By DENA BUNIS

The Orange County Register

WASHINGTON – Shadi and Melissa Zolgalal were seven and eight-years old when their parents sent them to the United States rather than
have them mixed up in their fight to overthrow the Iranian regime.

But the two young women flew from Orange County to the nation’s Capitol Sunday and today stood in the hot sun across from the White
House and demand that the U.S. government continue to protect their family and thousands of other Iranian exiles living in Camp Ashraf in
Iraq.

“We want to make sure they’re going to be protected and not turned over to Iran because we know then they’ll all be executed,” Shadi Zolgalal,
24, said. She held a red, white and green Persian flag in her hand while Melissa, 23, waved a royal blue and yellow flag with the symbol of the
Mujahedeen Khalq, known as MEK. The MEK fought against the Shah of Iran and its members have been living in exile after the Islamic
fundamentalists began their rule of the country.

An estimated 3,500 dissidents live in Ashraf, which had been an armed camp until 2003 when in exchange for a promise of U.S. military
protection, the MEK disarmed. Recently there have been news reports in Iraq that the U.S. government will turn over control of Ashraf to
Iraqi forces. And American supporters of MEK say that could mean a death sentence for the dissidents.

The U.S. Committee for Camp Ashraf Residents organized today’s rally in Lafayette Park. They drew some curious lunchtime passersby but
their goal was not to draw a crowd, said Nasser Sharif of Newport Beach, who is an organizer for the California Society of Dissidents in Iran.
They wanted media exposure.

“We’re trying to bring more attention to this issue so that the U.S. government will keep protecting them,” Sharif said. “Many of the family
members living in Orange County and in the L.A. area are worried we’re going to have another disaster on our hands.”

The Zolgalals e-mail their father and older sister who live in Ashraf. Shadi and Melissa Zolgalal haven’t were sent to America for their own
safety, they said, and haven’t seen their family since.
“It’s very insecure there although they are trying to be very cheerful. They have a hard time getting food in there,” Shadi Zolgalal said. The
answer, the two sisters said, is not for their family to come to the United States or flee Iraq.

“They went there (to Iraq) because their main goal has been to free our country from this regime. They want a country like this one.
Everybody should have the freedom we have here,” Shadi Zolgalal said.

The MEK has long been on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations, something Washington lawyer Steven Schneebaum told the crowd of Iranian-
Americans he is trying to get reversed. Several members of Congress have lobbied the Bush administration to take the group off the list as well.

“The people of Ashraf are not terrorists and they voluntarily disarmed in 2003,” Schneebaum said. He said the Iranian frontier is less than 100
miles from the camp and that the U.S. must live up to its obligation to protect them.

Rep. Ed Royce said after meeting with Iranian Americans in his Fullerton district he has gotten assurances from the State Department that they
are doing all they can to make sure Ashraf residents are not sent back to Iran.

“We’re going to keep the pressure on to make certain that no one is returned to Iran who does not want to be,” said Royce, who is not yet
convinced that the MEK should be removed from the terrorist list.

Royce also believes that over time “Camp Ashraf will slowly dissolve,” with some residents moving back to Iran and others becoming part of
the larger Iraqi society. He said State Department officials tell him the population of the camp is decreasing over time.

White House officials had no comment on today’s rally.

Many of the protestors at today’s rally will take their cause to Capitol Hill this week. Sharif said they will go to-do-door and try and talk to
members of Congress to help them in their cause.

The Zolgalals said they have gone to House members in Orange County who have been sympathetic.
Melissa Zolgalal said she’s worried that Ashraf will become a political football as European and U.S. officials negotiate with Iran over the issue
of nuclear weapons.

“Everybody needs to be aware that you don’t negotiate with a regime that’s the biggest terrorists in the world,” she said.

“It’s not fair,” Shadi Zolgalal Oglala added. “These are people. They are being tossed back and forth as if they have no meaning.”

Read Original Article at: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/ashraf-zolgalal-iran-2149893-mek-camp#

By NASSER SHARIF
February 3, 2010

President, Southern California Society for Democracy in Iran, political and human-rights activist

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/regime-232470-pmoi-iran.html

When Iranians poured into the streets of major cities to protest the fraudulent June 2009 presidential elections, many thought the protests
would subside in a matter of days. Eight months later, not only were the protesters still out in force, but the focus of the protests has shifted
to regime change.

