Roozbeh Farahanipour sat within the blue-green glow of his Westwood restaurant’s 220-gallon saltwater aquarium and frightened about Iran, his voice accented in anguish.
It was Sunday morning, and the homeland he fled a quarter-century in the past had been bombed by the U.S. navy, escalating a battle that started 9 days earlier when Israel sprang a shock assault on its perennial Center Japanese foe.
“Anger and hate for the Iranian regime — I have it, but I try to manage it,” mentioned Farahanipour, proprietor of Delphi Greek restaurant and two different close by eateries. “I don’t think that anything good will come out of this. If, for any reason, the regime is going to be changed, either we’re facing another Iraq or Afghanistan, or we’re going to see the Balkans situation. Iran is going to be split in pieces.”
Farahanipour, 53, who’d been a political activist earlier than fleeing Iran, rattled off a collection of questions as a gray-colored shark made lazy loops within the tank behind him. What would possibly occur to civilians in Iran if the U.S. assault triggers a extra widespread struggle? What in regards to the potential lack of Israeli lives? And People, too? After wrestling with these weighty questions, he posed a extra workaday one: “What’s gonna be the gas price tomorrow?”
Such is life for Iranian People in Los Angeles, a diaspora that contains the most important Iranian neighborhood outdoors of Iran. Farahanipour, like different Iranian People interviewed by The Occasions, described “very mixed and complicated” emotions over the disaster in Iran, which escalated early Sunday when the U.S. struck three nuclear websites there, becoming a member of an Israeli effort to disrupt the nation’s quest for an atomic weapon.
About 141,000 Iranian People reside in L.A. County, in response to the Iranian Information Dashboard, which is hosted by the UCLA Middle for Close to Japanese Research. The epicenter of the neighborhood is Westwood, the place the neighborhood’s namesake boulevard is speckled with storefronts lined in Persian script.
“No thank you; [I’m] not really political,” one middle-aged visitor mentioned with a wry smile.
Kevan Harris, an affiliate professor of sociology at UCLA, mentioned that any U.S. involvement in a navy battle with Iran is freighted with which means, and has lengthy been the topic of hand-wringing.
“This scenario — which seems almost fantastical in a way — is something that has been in the imagination: the United States is going to bomb Iran,” mentioned Harris, an Iranian American who wrote the ebook “A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran.” “For 20 years, this is something that has been regularly discussed.”
Many emigres discover themselves torn between deep dislike and resentment of the authoritarian authorities they fled, and concern in regards to the relations left behind. Some in Westwood had been keen to speak.
A girl who requested to be recognized solely as Mary, out of security considerations for her household in Iran, mentioned she had emigrated 5 years in the past and was visiting L.A. together with her husband. The Chicago resident mentioned that the final week and a half have been very troublesome, partly as a result of many in her quick household, together with her dad and mom, nonetheless reside in Tehran. They lately left the town for an additional location in Iran as a result of ongoing assaults by Israeli forces.
“I am talking to them every day,” mentioned Mary, 35.
Standing outdoors Shater Abbass Bakery & Market — whose proprietor additionally has hung the pre-1979 Iranian flag — Mary mentioned she was “hopeful and worried.”
“It’s a very confusing feeling,” she mentioned. “Some people, they are happy because they don’t like the government — they hate the government.” Others, she mentioned, are upset over the destruction of property and dying of civilians.
Mary had been planning to go to her household in Iran in August, however that’s been scrambled. “Now, I don’t know what I should do,” she mentioned.
Not removed from Westwood, Beverly Hills’ distinguished Iranian Jewish neighborhood was making its presence felt. On Sunday morning, Shahram Javidnia, 62, walked close to a bunch of pro-Israel supporters who had been staging a procession headed towards the town’s giant “Beverly Hills” signal. Certainly one of them waved an Israeli flag.
“Now that they’re in a weak point,” he mentioned of Iran’s authoritarian management, “that’s the time maybe for the Iranians to rise up and try to do what is right.”
Javidnia got here to the U.S. in 1978 as a youngster, a yr earlier than revolution would result in the overthrow of the shah and institution of the Islamic Republic. He settled within the L.A. space, and hasn’t been again since. He mentioned returning is just not one thing he even thinks about.
“The place that I spent my childhood is not there anymore,” he mentioned. “It doesn’t exist.”
