As a Christian woman who has escaped religious persecution in Iran, I do not want Kamala Harris to become president of the United States

Maybe because I have only lived in the United States since 2011, and have been an American citizen since 2016, I look at the US, American politics, and social issues differently than someone born in the US. But I am no less a proud American, and am deeply concerned about the well-being of our beloved country and all Americans. And I am deeply concerned about Kamala Harris.

I would be excited to see a woman become president of the United States, but not Kamala.

I would be excited to see a woman become president of the United States, but not Kamala. Through her campaign, women are being objectified and encouraged to vote for her, not based on her qualifications or platform, but as a woman. Further, as she strives to break the ultimate glass ceiling, Kamala represents a shallow platform that the only rights of significance to women are a “woman’s right to choose.” This is dangerous because it exclusively defines a woman’s right to choose as being about abortion, not about actual freedom.

Having been born and raised in Iran, under a tyrannous and extremist Islamic society, my views on women’s rights are much broader, and much more about life and death issues for all women. That’s why as a Christian, Iranian American woman, I will not be voting for Kamala because she represents values that endanger women in the Middle East and around the world.

I could speak for weeks about the harsh conditions in which I was raised and had to endure. I have written two books about being persecuted as a woman, and because of my faith. I have countless scars of extremist Islam, including the torture and death of my husband, breaking apart of my family, being arrested, imprisoned and interrogated, misogyny in every aspect of life, and the execution of my closest friend.

As much as I suffered, as do many Iranian women, and women in Islamic societies throughout the world, no recent example is more vivid than the murder two years ago this week of Mahsa Amini.

As much as I suffered, as do many Iranian women, and women in Islamic societies throughout the world, no recent example is more vivid than the murder two years ago this week of Mahsa Amini. Mahsa who was arrested and brutally tortured to death by the Iranian “morality police” for the “crime” of not wearing her hijab “properly.” Her murder triggered the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement across Iran and around the world. I can assure you that no Iranian women, or women being subjugated anywhere in the Islamic world, think for a moment about their “right” to have an abortion, as the most important issue facing women. This is what Kamala Harris would have you believe, and I don’t think it would be on their top ten list of women’s rights issues.

It’s not only that Kamala dismisses the abuse of actual rights facing hundreds of millions of women around the world, and as such endangers them, by marketing the only “right” that’s important is the “right to choose.”  By doing so, Kamala threatens women everywhere, and threatens America’s Judeo-Christian values.

It’s not only the oppression of women in Iran that she enables. In Afghanistan, the Taliban recently passed a law preventing women from showing their faces or hearing voices in public. The “Muslim brothers and sisters” she is fighting for practice the prevalent Islamic crime of female genital mutilation. And that which “Muslim brothers” brazenly call “honour killings,” leave countless women dead at the hands of their fathers, brothers, and husbands. My own brother was told by a mullah to kill me for becoming a Christian, and he would be protected.

For decades, Iranians have struggled against the Islamic regime. Obama, Biden, and now Kamala, have emboldened and funded the Iranian regime and its terrorist tentacles around the world, subjecting women to unspeakable horrors.

America needs a strong leader who will fight for America, its core values on the right side of history, to preserve our future, and truly to protect women’s rights. Kamala Harris is not that person.