On Feb. 11, the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution, the people are planning yet another major protest, prompting more pre-emptive
arrests by the regime. But greater brutality by the clerical rulers simply begets greater popular determination to unseat the entire clerical regime.

On Dec. 27, thousands of young Iranians risked death and braved bullets to take down posters of the regime’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.
Those protests rang the death knell for the regime.

As the Iranian people’s democratic struggle deepens and expands, many in Washington are debating what an effective American response
should look like. For Washington, this is a major opportunity to diminish Tehran’s threats.

Back in the 1970s, the United States supported the shah’s dictatorship and practically ignored the rising tide of popular protests. As bad as
that policy was, however, at least the shah and the U.S. were mutually supporting each other. What about a hostile fundamentalist regime that
supports terrorism, funds the killing of American soldiers in Iraq and is developing nuclear weapons? Even now Washington seemingly remains
just as reluctant as 31 years ago to provide clear support for the Iranian people in their struggle for democracy.

Although the Obama administration has ramped up the rhetoric against the mullahs somewhat, it is too little too late, because it is crucially out
of touch with the pace of the protests. And, sanctions are simply insufficient.

Clearly, the ayatollahs will not back down from their nuclear ambitions, a necessity for their strategic survival. That is why President Barack
Obama cannot place any hopes on negotiations. What matters is Washington’s attitude towards the organized Iranian opposition.

Allowing the Iranian opposition to be heard cannot be rejected as interfering in Iran’s internal affairs. If anything, Washington has already been
visibly doing that. In 1997, at the behest of the Iranian regime, the Clinton administration blacklisted as a terrorist organization Iran’s most
organized opposition, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI or MEK), in a move intended as “a goodwill gesture” to the
“moderates” ruling Iran.

The UK and European Union followed suit but were forced to detach their politically motivated label in 2008 and 2009, respectively, when
their own courts nullified the blacklisting. According to seven court rulings, there is absolutely no evidence the PMOI is involved in terrorism.
To the contrary, as senior U.S. officials have stated, it was the PMOI that first revealed the regime’s secret nuclear program.

For all its anti-Tehran rhetoric, the Bush administration decided to maintain the PMOI on its terrorism list, in hopes of reaching an
accommodation with Tehran. That, of course, rested more on hope than experience.

As it is, the blacklisting of Tehran’s strongest opponents in the U.S. has not only given Tehran more leeway to suppress dissent at home, but
it is also a major unwarranted concession to the mullahs.

Washington’s approach to Iran doesn’t need to be stranded between the two undesirable options of war or appeasement. There is a third
option, as articulated by the president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, Maryam Rajavi: democratic change by the Iranian
people and their organized resistance movement.

But, with the PMOI blacklisted, that option has been blocked prematurely. Even worse, the blacklisting of PMOI has acted as an enabler for
Tehran to murder PMOI members even as the Iranian people are in the process of making history.

By MARGALIT FOX
October 16, 2010

Marzieh, the great diva of Persian traditional song, who was silenced after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 but
who re-emerged years later outside Iran as a singer and a highly public supporter of the resistance, died on
Wednesday in Paris. She was 86 and had defected to France in 1994.

Her death, of cancer, was announced on the Web site of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the
opposition group, founded in 1981 and based in France, of which she was a member. Survivors include a
son and a grandchild.

A household name in prerevolutionary Iran, Marzieh (pronounced mar-ZEE-eh) was as closely identified with
her country’s music as the great Egyptian chanteuse Umm Kulthum was with hers. Marzieh began her career
in the early 1940s and was for decades a ubiquitous presence on radio and in concert. Over the years she
performed for many world leaders, including the Shah of Iran, Queen Elizabeth II, de Gaulle and Nixon.

Marzieh, whose rich, throaty mezzo-soprano was often likened to Édith Piaf’s, was famed for her vast
repertory, said to span a thousand songs. She was known in particular for her expressive interpretations of
songs of love — ill-fated love, unrequited love, everlasting love — many of which were settings of the work of the renowned Persian lyric poets of
the Middle Ages and afterward.

