religious considerations<\/a> over the rights and security of the Israeli people.<\/p>\nIsrael’s relationship with Evangelical Christians<\/p>\n
The decision is \u201cbecause we’re Christians, and they’re afraid, and the Ministry of Interior is run by the Shas party, they\u2019re religious, and they’re very anti-Messianic, anti-Christian,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey’re afraid of Christians; they’re afraid of the messianics, afraid they may want to convert them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Parsa argued that if his goal had been to convert people, there were far more potential converts in the United States than in Israel, and he has American citizenship, so it would be far easier.<\/p>\n
He also recalled that many evangelical volunteers faced significant obstacles from the Interior Ministry when they tried to enter Israel to assist in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre in 2023.<\/p>\n
With Palestinians barred from working in Israel, foreign workers leaving because of the war, and communities along the borders devastated by the Hamas invasion and Hezbollah attacks, many farmers came to rely on foreign volunteers to harvest crops and help sustain Israel\u2019s agricultural sector.<\/p>\n
Parsa took on the role of cooking thousands of meals for the displaced, and used his platform to advocate for Israel at a time when many were outraged by the war in Gaza.<\/p>\n
“Right now, Israel’s strongest supporters are evangelical Christians. By doing this, they’re damaging Israel’s reputation and giving more ammunition to anti-Israel activists and antisemites, who will say, ‘See? We told you. Look at what they’re doing to Christians.’ We don’t want that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don’t want Israel to be attacked or demonized. We know this doesn’t represent all of Israel. It’s a very small group, whether it’s certain religious figures or people within the Interior Ministry making these kinds of decisions.”<\/p>\n
Since moving to Israel, Parsa has been unable to work or travel, including to events where he had been invited to advocate for Israel, and has had to live under the constant weight of uncertainty.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the Interior Ministry only told The Post that they don\u2019t comment on individual cases when approached for comment.<\/p>\n
Moving to Israel after fleeing Iran<\/p>\n
Explaining how he came to live in a country he had been taught to view as the “Little Satan,” Parsa described the violence and near-constant antisemitic and anti-Israel indoctrination that shaped his upbringing.<\/p>\n
He said he was taught that Jews hunted Muslim children for their blood to make matza, shown staged images of Israeli soldiers aiming their weapons at Muslim children, and required to attend rallies where chants of “Death to America, death to Israel” were a condition for passing his classes.<\/p>\n
The same brutality the Islamic Republic accused Israel of committing was what Parsa witnessed in the streets of Iran. Public hangings, floggings, and mutilations for the crime of stealing food were commonplace and widely accepted as normal.<\/p>\n
Even so, he said the regime’s tight control over information left many believing they were fortunate, while the rest of the world was living in hellish conditions. Parsa was one of those, until he was arrested at aged 16 for simply being in a car where another person was in possession of a small amount of alcohol.<\/p>\n
Being arrested at 16 changed Parsa’s view of the Iranian regime<\/p>\n
On his way to a family wedding, Parsa was being driven by relatives when Basij paramilitary forces randomly closed the street and began inspecting every vehicle.<\/p>\n
A coachload of people were detained, including Parsa, for \u201ccrimes\u201d such as being in a car with a member of the opposite sex who was not a family member, allowing some hair to slip out from under a hijab, or engaging in any behavior deemed to violate Sharia law.<\/p>\n
Despite being only 16, and an observant Shiite Muslim at the time who had never touched alcohol, Parsa was driven to a holding cell where he said he was stripped naked, beaten, and hosed down with cold water. He said he never appeared before a judge or was allowed to defend himself before being locked in a tiny room with other young men, where they were given only two eggs a day to eat, very little water, and two short bathroom breaks.<\/p>\n
He was only released after his family bribed the guards, he said.<\/p>\n
“They were mocking and laughing at us. They made us face the wall naked and do sit-ups: up and down, up and down. After 60 or 70 repetitions, you can’t do it anymore. You get muscle cramps, and if you couldn’t continue, they would beat you even more.<\/p>\n
I was beaten badly, along with my friends and other people there, while they laughed at us and did it with a sense of joy,\u201d he said. \u201cIf someone does something wrong and you punish them, you might do so because you believe they deserve it, but you don’t laugh. You don’t enjoy it. They were gleeful. That was when I saw the cruelty of this regime and realized how truly evil and brutal it was.”<\/p>\n
“Everything inside me began to change. I started thinking: maybe the people they hung from cranes were innocent too, like us. Maybe the people whose hands they cut off or whose eyes they removed were also innocent.”<\/p>\n
Converting to Christianity and moving to Israel<\/p>\n
The experience left Parsa rejecting all religion, though he would later become a Christian after hearing satellite radio broadcasts about Jesus Christ. His conversion led to threats against his life, including a stabbing, and two years living as a refugee<\/a> after he was smuggled out of Iran and into Turkey.<\/p>\nAfter becoming a US citizen in 2015, Parsa was finally able to visit Israel. He immediately began advocating for the country online, which was how he met his wife in 2020.<\/p>\n
She sent him a drawing of two hands decorated with Iranian and Israeli flags, symbolizing the love between the Iranian and Jewish peoples, and the rest was history.<\/p>\n
They met in person five months after he first messaged her online and married eight months later. After spending their first two and a half years as newlyweds in the United States, they returned home to Israel, where her parents are able to help them raise their children.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ramin Parsa has lived in Israel since early 2023, where he has built a life with his wife…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":567069,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[21171,25246,39925,19121,85,87,127873,53065,46,74,26167,43,13838],"class_list":["post-567068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-deportation","tag-evangelical","tag-evangelical-support-for-israel","tag-execution","tag-il","tag-iran","tag-iranian-dissidents","tag-irgc","tag-israel","tag-israelis","tag-jewish","tag-news","tag-refugees"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/567069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}