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Why Iranian-Americans are cheering the war — and thanking Trump

Crowds filled Westwood Boulevard on the night the war with Iran began, on Feb. 28 — not in protest, but in celebration. 

Iranian-Americans danced in the streets of what locals call Tehrangeles, waving the red, white, and green Lion and Sun flag of pre-revolutionary Iran alongside American and Israeli flags, chanting for a free and secular Iran. 

The scene was, by most accounts, the most emotionally charged the neighborhood had seen since the community first took root here after 1979.

Almost everything about California’s Iranian diaspora runs back to 1979.

California is home to roughly 500,000 Iranians, making up half of the entire U.S. Iranian population, concentrated in West Los Angeles, Irvine, and the San Fernando Valley. 

The overwhelming majority came here, or were raised by people who came here, because the Islamic Republic made staying in Iran impossible. 

They were teachers who lost their jobs, businesspeople whose assets were seized, political dissidents who fled execution orders, religious minorities who faced systematic persecution. 

Their story, with variations, is the same story: They are here, because that regime is there.

This is the context that American policymakers and California’s progressive political establishment have consistently failed to absorb. 

For the Iranian community, the question of whether to support military action against the Iran regime is not a foreign policy concept. It is personal. And the answer, for most, has always been yes — if the alternative is another 47 years of the same.

Iranian-Americans are feeling a sense of gratitude, directed specifically at President........

© New York Post