Marzieh was born Ashraf os-Sadat Mortezai in Tehran in 1924. Her father, a moderate Muslim cleric, and her mother, who was descended from a
family of artists and musicians, encouraged her to pursue a life in music. She studied for years with some of the greatest masters of Persian song
before beginning her career in 1942 under the stage name Marzieh, a popular Iranian name meaning laudable or agreeable.

In 1979, after the shah was overthrown, Iran became a theocracy led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The fundamentalist clerics who ran the
country deemed the arts, including music, inimical to the new order. As an artist who was also a woman, Marzieh, doubly marginalized, was barred
from performing. She retreated to her farm in the countryside and did not sing in public for a decade and a half.

During this period, the restrictions on female singers were relaxed to a degree, and Marzieh was told that she could appear before audiences of women
only. She considered this stricture unacceptable, she later said, and continued her silence, practicing in private where no one could hear her.

“I sang for the birds, for the river, the trees and the flowers,” she told The Washington Times in 1995, “but not the mullahs.”

In 1994, while visiting Paris, Marzieh defected. She joined the National Council of Resistance of Iran and for several years afterward lived in Iraq,
where an affiliated organization, the armed opposition group Mujahedeen Khalq, had a training camp. There, she sometimes sang atop a tank, dressed
in military garb.

Her association with Mujahedeen Khalq drew criticism in the West and from some Iranian exiles. The group, which advocates the overthrow of the
Iranian government, supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-8.

Mujahedeen Khalq is on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, although Britain and the European Union have removed it from
their lists in recent years.

Marzieh, who was 70 when she defected, also resumed performing in public, starting with a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1995. She
later sang in Los Angeles and in several European cities. She gave her last major performance in Paris in 2006, at 82.

Interviewers often asked Marzieh, who had been largely apolitical as a young woman, what had moved her to join the resistance. Speaking to the
newspaper The Scotsman in 1999, she replied by quoting Rumi, the revered 13th-century Persian poet:

I am looking for that which cannot be found

For I am fed up with beasts and ogres

And I yearn for a human being.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/world/middleeast/17marzieh.html

The Huffington Post
February 10, 2010

By Ali Safavi, Member of Iran’s Parliament in Exile; President of the Near East Policy Research

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-safavi/refocusing-washingtons-po_b_457070.html

On a chilly October day in 1981, after returning home from the University of Michigan campus, I answered a phone call. On the other side of
the line was my step mother from Iran. She rarely called those days because of the reign of terror imposed by the regime some five months
earlier. In tears, she gave me the distressing news. My older brother, Hossein, had been executed a week earlier.

She told me she had just returned from Behesht-e Zahra, Tehran’s main cemetery, where she had laid a wreath on his grave. When I asked the
reason for his execution, she simply replied, “Moharebeh” (“waging war against God”).

Hossein was a prolific writer and an aerospace engineer from Northrop University, California. We shared an apartment for seven years in west
Los Angeles before I left for Michigan to work on my post graduate degree in sociology, and he left for Iran hoping to help rebuild a new
democratic country after the Shah’s overthrow. A supporter of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK), the main Iranian opposition movement,
Hossein was executed along with 57 others on September 27, 1981.

Last week, almost 29 years later, when I read reports from Iranian state-run media that 11 protestors are on death row and two others executed
on charges of “moharebeh,” I felt a chill in my spine and the bitter memories of October 1981 came back. Not only the very people who
executed tens of thousands on the charge of moharebeh in the 1980s have once again assumed the reigns of power, but they have also expanded
the definition of moharebeh to encompass acts such as hurling stones at security forces!

This comes on the heels of the regime’s eight-month long campaign of killing, arresting, torturing and even raping activists in prison to curb
protests. Unfazed, millions of disenchanted Iranians are determined to bring about democratic change.

This was most evident on commemoration of Ashura on December 27. The worn-out regime forces were on the retreat and the people more
fearless and organized. Considering that the regime has harnessed almost all of its menacing power, the simple act of attending a rally has a
profound political meaning.

The people’s persistence has cultivated widespread anxiety in the regime, partly manifested in the rising number of defections, deepening rifts,
and a reported exodus of capital. The position of the regime’s number one authority, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, has significantly
diminished, weakening the regime as a whole.

