Tehran, Iran, Jan 2, 2018 / 16:08 pm
Ongoing protests in Iran could be a sign of hope for repressed religious minorities, if protesters demand that conscience rights be respected, said an Iranian-born journalist who converted to Catholicism in 2016.
Although most of those protesting in the streets of Iran were born after the 1979 revolution that led to the current Islamist regime, "many of them are chanting nostalgic slogans about the pre-revolutionary era," noted Sohrab Ahmari.
"At the time Iran was no democracy," he said, but the pre-revolution regime "was far less repressive and people retained many personal and social liberties, if not political ones."
Ahmari was born in Tehran. He has lived in the United States for two decades and worked for the Wall Street Journal for several years before becoming a senior writer for Commentary magazine.