January 25, 2019
The United States has now arrested a dual national an American-born woman who is a naturalized Iranian citizen and who anchors news programs on Iran’s English language news channel, PressTV.
What’s more, the US arrested the woman at an airport, a common locale for Iranian arrests of dual nationals.
The woman is an African-American born in New Orleans as Melanie Franklin and known in Iran as Marzieh Hashemi.
Now 59, she was attending college in Louisiana during the 1979 revolution in Iran and became fascinated with it. She married an Iranian student, converted to Islam and moved to Iran. PressTV said she has worked for state broadcasting for 25 years. Her brother said her husband is now deceased.
The United States has said little about the arrest, except that she is being held as a material witness. That means she is not being held for a crime. US law allows for a material witness to be detained if there is concern the witness might leave US jurisdiction. The FBI has not said what crime it believes Hashemi was a witness to.
One of her children, Hossein Hashemi, says he and two siblings, all of whom live in the US, have also been told to appear as witnesses before a grand jury in Washington, DC, but he says he has no idea what the issue is.
The Islamic Republic has gone into overdrive, with the government accusing the United States of tearing off Hashemi’s headcovering and ordering her to eat pork. The Fars news agency carried a headline saying she was being “tortured” by the FBI.
Family members said Hashemi normally returned to the United States about once a year to visit relatives. She was arrested January 13 at the airport in St Louis as she was flying to see another relative in Denver.
PressTV issued a long statement describing her treatment as it says Hashemi described it to her family in a telephone conversation she was allowed to have two days after her detention.
It said, “Immediately after arrest, she was forced to remove her hejab (the head covering for Muslim women) even though the authorities knew about her being a Muslim. They allowed her only a T-shirt to wear, with her forearms being exposed against Islamic law. She was even photographed in that state….
“She has been denied halal food (food permissible under Islamic law), being offered only pork as meal and not even bread, which she has requested to avoid the meat. Ms. Hashemi has had nothing to eat other than a packet of crackers since her apprehension. The resulting malnutrition, compounded by cold weather conditions, has made her weak and infirm.
“Her current feeble health condition necessitates urgent medical attention.
“The United States government is accountable for any potential harm or hazard that would affect Ms. Hashemi’s mental or physical condition.
“Accordingly, as part of the media community, we expect that all international media outlets set about relaying this affair without delay.
“We, further, call for the immediate and unconditional release of Ms. Hashemi, and for the US government to apologize to both the journalist and the international media community for her treatment.”
PressTV, started in 2007, is an all-English television news outlet owned and operated by Iranian state broadcasting. It is mostly aimed at a foreign audience, but can be viewed inside Iran as well. Hashemi anchors news broadcasts and has also conducted many interviews.
In 2012, the Anti-Defamation League, an American Jewish organization, described the channel as “one of the world’s leading dispensers of conspiratorial anti-Semitism in English.”
The Iranian media, which rarely gives attention to the arrests by Iran of dual nationals, has given blockbuster coverage to Hashemi’s detention.
The hardline Vatan-e Emruz daily said the Americans were engaging in “Saudi-style behavior with a critical journalist,” although Hashemi has not been killed and dismembered the way Saudi journalist Jamal Kha-shoggi was.
Foreign Minister Moham-mad-Javad Zarif said, “The arrest of Ms. Hashemi is a very clear affront to freedom of expression, a political abuse of an innocent individual and I believe the United States should release her immediately.”
Nader Talebzadeh, an Iranian writer and filmmaker who has worked with Hashemi, called her arrest a “concocted plan by the Trump Administration” to elicit a reaction from Iran. “This is intimidation and a provocation against Iran.”