The question now is not if but when the regime will be overthrown. To his credit, President Obama has offered supportive rhetoric to the large-
scale opposition against the regime. He has also pushed for tougher sanctions to prevent the regime from acquiring nuclear weapons.

In the eyes of the Iranian people, however, these attempts, though laudable, are insufficient in and of themselves. Worse yet, the
administration’s supportive rhetoric is significantly belied by its unfavorable attitude toward the main Iranian opposition. Since 1997, the US
has blacklisted the MEK at the behest of the mullahs. This has severely undercut the organizational strength of the opposition inside Iran
while excluding a large portion of the movement from public debate, which explains the poverty of policy decisions toward Iran.

Similar politically-motivated listings against the MEK were nullified by the highest judicial bodies in Europe and the United Kingdom because
they are legally baseless. The MEK is not blacklisted in the UK and the EU, which shows that the US is now out of sync on Iran with its
closest allies. To the people of Iran, Washington’s attempt to stifle the progress of a crucial part of the opposition seems not only suspect but
diminishes the power of the President’s moral support.

MEK members and supporters, who have lost more than 120,000 of their friends and relatives to the Iranian regime, form the biggest organized
social network in Iran and a decisive factor for leading the opposition. Restraining them by a politically-motivated label at this crucial moment
is a great injustice to the Iranian people.

As the administration grapples with its Iran policy, it should realize that the dichotomy of either military conflict or direct negotiations is a
false one. There is a third option presented by the Iranian people and their organized resistance, which avoids the costs of both other options
while offering added strategic benefits.

Such refocusing of the American policy lens on the third option will also empower Washington to grasp the facts on the ground in Iran more
clearly, enabling it to calibrate its policy more realistically and pragmatically.

Ali Safavi, is a member of Iran’s Parliament in exile, National Council of Resistance, and President of Near East Policy Research, a policy
analysis firm in Washington, DC.

http://orangepunch.freedomblogging.com/

February 1st, 2010, 5:00 pm by by Alan Bock, Register editorial writer

I talked Friday with a couple of representatives from the California Society for Democracy in Iran about the ongoing injustice of listing the
People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), also known as the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) as a terrorist organization. As I noted in this
more extensive article I did last summer, the Clinton administration decreed that the PMOI was a terrorist organization in the 1990s, as a
gesture to the Iranian regime during one of those periods when it looked as if there might be a chance of doing business with “moderates” in
positions of influence in the regime. It’s a huge and unjustified mistake.

The European Community and the UK have held extensive proceedings, including hearings and investigations of classified material on the
PMOI, and have concluded that it is inaccurate to call it a terrorist organization. In addition, PMOI loyalists who had been in exile in Iraq (and
are still there, quarantined at Camp Ashraf and in possible danger from the Shia-dominated Iraqi regime) had been helpful to U.S. occupation
forces and had provided actionable intelligence on Iran’s nuclear plans.

The two opposition figures executed in Iran last week, as well as 9 more probably slated for execution, are described by the regime as PMOI
supporters or adherents. As long as the U.S. continues to designate the PMOI/MEK as a terrorist organization it gives the Iranian regime a
huge propaganda advantages as in: “see, even the U.S. calls these people terrorists.”

I’m still not for intervening in Iran to try to effect regime change through U.S. military or more subtle intervention. As Nasser Sharif pointed
out, however, designating one of the most influential opposition movements in Iran as a terrorist organization puts the U.S. effectively on the
side of the regime instead of being in a neutral position. Iranian-American groups have filed a lawsuit to reverse this decision, but it could take
months or years to work its way through the system. Better would be for Congress to pressure the State Dept., and better still would be for
the State Dept. to commission an independent investigation and reverse its decision on its own.

A deadly clash after Iraqi forces stormed the camp has sparked protests and calls for better protection for the
3,500 Iranian dissidents living at Camp Ashraf.

A Times Staff Writer

August 19, 2009

The Obama administration downplayed international fears about the safety of Iranian dissidents living at a camp in Iraq as recently as
mid-July, days before a raid by Iraqi security forces killed 11 of the exiles and left scores wounded.

