May 9, 2006

Our Town: Giving kids hope
by Don Kazak
Palo Alto Weekly

East Palo Alto residents were sad, shocked and hurt at the shooting death of Police Officer Richard May in January. Police Chief Ron Davis let people vent their emotions at a special meeting in late January.

A lot of words were spoken that night, many very eloquently. But one young man spoke so passionately about young people that he stilled the room — with words that apply to all communities.

"Do not stigmatize your children," he said. "Teens from different backgrounds and races are embracing each other. The children are coming to the Boys and Girls Club every day and putting their differences aside."

The speaker, Arash Daneshzadeh, is the teen director at the club. His background is unusual, to say the least.

Daneshzadeh, 25, is Iranian. His family fled Tehran in 1987 during the Iran-Iraq war. He lost a cousin in that war. He had earlier lost a brother and a sister during the fundamentalist Islamic revolution of 1979 that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power.

He said his father protested both the regimes of the former Shah and that of Khomeini.

"He got a brick to his head," Daneshzadeh said of his father >>> Full text

>>> Daneshzadeh's features in iranian.com

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