Becoming an American citizen 10 years ago was one of the most exciting and proud days in my life. It was not simply because I had fled Iran – the country of my birth – where, after becoming a Christian in 1999 I was arrested and sentenced to death for the “crime” of apostasy.

Indeed, the ability to live as a Christian without daily fears of arrest or persecution, much less torture and death, was life-changing. I was also able to vote in a free and democratic election for the first time in my life. It’s impossible for most Americans to imagine not having the freedoms so cherished for us all – and for which Iranians are struggling and dying in order to gain their freedom from the oppression of the Islamic Republic – and being so foreign and unimaginable for me just years earlier as I sat on death row in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison.

Often, as a naturalized American citizen who was able to flee tyranny, I feel that I cherish America’s freedom’s more than those who were born here and take them for granted. I understand more than most what lack of freedom looks like in an entire country, and for the citizens living under the oppression of Islamic Shariah law.

I don’t dismiss the things that are talking points of American elections, not at all. But for so many Americans living with the freedoms that we have, far too many do not appreciate what they mean. When it comes to women’s rights, of course I stand for that in the American way of thinking. But sometimes I shake my head because I know what it’s really like to live in a society in which misogyny and subjugation of women is in its DNA. I know what it’s like to see women manipulated to become sex workers under the guise of a perverse and institutionally sanctioned Islamic formula of “temporary marriage.”

I know what it’s like to fear being beaten or abused because of not wearing the mandatory hijab “properly,” or to wear makeup, pluck one’s eyebrows, or have nail polish. I know what it’s like to see women brutally tortured, their faces deliberately disfigured and teeth knocked out because in Islam a woman’s life is worth only half that of a man.

I know what women face daily by way of sexual harassment, assault and rape both in prison and on the streets. I know that the Islamists are so evil that even before executing women on a variety of trumped-up charges, like my best friend Shirin Alamhooli – as I would have been had God not spared me – they rape virgin women and girls to prevent them from going to heaven. No matter how many times you read that sentence, it will never be normal, humane or tolerable in any way.

I even know what it’s like for a brother to tell me, after I became a Christian, that an Islamic cleric told him to kill me for shaming the family and insulting Islam, and that he would be protected from any legal repercussions. All these and many other ways women suffer in Iran, and under Islam generally, are due to the evils of Shariah law imposed on women, and any non-Muslim, in countless ways.

As a grateful and proud American, I weep as I see a trend happening in the United States that echoes the naïve ignorance that paved the way for the rise of the Islamists in the country of my birth. More than the ignorance of those who protested to bring down the Shah, often what’s known as the Red-Green alliance of Marxists and communists collaborating with the Islamists, Americans are actually electing the Islamists through democratic voting that has been hijacked.

When I see Abdul El Sayid as the Democratic candidate for U.S. senator in Michigan, I see the interrogators and judges I faced and argued with. They repeatedly tried to entrap me and convince me to reject and renounce my faith in Jesus, claiming that I would be forgiven and set free. But I knew the truth – that there was no compromise with these evil people and no matter what I did they would still execute me.

When I see Ilhan Omar, who manipulates American freedom to impose radical Islam in Congress and become rich in schemes that she and her husband/brother are alleged to have concocted, I see the hijab-covered women of the Iranian Revolution era, who with their stupidity and self-righteous adherence to Islam ushered in a society that made them worth only half of their brothers and husbands.

When I see Iranian-American Yassamin Ansari serving in Congress, representing Arizona’s third district, I see the fake reformists within Iranian society and those who have been exported by the Islamic regime in order to infiltrate Western society. She makes her handlers at NIAC (National Iranian American Council) happy, but turns the stomach of average Iranians who want to see freedom from everything she represents.

When I see Adam Hamaway in New Jersey, I see the professionals of Iran who colluded with the Islamic regime to protect themselves and their livelihoods, empowering and enabling the ayatollahs out of fear, or their own conversion to radical Islam. How an Islamist who was an aide to the “blind Sheikh” associated with the World Trade Center bombing could stand for Congress in a district just 50 miles from where Islamists brought down the World Trade Center 25 years ago is unthinkable. How can Americans be so blind?

When I see Ghazala Hashmi as lieutenant governor of Virginia, I see the slavery that has been imposed by Islam over much of the non-Arab world – including the country of her birth – by the steady and deliberate Islamic conquest. Islamists will conquer city by city and state by state, through violent jihad where necessary, or under the stealth manipulation of freedom in the country they are trying to conquer.

When I see Zohran Mamdani, an unapologetic Islamist extremist as mayor of America’s largest city and financial capital, I see the radical Mahmoud Ahmadiinijad who served as mayor of Tehran before becoming President of Iran, under whom I experienced and witnessed the regime’s savage brutality while in prison. God help us if this is not the final stop of Mamdani’s political career.

When I see hundreds of Democratic leaders pandering to the Islamists, I see leftist Iranian civilians who protested against the Shah and ushered in the Ayatollah’s regime in 1979 before being arrested, imprisoned, tortured, executed or exiled by their former poster child Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamist backers. It didn’t take long before the Islamists’ true colors were clear, thanks to the leftists who had been manipulated as the useful idiots they had become.

I love the country of my birth and pray that all Iranians will be free from the heel of Islamic brutality soon. I also love my adopted country, the United States of America, and the freedoms that we all cherish. But I fear that Americans do not see the threat that’s already in our backyard, and will continue to elevate, enable and elect Islamists like these and others, and end up seeing our cherished America becoming like the country of my birth.

One Islamic Republic is one too many. We do not ever want that here. America, please do not be fooled, and please do not vote for any of these Islamists or their enablers. Heaven help us all.