The deadly clash has sparked public protests in Washington and around the world, with dozens taking part in hunger strikes to emphasize
demands that the Obama administration provide better protection for the exiles.

It also underscored some of the challenges of the administration’s plan to wind down U.S. military involvement in Iraq and cede control to a
government in Baghdad that may not adhere to U.S. commitments.

In a July 15 letter to a concerned British politician, the State Department had said U.S. officials were doing their “utmost” to ensure the safety
of up to 3,500 Iranians living at Camp Ashraf in Iraq.

Until this year, U.S. forces had been protecting the Iranians, who are members of Mujahedin Khalq, an Iranian dissident group based in Iraq
since the 1980s.

Because of the Mujahedin Khalq’s history of violent resistance to the Islamic Republic, U.S. and European governments have classified it as a
terrorist group. But the group says it renounced violence years ago, and European officials dropped the terrorist designation this year.

This year, the U.S. military handed over control of the camp to Iraqis as part of the security agreement reached in December between
Washington and Baghdad, a decision protested by camp residents and their relatives and supporters living elsewhere.

Nonetheless, “U.S. military representatives are in daily contact with Camp Ashraf residents and continue to monitor their situation,” Deputy
Assistant Secretary of State Richard J. Schmierer wrote in the letter, sent on behalf of President Obama to Robin Corbett, a member of the
British House of Lords.

But in raids July 28 and 29, Iraqi security forces stormed the camp and clashed with the exiles. Iraqis said they wanted to take control of the
camp and establish a police post, but camp residents pointed to pledges by top Iraqis to close down Camp Ashraf, as Tehran has asked
Baghdad to do.

Widely circulated video shows nearby U.S. troops in several military vehicles observing the raid, with at least one taking photographs. But
American officers in a white SUV are shown rolling up a window and driving away as Iranians, some wounded and bleeding, appealed for help.

State Department officials last week criticized Iraqi forces but did not return calls Tuesday concerning assurances given by the administration
about the safety of exiles.

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iranian-exiles19-2009aug19,0,2334177.story

San Jose Mercury News

August 5, 2009

Ken McLaughlin

http://www.mercurynews.com/politics/ci_12993041?nclick_check=1

When Iraqi police raided a remote refugee camp in the desert last week, hundreds of Iranian-Americans in the Bay Area feared for the lives of loved
ones in the camp.

The 3,500 residents of Camp Ashraf are members of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or People’s Mujahedeen of Iran, a dissident group initially formed in
the mid-’60s to help topple the regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. After the 1979 revolution that deposed the shah, Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini turned against the group, executing more than 100,000 of its members and supporters — and driving others into exile.

Many of those exiles landed in the Bay Area, which has an Iranian-American population of more than 200,000.

“We’re afraid the people in the camp will be executed or sent back to Iran, where they would be imprisoned and tortured or killed,” said Ensieh
Yazdanpanah, 47, a supporter of the Mujahedeen who was resettled in San Jose in 1984 after she and her husband escaped to Pakistan when she was
seven months pregnant with her first child.

One of the residents of Camp Ashraf is a 25-year-old woman, Asieh, who was raised in the Bay Area by Yazdanpanah and her husband, Parviz, 57.
The woman came here as a little girl during the first Persian Gulf War after the Iraqis let some Iranian children out of the country for their safety.

Parviz Yazdanpanah also has a sister, Fersheteh, in the camp. Another sister, Parvaneh, was killed at age 25 by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in a
border skirmish near the camp in 1988.

The Yazdanpanahs say that e-mails and phone calls have stopped since the July 28 raid. “We cannot get any information,” Ensieh said.

Exactly how many people were killed or injured in the raid is unclear because journalists and human rights groups have not been allowed into the
camp to sort out the conflicting claims of the Mujahedeen and the Iraqi government — which has close ties to the Iranian government.

The Mujahedeen says at least 13 camp residents have been killed and about 500 injured as the Iraqis fired weapons and water cannons and beat them
with batons. The Iraqis say they entered the camp to establish a police station inside it, and tensions escalated into a violent clash when the
dissidents resisted. The government says six were killed and that the number of wounded is unknown. About 30 police officers were injured in the
raid, according to the Iraqis.

