“We felt that just because of our identity, our ethnic background, our transaction was being flagged,” Ghandehari said. “What the payment company is saying is, ‘We have to comply with sanctions.’”
Ghandehari said that his experience with discrimination, hostility and racial violence goes back to his time in grade school when, after answering a classmate’s question about visiting family members in Iran, he was told that Iran is part of the “axis of evil” and that he “shouldn’t be communicating with family members because they’re part of this country.”
“There are members of our community that, in recent weeks and years, have experienced incidents at bars, at their work. People telling them to go back to their country, calling them terrorists,” Ghandehari said. “When we get an email like this from Stripe or Venmo or PayPal, it feels like assault. It feels like yet another person telling us we don’t belong here.”
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This is happening to many other nonprofit organizations that are sending food and medicine to Iran due to U.S. sanctions. Their license to send aid to Iran is in limbo by The Department of the Treasury.
Among them is an organization called Child Foundation. Child foundation supports disadvantaged children in Iran who need assistance in order to stay in school. The children and their families are identified by a social service agency in iran, Refah Koodak, and then referred to Child Foundation. Because of the us sanctions against iran, most support was provided in the form of bulk food, which is distributed to the children’s families.
Here is their website with more info about their humanitarian activities:
https://www.childfoundation.org/
And a video clip: