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Karmel Melamed

Karmel Melamed is an award-winning journalist and commentator in Southern California covering Iran, Iranian Americans and Middle East affairs.

They do so over the regime’s objections and under the threat of imprisonment or death.
“Members of the Jewish community were the first to help us ... they realized the evil nature of the Iranian regime’s dictatorship,” said Gazelle Sharmahd, whose father faces a death sentence in Iran.
“The female-led uprising is the most consequential fight for human rights of our generation,” says activist Sam Yebri.
UCLA’s Aomar Boum has spent 22 years championing interfaith familiarity and amity
Maurice Motamed, a Jewish former member of Iran’s parliament who currently lives in Los Angeles, sparked controversy by meeting with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in New York.
“If the media of the world would support the opponents of the regime and show the true face of this criminal cult, they [Iranian repressive leaders] will be forced to retreat,” said Mitra Jashni, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Farashgard Foundation.
“The more we in the Iranian community get involved in government, the more integrated we become into the fabric of this country,” said attorney Makan Delrahim.
“[His] satisfaction in life, even to the last hours of his life, was to community work. He did it for what he believed was a noble cause,” said George Haroonian, a Los Angeles-based Iranian Jewish activist.
As a people who for millennia have faced unspeakable violence, hatred, injustice, pogroms and even genocide, we have always spoken out in support of those who were downtrodden and oppressed.
“We have lived with Islamists in Iran and know their psychology, their politics and the way they operate. Appeasing them will haunt you, and they consider these moves as temporary and a sign of weakness,” says George Haroonian, a Los Angeles-based Iranian Jewish activist.
Various Persian-language satellite news-media outlets in the United States and Europe had been giving extensive coverage his actions.
Commemorating the fact that their ancestors played a role in the elimination of European Jewry is a meaningless gesture unless it is connected to fighting like hell for live Jews—and that means confronting Iran.