May 20, 2022
Iranian immigrant Marziyeh Amirizadeh is running for the Georgia state House of Representatives as a Republican candidate and as a strong Trump supporter.
She is running in House District 67, a suburban area southwest of Atlanta that has a heavily Black population.
Amirizadeh, 43, is making her Iranian origin very much a part of her campaign. She was born in Tehran in a family that was nominally Shiite, but non-practicing. She converted to Christianity at age 19 in 1998, following a friend who had converted. In 2005, she quit her job in cosmetology and became an activist seeking to convert others. That got her arrested in March 2009 and sentenced to death. She spent 259 days in Evin Prison before she was released and fled the country.
She arrived in the United States in 2011 and became a self-employed motivational speaker, telling the story of her conversion, imprisonment and dedication to Christianity. With a fellow convert and prisoner, she wrote “Captive in Iran,” which was published in 2014 and holds a top five-star rating from customers at Amazon books. She describes the book as a best-seller, but the sales rank is 136,101. That is high, given that Amazon sells more 33 million titles, but not a best seller.
In March, a second Amirizadeh book, “A Love Journey With God,” was published and has also won a five-star rating from Amazon customers.
Amirizadeh drew no primary opposition and so won easy endorsement from the Georgia state Republican convention in March. Amirizadeh will face Democrat Lydia Glaise in November. Glaise, who also drew no primary opponent, is a Black woman who previously served as a member of the City Council in Fairburn, the main city in the district, holding about a quarter of the district’s population.
The seat became vacant because the incumbent Republican, Philip Singleton, decided not to run for re-election, saying the district’s new boundaries after re-districting were not favorable for a Republican, suggesting that Amirizadeh will face an uphill battle. Singleton described the new map as “a 67 percent Biden district” that he could not win.
Amirizadeh, who goes by the nickname “Marzi” in the United States, said she thought she could win because the district is diverse and she would appeal to voters because of the challenges she faced before coming to the United States. “Because of my experience, background, poverty, difficulty and struggles for employment, I understand people and their struggles.”
She said one of the main issues she hears from voters is school choice and children being indoctrinated in the classroom. The other main issues, she says, are redistricting, taxes and regulations.
Amirizadeh said, “Becoming an American citizen was the greatest day of my life.” But she sees dangerous things happening in America. “Since I lived under an authoritarian regime for 30 years, I know some of the tricks of how the government can take away our freedoms, like creating division among people. I see many politicians use this for their own benefit.”
She said the 2020 presidential election “set off alarms with me and I thought: What is going on? It reminded me of the system in Iran.” She said, “Election integrity is important to people in my district and in America. People want to have transparency.”
She is also very concerned about censorship. “If you have the wrong opinion in this country, you can lose your job, get banned from social media and even be threatened with violence. These are alarms to me; we are losing our freedoms.”
And she is no fan of the nuclear deal with Iran. “It’s the most horrible thing ever. We should never negotiate with terrorists.”
She has said, “God has led me down this path. For me, this is not an election, it’s a mission. Leaders are not supposed to rule people, they are supposed to listen to the people.”
Amirizadeh became a US citizen in June 2016, just in time to vote in the presidential elections that year. She said she voted for Donald Trump and was appalled at the way he was treated.
“Since 2016, President Donald Trump has been attacked by democrats and even wrongfully impeached,” she wrote in an article she posted on the internet. “God … showed me how Joe Biden would cheat in the [2020] election and try to steal people’s votes…. Joe Biden is the true loser of the election with the help of the fake news media.”
Amirizadeh continued: “In my eyes there is no difference between him and what the Islamic Republic does in elections in Iran…. I believe Joe Biden learned a good lesson from his friends and supporters in the Islamic Republic regime how to deceive people and take power.”
Amirizadeh and the co-author of “Captive in Iran, Maryam Rostampour, were born into Muslim families in Iran. They met while studying Christian theology in Turkey in 2005, and realized they had become Christians at about the same time six years earlier. Deciding to join forces, they returned to Iran and began proselytizing. Over the next two years, they handed out 20,000 copies of New Testaments in Tehran and other cities. They started two house churches in their apartment, one for young people and another for prostitutes. They extended their ministry with mission trips to India, South Korea and Turkey.
In 2009, the pair were arrested in Tehran for promoting Christianity. The official charges were apostasy, anti-government activity and blasphemy. They were both sentenced to hang. Christian groups abroad launched a campaign on their behalf and the pair believe that as a result they were released in November 2009 and cleared of all charges the following year. After their release, they emigrated to the United States.
Amirizadeh feels very strongly that foreign advocacy for specific prisoners in Iran helps those prisoners avoid torture and improves their conditions.
The Georgia House has 180 members elected to two-year terms. Each seat represents about 60,000 people.
