“Violating our rights, confiscating our belongings and treating us badly has become costumary. Zoroastrians who denounce such violations to authorities are completely ignored.”
Bravo, Kurosh Niknam. May you be safe. From AKI, with thanks to Fjordman:
Tehran, 23 Jan. (AKI) – Kurosh Niknam, an Iranian MP representing Zoroastrians in Parliament, has denounced state discriminations against members of his faith. “Violating our rights, confiscating our belongings and treating us badly has become costumary,” he told Iranian daily Khatam Yazd on Tuesday. “Zoroastrians who denounce such violations to authorities are completely ignored.”
Niknam also complained about the scrapping of his faith, the oldest religious community of that nation to have survived, from the list of officially recognized religions, which only includes Abrahamic religions.
“We have the impression that someone wants to cancel us gradually from the history of the country where our faith was born,” he said….
The Zoroastrian community in Iran was estimated to number 32,000 individuals at the beginning of the 1980s but reports suggest that their number has halved since the 1979 Iranian revolution established an Islamic Republic. However, conservative Iranian papers have denounced that in the past few years an increasing number of Iranians, especially youths, have converted from Islam to the Evangelical Church and Zoroastrism, claiming the phenomenon is growing and becoming “extremely worrying.”