best way to go about it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would have hoped it would have been more surgical,\u201d he told CNS. \u201cI would have preferred us to continue putting economic and political pressure on Iran so that there would be an internal implosion, rather than putting our people in harm\u2019s way. \u2026 and potentially creating another generation of people who hate Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nazarian said he doesn\u2019t have much contact with anyone in Iran these days.<\/p>\n
Asked if the City Council might issue a resolution on the matter in the coming days, he sounded skeptical.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is a resolution in the city of Los Angeles going to do except to make a handful of people happy that something was said?\u201d<\/p>\n
Nazarian serves the council\u2019s Second District, representing the eastern San Fernando Valley and parts of the Crescenta Valley. The 52-year-old Democrat previously served in the state Assembly from 2012-22.<\/p>\n
The large-scale strikes were carried out early Saturday, hitting the capital city of Tehran and several other cities. Khamenei\u2019s death was reported by Israel and multiple U.S. and international news outlets. He had been Iran\u2019s supreme leader since 1989, making him the longest-serving head of state in the Middle East. He was previously president of Iran from 1981-89.<\/p>\n
Iranian officials said one strike killed dozens of people at a girls school.<\/p>\n
Iran launched a counteroffensive, attacking Israel and U.S. military bases located in allied Arab nations across the region, including in the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq and Jordan. Many of the missiles launched at Israel were intercepted by that country\u2019s air defense system.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe United States military is undertaking a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests,\u201d President Donald Trump said in a message to the nation Saturday. \u201cWe are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n
The president accused Iran of attempting to rebuild its nuclear program after the U.S. carried out a massive attack on it last summer that Trump said at the time had left the program \u201ccompletely and totally obliterated.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Iranian regime seeks to kill. The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties. That often happens in war, but we\u2019re doing this not for now. We\u2019re doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission,\u201d Trump said Saturday.<\/p>\n
Southland Democrats condemned the Trump administration\u2019s attack, calling it an illegal action taken without authorization from Congress.<\/p>\n
Demonstrations were expected Saturday afternoon in downtown Los Angeles and near the Federal Building on Wilshire Boulevard in the Westwood area, which is home to a large Iranian-American community and has been the site of multiple weekend demonstrations recently in support of Iranians protest against their government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Los Angeles City Councilman Adrin Nazarian, who was born in Iran, shared his thoughts on the U.S. and…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":344486,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5123],"tags":[266614,8991,1582,276,48495,256556,2961,224,5337,42463,111893,49537,9795],"class_list":["post-623579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-adrin","tag-attack","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-councilman","tag-iranian","tag-la","tag-los-angeles","tag-losangeles","tag-native","tag-nazarian","tag-shares","tag-thoughts"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116151473044134640","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=623579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/344486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}