Iran persecuted me for my faith — the US offered me the American dream

I was 16 when I understood, for the first time, that my life was not entirely my own to plan.

I was born into a Baha’i family. Under the Islamic Republic in Iran, that single fact was enough to make us targets — not because of anything we did, but because of what we believed.

Baha’is of Iran, the country’s largest non-Muslim minority, have been barred from universities for 47 years , from many jobs and from burying our dead in peace . We are watched, detained, sometimes worse, simply for practicing a faith built on the idea that humanity is one family.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has executed or killed hundreds of Baha’is since 1979 . I grew up watching adults I loved lose their livelihoods and their freedom. At age 11, I was expelled from sixth grade in a most horrific manner. School officials made their intention clear that they wanted to have a mob of students kill me. Eventually my family had no real choice left. My parents hired a smuggler and had me cross the border into Pakistan.

I share this now because it is not history — it is this week’s news.

Human rights organizations report that dozens of Baha’is have been detained in Iran this year alone ; the crackdown has intensified as the country’s confrontation with the U.S. and Israel continues. When a government feels cornered, it often reaches for its oldest scapegoat. In Iran, that has long been the Baha’i community. A new generation is now living through what many generations have survived. I recognize the pattern because I experienced it.

What does that persecution feel like from the inside? It’s seeing your parents wanting to protect their kids and not being able to. It is understanding, as a teenager, that your faith is not a private matter but a public liability. It is leaving behind a country, a language, a community, your family, and arriving somewhere new with nothing, because nothing was what we were allowed to keep.

What I was allowed to keep was harder to take from me. My faith as a Baha’i centers on service, on the unity of humanity, on the idea that work done honestly and in the spirit of service is itself a form of worship. Those values did not stay behind in Iran. They came with me, and they became my North Star as I built my life in the U.S., and ultimately as an entrepreneur.

I landed in California as a refugee and eventually made my way to the University of California-Davis. I did not yet have a network, capital or a plan beyond working hard and preparing myself to live a life of impact. What I found in the Bay Area was something I had not experienced before: a place that did not particularly care where I came from, only what I could build.

That is not a small thing. It is, I think, America’s defining gift to people like me. The United States’s tolerance for outsiders, its appetite for unconventional paths and unconventional people, is what made it possible for a Baha’i refugee with an accent and no family wealth to eventually co-found a company, with my brother. That company, AutoWeb , became one of the earliest online car marketplaces and went public in 1999. I later built other companies in the Bay Area, and today I am the founder and CEO of One Planet Group, a private equity firm. I’m grateful for all the opportunities this country has given me.

America took me in when my own country had made clear it did not want me. In return, I helped build companies here, created jobs here, and paid into the economy that gave me a second chance. That is not charity repaid. It is closer to a promise kept on both sides.

In the meantime, the danger from Iran’s fanatical government has not passed, and it doesn’t look like it will moderate on its own.

I grew up in Iran in the 1980s, when banners across the country quoted Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolution’s founder: “War is a blessing.” That mentality never left. Weakening a regime militarily does not touch its ideology, and ideology — not pragmatism or self-preservation — is what drives this government’s choices. A government that does not build, does not think in terms of decades, and treats its own people as expendable will not suddenly moderate because it has taken a hit.

The clearest evidence is what this government does beyond its own borders. It has made life hell for Palestinians through Hamas, for the Lebanese through Hezbollah, and for Yemenis through the Houthis — not out of solidarity but because permanent regional crisis serves its own grip on power at home. These are not allies bound by shared belief. Iran uses innocent people as its instruments.

A government willing to sacrifice the very people it claims to champion is not a rational actor the world can trust and negotiate with. A government that treats its own 93 million people as enemies cannot be pressured into a better nuclear deal on the assumption that a signed contract can somehow be trusted. Until the world understands who it’s dealing with, and chooses to stand up for the Iranian people and for what’s right rather than what’s profitable, the Islamic Republic will only grow stronger and its atrocities more widespread.

I think all those young people taken to the gallows every morning in Iran . I think about the Baha’is being detained in Iran right now. I think about the youth of Iran, the women of Iran, many of them teenagers like I once was, and I think about what it would mean if the world simply looked away again. It has looked away for half a century while an entire nation has been persecuted. Iran’s current turmoil could make that persecution worse.

I do not have a solution to Iran’s politics. But I know what it means to be forgotten by the world while your government decides your destiny. I was fortunate. I found a country willing to bet on me. I do not seek war, but I do seek freedom for Iranians.

Payam Zamani is the founder and CEO of One Planet Group and the author of “ Crossing the Desert .”