WASHINGTON: She is largely unknown in the US. But the American anchorwoman for Iran’s state-run broadcaster, detained last weekend by US authorities, is a familiar face on its English-language channel.
As a newscaster for Press TV, Marzieh Hashemi has been conducting interviews and reading the news as written by government loyalists in Iran. 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.
Her journalism and her public comments mirror her host country’s official ideology.
“When I got familiar with Islamic Revolution in Iran, and I saw it was a political and religious revolution, I was attracted to this,” Hashemi once told an interviewer in Farsi. “I saw this as a political movement to the revolution.”
Now, after her apparent arrest by the FBI, her family is questioning why the 59-year-old grandmother was imprisoned by the US Her detention comes at a time of escalating US-Iran tensions, including President Donald Trump’s maximalist approach to Iran after pulling America out of its nuclear deal.
Hashemi was detained Sunday in St. Louis, where she had filmed a Black Lives Matter documentary after visiting relatives in the New Orleans area. She was then taken to Washington by the FBI on a material witness warrant, according to her elder son, Hossein Hashemi.
The FBI said in an email that it had no comment.
Federal law allows judges to order witnesses to be arrested and detained if the government can prove their testimony has extraordinary value for a criminal case and that they would be a flight risk and unlikely to respond to a subpoena. The statute generally requires those witnesses to be promptly released once they are deposed.
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.”
Hashemi said that’s where she learned about Iran’s revolution, which saw Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi replaced by an Islamic Republic led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Shiite cleric who had final say on state matters as the country’s supreme leader.
“I started to ask them about the revolution, because there were many demonstrations by pro-Khomeini demonstrators and also against the revolution in that university,” she later recounted. “I wanted to know that what they are doing and find out who is the Ayatollah Khomeini, and it was very interesting for me as an activist.”
Hashemi ended up in Iran working at Iran’s state broadcaster, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, or IRIB.
There are no private television or radio stations in Iran. Satellite dishes, while widespread, also are illegal. That leaves IRIB with a monopoly on domestic airwaves.
Since the revolution, IRIB has been in the hands of hard-liners who back Iran’s government. Their broadcasts mirror those of other state-run channels across the Mideast, with direct criticism of leaders incredibly rare.
Press TV, launched in June 2007, is IRIB’s English-language service. While airing in Iran, it focuses predominantly on international affairs through the lens of how leaders in the Islamic Republic see the world. The hashtag “FreePalestine” accompanies stories on the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Fierce criticism of British and American foreign policy is common.
Its broadcasts have drawn Western criticism.
In 2012, the Anti-Defamation League described the channel as “one of the world’s leading dispensers of conspiratorial anti-Semitism in English.”
The channel was pulled from the air in Britain in 2011 after a complaint by Maziar Bahari, a Canadian-Iranian journalist for Newsweek who was imprisoned by Iran after the 2009 disputed re-election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became the Green Movement protests. Bahari said the channel aired an interview that had been scripted by his captors, who threatened to execute him unless he cooperated.
For her part, Hashemi both helmed newscasts critical of the West and offered her own criticisms as well.
In 2009, she said she believed Western media exaggerated popular support in Iran for Mir Hossein Mousavi, a reformist who was later put under house arrest, where he has languished for years after challenging Ahmadinejad in 2009 and leading the Green Movement protests.
“What is shown many times in the West, for example, when people saw that there was a very large demonstration supporting Mr. Mousavi, people got the feeling that the country was falling apart and that the majority of Iranians actually supported Mr. Mousavi,” Hashemi told NPR. “No, the majority of them did not, and the other side of the spectrum has not been shown as much, I believe.”
It remains unclear why Hashemi was arrested. However, 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.”
From New Orleans to Tehran: Life of detained Iran newscaster Marzieh Hashemi
From New Orleans to Tehran: Life of detained Iran newscaster Marzieh Hashemi
- Hashemi studied journalism at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge
- Hashemi ended up in Iran working at Iran’s state broadcaster
To infinity and beyond: Grendizer’s 50 years of inspiring Arabs
- 50 years after its creation, the Grendizer anime series continues to capture Arab imagination
- Arab News Japan speaks to creator Go Nagai, Middle Eastern fans and retells the story behind the UFO Robot tasked with protecting our planet
LONDON: Few cultural imports have crossed borders as unexpectedly, or as powerfully, as Grendizer, the Japanese giant robot that half a century ago became a childhood hero across the Arab world, nowhere more so than in Saudi Arabia.
Created in Japan in the mid-1970s by manga artist Go Nagai, Grendizer was part of the “mecha” tradition of giant robots. The genre was shaped by Japan’s experience during the Second World War, and explored themes of invasion, resistance and loss through the medium of science fiction.
But while the series enjoyed moderate success in Japan, its true legacy was established thousands of kilometers away in the Middle East.
The anime “UFO Robot Grendizer” arrived on television in the region in 1979, dubbed into Arabic and initially broadcast in Lebanon during the Lebanese civil war. The story it told of the heroic Duke Fleed, a displaced prince whose planet had been destroyed by alien invaders, struck a chord with children growing up amid regional conflict and occupation by Israel.
Its themes of defending one’s homeland, standing up to aggression and protecting the innocent were painfully relevant in the region, transforming the series from mere entertainment into a kind of emotional refuge.
Much of the show’s impact came from its successful Arabization. The powerful Arabic dubbing and emotionally charged voice-acting, especially by Lebanese actor Jihad El-Atrash as Duke Fleed, lent the show a moral gravity unmatched by other cartoons of the era.
The theme song for the series, performed by Sami Clark, became an anthem that the Lebanese singer continued to perform at concerts and festivals right up until his death in 2022.
By the early 1980s, “Grendizer” had spread across the Middle East, inspiring fandoms in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and beyond. For many, it was not only their first exposure to anime, it also delivered lessons on values such as justice and honor.
Grendizer was so influential in the region that it became the subject of scholarly research, which in addition to recognizing the ways in which the plight of the show’s characters resonated with the audience in the Middle East, also linked the show’s popularity to generational memories of displacement, particularly the Palestinian Nakba.
Half a century later, “Grendizer” remains culturally alive and relevant in the region. In Saudi Arabia, which embraced the original version of the show wholeheartedly, Manga Productions is now introducing a new generation of fans to a modernized version of the character, through a video game, The Feast of The Wolves, which is available in Arabic and eight other languages on platforms including PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch, and a new Arabic-language anime series, “Grendizer U,” which was broadcast last year.
Fifty years after the debut of the show, “Grendizer” is back — although to a generation of fans of the original series, their shelves still full of merchandise and memorabilia, it never really went away.
