I had an Iranian room-mate for a few months while in college in the 70s. He was one of the nicest guys you could meet. And he hated and feared BOTH the Ayatollah & the Shah. He said both only wanted personal power, and both were evil men. He wanted to stay in America, because America has religious freedom. He told me I didn’t know how good I had it, as a Baptist, to be free to worship the way I believed.
However, you wouldn’t find many of that opinion in rural Afghanistan. It is a place where men are willing to die for the right to kill their women - wives and daughters - if they feel like it. There are pockets of extreme evil. And having spent 6 months in Afghanistan, I can now understand those passages in the Bible where God commanded the Jews to kill everyone...
I think you’re right about the Persian people, but they tend to be better educated than most Muslims. I really like Iranians and the Lebanese too. I’d be willing to be that you’d see an Iranian liberated under the Shah a la Chile under Pinochet. The only way out of a theocracy is violent bloodshed.
It is the dictatorial and socialistic aspect, coupled to tribalism, that keeps these areas backward. Jihadis and mad men are drawn from these peasants who live in 12th century conditions and a niche of the educated who reject modernity. Here’s a great article from the Feb 06 Smithsonian: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/presence-feb06.html
From the article: “In America, unlike in Egypt, dreams could come true. Qutb understood the danger this posed: America’s dazzle had the power to blind people to the real zenith of civilization, which for Qutb began with Muhammad in the seventh century and reached its apex in the Middle Ages, carried triumphantly by Muslim armies.”
Radical Islam is at war with modernity. They’ll lose, unless they get a bomb. Hence attacking Iran is a good idea.
I also have pondered long about God ordering the killing of an entire tribe top to bottom peculiar, but as I’ve grown older and experienced more and more I don’t find it as shocking. God knows his plan and we don’t.