The Israel Brief – 06 March 2023– IAF Commanders write letter. Protests grow. Oil for King Charles coronation from Jerusalem. Hungary to move embassy?
The Israel Brief – 07 March 2023– Day of Disruption planned for Thursday. Ben Gvir speaks to KAN. Alleged IAF strike on Aleppo. Chag Purim Sameach!
The Israel Brief – 08 March 2023– IDF strike targets in Gaza in response to rockets fire. Former police officers call for the PM to fire Ben Gvir. Cornea of murdered brothers transplanted. International Women’s Day.
The Israel Brief – 09 March 2023– Protests around Israel in “Day of Resistance”. Israel slams South Africa for vote to downgrade relations. Smotrich apologises to IDF. Chaim Topol dies.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
Reflections during Purim of a latter day heroine, Marzi, a defiant and brave Iranian Christian
By Jonathan Feldstein
Marziyeh “Marzi” Amirizadeh is not a Persian queen.
Unlike the biblical Jewish queen, Esther, an orphan in Persia expelled from Judea following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and exile of the Jewish people, Marzi is a native of Persia. Today that is Iran. She lives in the United States, her adopted country where, like Esther, she has risen to the occasion “for such a time as this.” Like Esther who put her life on the line to approach the King, her husband, and to save her people, Marzi also put her life on the line. She did not go before the modern “King” – the ayatollah – to save her people from imminent death, but rather worked stealthily behind the scenes – against the ayatollahs – to affirm her faith and for the well-being of Iran.
Beauty and the Beasts. Former Iranian prisoners Marziyeh “Marzi” Amirizadeh, (l), and Maryam Rostampour (r) were sentenced to death in 2009 for spreading the message of Christianity but the regime’s punishment backfired when they evangelized hundreds of fellow prisoners – even prison guards – in the 259 days before they were released following intense international pressure. “God had a purpose for being in that dark place,” says Marzi.
Marzi is an Iranian-born Christian who fled the land of her birth, the land in which she found her faith. Just doing so put her life at risk. Christians, like Jews are persecuted, as is pretty much anyone who does not fit into the narrowly defined version of extremist Shia Islam that hijacked Iran in 1979. Sunnis, Kurds, Bahais, and other religious and ethnic minorities are all in the regime’s crosshairs.
Coming to faith as a Christian in Iran is not something to be taken for granted. While there is the morality police enforcing Islamic dress code, such as ensuring women in the country wear hijabs, simply being a Christian and affirming that in any way publicly can be dangerous, if not life threatening. Marzi knows all too well!
Arrested and thrown into one of the most brutal prisons in the world – the notorious Evin Prison outside Teheran – Marzi was subjected to months of physical and mental hardship, including intense interrogation before being brought to trial, where she was sentenced to death by hanging for the ‘crime’ of “apostacy”.
Behind Bars for Beliefs. The notorious Evin Prison in northwestern Tehran has held during its brutal history, hundreds of peaceful activists, journalists, intellectuals, human rights lawyers and Christians like Marziyeh Amirizadeh and Maryam Rostampour who chose to take the dangerous step of sharing their faith inside the very walls that was meant to silence them.
But like Esther, Marzi is not only brave, she is astute. In her interrogations and even at her trial, when accused of ‘apostacy’ -the renunciation of a religious belief – which she did by converting from Islam to Christianity, Marzi simply said:
“No.”
Although forced to study Islam, Marzi never considering herself a Muslim, despite that under Islamic law a child born of a Muslim man is Muslim, and that children born as such in Iran are registered as Muslims. Marzi never avowed Islam; never embraced it and so she could never disavow it. Baffling her accusers, they were left without much to challenge her, despite that she and everything about her so enraged the Iranian regime.
Living on the Edge. Marzi was arrested and imprisoned in 2009 for converting from Islam to Christianity, an offense which carries the death penalty. Placed in Evin prison’s notorious Ward 2-A, which is controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Marzi was denied a lawyer and contact with her family for three months.
But she didn’t stop there. Marzi shared her faith with her accusers, her captors and her interrogators. If Allah was really God, why could she not have a personal relationship with him? Why could Allah not speak to her directly? There were many “whys” in her search for faith, and then her affirmation of it.
Marzi related that their God is a God who is distant, with whom you cannot have a close relationship, is always ready to punish, even inflict torture for the most minor infractions. She never accepted Allah as the true God. She was always searching for a personal relationship with God, to find the truth. Even something as mundane as only praying to God in Arabic, not in Persian or any other language, challenged her and caused her to challenge their theology. If their God was God, he would surely be multi-lingual and receive prayers in all languages?
She understood her accusers were lying, and her eagerness to find God intensified. Eventually, God spoke to Marzi in a dream, revealing the true face of Islam, and God’s love for her and all people. A God of love was comforting, made sense, and upended her accuser’s God of fear. After this, God made Himself present in her life, and became her rock.
In coming to faith in the land whose Islamic leaders brand Israel “the Zionist entity” and “the little Satan”, Marzi also had a spiritual awakening about Israel and the Jewish people, how important they were to her faith and very existence as a Christian. This alone could have earned her another death sentence. Even in our conversation for the Inspiration from Zion(podcast), she dispassionately notes how that this would assuredly be used by Iranian extremists to demonstrate her “spying” for Israel. She is aware that should the Iranians arrest her in the future, she will be accused as a spy.
Marzi enraged the judge in whose hands her life precariously lay, by recounting how God spoke to her. This was totally at variance with the judge’s and Islam’s belief that God only speaks to prophets and holy people. Some of her captors even admired the strength of her faith for standing up to the many forms of intimidation and threats of consequences of not renouncing her Christianity, even while challenging fundamental principles of Islam.
But Marzi does not do anything in half measures. Though Iran is the land of her birth, and the United States is where she’s now a citizen and where she has even run for elected office, Israel is a dream on her radar. Next month she’ll get to fulfill her dream and visit the Land of the Bible, the Land in which her faith was born, where Jesus lived. She wants to see all of Biblical and modern Israel, and be inspired in her own faith. But she also wants to bring a message of love to Israel that while the Iranian regime hates Israel, average Iranians do not. She knows that just as she was arrested and sentenced to death, and only a miracle saved her, the Iranian threat to Israel is very real, but that God will also protect Israel.
Fate Uncertain. Iranian women prisoners sit at their cell in Tehran’s Evin prison. While allegations of sexual abuse and rape against Iran prison officials have been made by former female political prisoners, information about the alleged number of rapes committed by IRGC officials in Iran’s prisons remains unclear.
2500 years ago, Esther beseeched the Jewish people to pray and fast for her, that she should be able to use her position to save the Jewish people from the death decree forced by Haman. Today, Marzi represents Esther’s bravery and boldness, and is very much a bridge between Jews and Christians.
Purpose in Prison. In ‘Captive in Iran’, cowriters Marziyeh Amirizadeh and Maryam Rostampour who knew they were putting their lives on the line by sharing their Christian beliefs, recount how God used their 259 days in Evin Prison to shine His light into one of the world’s darkest places, following their arrest in 2009.
We should join her in prayers for Iran, that somehow miraculously the Iranian people can be saved from its evil rulers.
About the writer:
Jonathan Feldstein - President of the US based non-profit Genesis123 Foundation whose mission is to build bridges between Jews and Christians – is a freelance writer whose articles appear in The Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Townhall, NorthJersey.com, Algemeiner Jornal, The Jewish Press, major Christian websites and more.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