Fearful exiles

Police arrested 36 dissidents after the raid, and exiles say they fear they will be executed. One of those arrested, Jamshid Kargar, used to live in San
Jose when he was a college student, Ensieh Yazdanpanah said.

For years Washington officials have wrestled with the question of what to do with the residents of Camp Ashraf. And last week’s bloody melee
raised fresh doubts about the worth of previous assurances from top Iraqi officials that the Iranian dissidents would continue to be protected after
the Americans turned over responsibility for the camp to Iraqi forces in February.

Exile groups had warned the U.S. not to give up control of the camp, saying the action would invite violence against the dissidents. They had gone on
hunger strikes and marched in front of the White House.

“We told them that this would happen,” said Ensieh Yazdanpanah.

In exchange for their cooperation and protection by U.S. troops, the dissidents gave up all their weapons in 2003 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The Iranians in the camp had initially entered Iraq toward the end of the Iran-Iraq War in the mid-1980s. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had given
them refuge and used their armed camp as a buffer.

The People’s Mujahedeen has been on the U.S. State Department terrorism list for decades because of terrorist activities against Iranian targets it
carried out beginning in the 1970s. But members say they belong to a pro-democracy group fighting against the tyranny of the theocracy in their
homeland.

Despite their “terrorist” label, the U.S. has tried its best to protect the dissidents, who have been feeding information to Americans for years on Iran’s
nuclear program.

Some officials of the Bush administration argued that taking the group off the terrorism list — an action taken by the European Union in January —
would send a tough message to Iran. But Condoleezza Rice, then secretary of state, shot down the proposal, in part because the U.S. wanted to
engage the regime in Tehran.

Dedicated to freedom

Iranian-Americans in San Jose say members of the People’s Mujahedeen are “freedom fighters” who should be supported by the U.S., not labeled as
terrorists, because they support a secular, democratic state.

“All we’re looking for is freedom for all Iranians,” said Parviz Yazdanpanah, who was imprisoned for four years under the shah.

At the time he and his wife were forced to flee, Yazdanpanah was a medical student. Since being resettled in the U.S., he has worked in doughnut
shops and as a florist in San Jose and the East Bay. He and his wife now live in El Sobrante.

Their 27-year-old daughter, Somayeh, and 23-year-old son, Hamid, are also active in the pro-democracy movement. Somayeh has been on a hunger
strike in Washington, D.C., aimed at calling attention to the camp.

“What’s going on in Camp Ashraf is a continuation of what’s going on in Iranian society,” said Hamid Yazdanpanah, a University of California-Davis
graduate who will soon be starting his third year at the McGeorge School of Law at the University of the Pacific.

He called the recent protests that followed the Iranian presidential election, which many Iranians thought was rigged, “an unprecedented organic
uprising for democratic change and freedom.”

“I’m 100 percent convinced,” he said, “that the majority of Iranians want a secular republic just like every other democratic nation.”

For Immediate Release
July 10, 2009
Contact: Nasser Sharif Tel: 562-221-8000

Iran Uprising

Following 30 years of brutality against the Iranian people and especially since the post-election nationwide protests, both the purported
pragmatists and conservatives in the Iranian government are tarnished. Iranian people, informed politicians, and progressive leaders here in the
United States have long argued, often while enduring unjust criticism, that Iran’s system of governance as well as its political/clerical elite are
void of religious and electoral legitimacy.

The California Society for Democracy in Iran expresses solidarity with the protesters in Iran and rejects the mullahs for creating a virtual
dictatorship enforced by an increasing violent security apparatus. Likewise, our deepest gratitude is reserved for brave and progressive
members of U.S. Congress who have in the past and still today stand by the Iranian people and their just resistance.

