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More about the Iranian-American news reader the FBI arrested
[IsraelTimes] Marzieh Hashemi was Melanie Franklin before converting to Islam and moving to Iran, where she is the face of government-controlled English TV news.As a newscaster for Press TV, Marzieh Hashemi has been conducting interviews and reading the news as written by government loyalists in the Islamic Theocratic Republic. It’s a long way from New Orleans, where she was born Melanie Franklin in 1959 to a Christian family. In college in Louisiana, encounters with Iranian students in the wake of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution saw her convert to Islam. A marriage brought her to Iran, where she learned fluent Farsi and began working for the country’s state broadcaster 25 years ago. Now, after her apparent arrest by the FBI, her family is questioning why the 59-year-old grandmother was imprisoned by the US. Hashemi studied journalism at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. A yearbook photo shows her smiling with other colleagues at WPRG, now KLSU, the student-run radio station. "When we were in school together, that was during the Iran hostage crisis. LSU had a sizeable number of Iranian students who were going to school there," said radio newsman Jim Engster of Baton Rouge, who was also in the photograph. "The time we were in school was less than 25 years from LSU being an all-white school. So Melanie was a trailblazer too as a black female journalist. There were a few others but not many." It remains unclear why Hashemi was locked away Maw! They're comin' to get me, Maw! . However, we can't all be heroes. Somebody has to sit on the curb and applaud when they go by... it isn’t the first time she’s been questioned by US authorities, her son said. For the past decade, "she has been harassed on a regular basis when she goes to airports," he said. "Whenever she boards a plane, prior to it she will have interviews or interrogation, if we might call it that‐ things that are not very typical is what she’s had to deal with for some time." Posted by: trailing wife 2019-01-18 |
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