He’s been arrested at mass demonstrations to denounce the Islamic regime ruling his native Iran, he supports an organization that the U.S. government deems a terrorist group, and the FBI has sent agents to interview him at his jewelry store in Island Park.

As political unrest continues to sweep through the Middle East, Max Saatchi spoke about his eventful life as an Iranian expatriate at the Long Beach Library Tuesday night. 

“Stay on the right side of history,” Saatchi told the Long Beach Tea Party Patriots, who invited him to speak at their meeting. “Stop appeasing Islamic fundamentalism. Stop dealing with the Iranian government. Stop to say: ‘We want a strong policy against this government.’”

Saatchi showed “Iranium,” a newly released documentary on Iran’s backing of terrorist organizations worldwide, its nuclear weapons program and America’s foreign policy toward the regime.   

Before and after the documentary, Saatchi and his associate Frank McQuade, a Long Beach resident and attorney, talked and fielded questions.

“You have to ask, as an American, why is it that all these other states that are going down one after the other are getting maximum press,” McQuade said about the toppling of governments in Egypt and Tunisia and possibly Libya, “and the real fight that is going to bring down our only professed enemy, the real true threat to America, and you see nary a word about it.” 

In 1981, two years after Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic fundamentalist regime took power in Iran, Saatchi was jailed and his jewelry store in Tehran was confiscated after he demonstrated there with a half million Iranians who opposed the theocracy. 

After he was released, Saatchi, his wife, Amy, and their two young sons fled with fake passports and ultimately settled on Long Island. Saatchi has many relatives still living in Iran, but 17 of them were executed in prisons.

“Khomeini’s answer for any peaceful demonstration was the bullet or arrest,” said the 56-year-old Saatchi.

He supports the People's Mujahedeen of Iran (PMOI), an expatriate resistance movement with more than 5,000 armed fighters dedicated to overthrowing Iran's ruling mullahs and ayatollahs.

The U.S. State Department, however, has listed the PMOI as a terrorist group since 1997. But Saatchi said the label is misleading, since the PMOI’s aggression in Iran has only targeted the regime in order to replace the theocracy with a secular democracy.

“They’re not asking for troops or money or Israeli jets or American Marines,” McQuade said about the PMOI. “They’re asking for the moral and political support of the United State government and European allies.”

In June 2009, as hundreds of thousands of Iranians poured onto Iran’s streets to protest a presidential election they believed the regime rigged to favor President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Saatchi and McQuade flew to Paris to attend the PMOI’s annual conference to discuss Iran with American and European delegates and Iranian expatriates. The duo also recently went to Washington D.C. to appeal to Congress to support the PMOI.

Saatchi called on his audience and all Americans to invest in the Iranian resistance, and for the U.S. government to impose much stronger sanctions on Iran. He fears U.S. or Israeli military strikes will work to the regime’s advantage. 

When asked what an Iranian expatriate had to do with the local tea party, organizer Robert Freidank said:  “The idea was to hopefully show us the need to oppose, react and go up against any expressions of anti-Americanism.”

Freidank noted that McQuade suggested the idea of having Saatchi address the group.

“We try to bring topics that are important to those who are trying to restore America to its greatness,” McQuade said about his involvement with local tea parties, “starting with our home communities, but certainly with a global picture was well.”

Cookie Kojak, a self-described civic activist and political blogger from Springfield Gardens, said she routinely attends such events to educate herself. While she was aware that Iran has “a treacherous regime,” Kojak said, both Saatchi’s talk and the documentary alarmed her.

“We should be standing up and voicing our opinion to our government, to Obama, to our congressmen and telling them to put on sanctions altogether and get real about this,” she said. “Because this is a real threat.”