Mick Hartley

Madeleine Rowley at The Free Press talks to five ex-Muslims about how they were taught to hate Jews. Here's one, Darya Safai, born and raised in Iran and now a member of the Chamber of Representatives in Belgium:

When I was born, Iran was still free. You could drink and dance, and women could wear whatever they wanted. I’ll never forget my first day of school after the Islamic Revolution. I was six, and my mother entered my room with a long, dark, and formless manteau and a piece of fabric for my hair and neck.

“My darling,” she said, “this is your uniform.”

I didn’t understand. I pointed to my closet and said, “But I have so many other beautiful dresses.”

She explained that I had to wear it if I wanted to become educated. I remember seeing the boy next door walk out his front door. He wore the same clothes he always did. I knew, but couldn’t accept, that my life would change, and his wouldn’t.

At my school in Tehran, in my new shapeless uniform, we read the Quran every morning and repeated sayings like, “Down with the USA, down with Israel.” To enter our classroom, we had to step on a painting of the Israeli flag on the ground. There are still universities in Iran that have painted American and Israeli flags on the ground, but most students walk around them.

The Iranian people and the Israelis are victims of the same monster—Islamists. In 1999, I was imprisoned under Ayatollah Khamenei for speaking out against the marginalization of women. I was 24. I was afraid that they wanted to execute me in jail, but instead they released me in the hopes that I would lead them to my husband, who was one of the leaders organizing protests against the Iranian regime. Luckily, a friend smuggled me in the back of his car to reunite with my husband in secret. We lived in Turkey for six months before moving to Belgium and have been married for 26 years.

When I saw the problems that we face in Belgium regarding radical Islam today, I began to write opinion pieces on the subject and eventually entered politics. I was elected to the Belgian Federal Parliament in 2019.

Islamists have ruined Iran, and they have destroyed the Middle East. Do we want to wait until this atrocity ruins everything in our Western countries too? As an elected official here in Belgium, I try to be the eyes and ears of some of the people who are sleeping.