Chairman Bob Filner (D-CA), a founding member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and co-chair of the Iran Human Rights and
Democracy caucus (IHRDC) is a leading politician who has stood by our community and the people in Iran. On July 2006, Mr. Filner said
that, “In order to prevent war, we must support the Iranian people and their resistance for a democratic change in Iran.” On June 30, 2007,
Rep. Filner warned about Iran’s increasing use of terror both inside and outside of Iran and urged the international community to refrain from
appeasing Iran. He noted, “No to War! But, we also must understand that the appeasement of a brutally oppressive dictatorial expansionist
government in Iran will never lead to prosperity and freedom. It is short sighted to think that economic gains dished out by the mullahs are
strong enough reasons to justify ignoring the horrific violations of human rights…” “The Iranian regime’s aggressive policies are rooted in the
growing weakness of the mullahs,” he wrote in May 2008, and thus foretold of their illegitimacy. He added, “The unrelenting assault on the
civil and human rights of the Iranian people is a direct response to the unpopularity and illegitimacy of the extremist theocratic government.”
(Don’t Enable Iran’s Offenses, San Jose Mercury; May 15, 2008) The recent protests by Iranians have certainly validated this progressive
and peaceful stance.

As co-chair of the IHRDC, Representative Dan Rohrabacher is another congressional leader who has also stood in solidarity with the Iranian
people. On June 18, 2009, he expressed “solidarity with the brave youth, students, and women of Iran who for the past few days so
unequivocally rejected the oppressive government ruling over them.” Mr. Rohrabacher has reflected the general will of the Iranian people and
supported our community in bringing about “a secular, democratic and non-nuclear Iran.” As he noted recently, “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-
appointment will surely lead to a rise in suppression of the Iranian people and purge the opponents within the government itself. It will also
hasten Iran’s drive towards nuclear capability.”

The California Society for Democracy in Iran calls on Iranian-American Communities, NGO’s, governmental organizations, concerned citizens,
and political leaders to take an active role in confronting the barbarism emanating from Iran. “The Iranian people are imbued with democratic
aspirations and a well-organized resistance movement.” (Bob Filner; SJM; May 15, 2009)

We urge everyone to embrace this peaceful resistance.

The California Society for Democracy in Iran
2892 Bellflower Blvd, Suite # 276
Long Beach CA 90815
email: info@californiasdi.org

http://www.free-press-release.com/news/200907/1248057458.html

By Phillip Zonkel, Staff Writer
Posted: 06/25/2009 08:38:10 PM PDT

LONG BEACH – Nasser Sharif fled his home country of Iran to save his life, he says.

In 1982, the Long Beach resident was a first-year college student and member of a student group demonstrating against the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini.

After a fellow student protester and friend of Sharif’s was arrested and turned up hanged in jail, Sharif went into hiding with friends, he says.

Eventually, plain-clothed militia members arrived at Sharif’s home and searched for him, Sharif says.

A short time later, Sharif fled Iran, he says.

“I knew I had to leave,” said Sharif, now 47. “It was a matter of life and death.”

Sharif is still protesting. He’s president of the California Society for Democracy in Iran, a two-year-old Long Beach-based not-for-profit group.

Thursday night, he was one of 25 to 30 demonstrators in front of Chase Bank, 5200 E. Second St., in Belmont Shore holding a candlelight vigil to honor the memory of Neda
Salehi Agha Soltan, the 26-year-old Iranian woman shot dead during Saturday’s demonstrations in Tehran, Sharif said.

Some demonstrators held signs with photographs of Neda smiling while pictures showed her after she had been shot, lying on the ground with blood pooling from her mouth.

Other protesters waved Iranian flags and showed support for the anti-government protesters in Tehran by chanting, “Free elections with U.N. supervision.”

Democracy in Iran also advocates not recognizing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran; issuing international arrest warrants for Ahmadinejad and others responsible
for the brutal crackdown in Iran and taking their cases to an international criminal court and cutting all political and diplomatic relations with Iran until the oppression has
completely stopped.

In Washington, D.C.; however, President Barack Obama still believes in engagement with Iran, senior administration officials said Wednesday, according to published reports.
“It makes no sense to completely rule out engagement,” a senior White House official said, according to published reports. “Why is it considered being tough to not talk to
somebody? It’s the opposite. When you don’t talk to somebody, you’re ruling out the use of something that could strengthen you.”

Back in Long Beach, Sharif says he also protests as an obligation to his fellow Iranians in Iran. “I feel a responsibility,” he said, “to raise my voice for my countrymen.”

phillip.zonkel@presstelegram.com, 562-499-1258

http://www.presstelegram.com/news/ci_12693162