The saddest thing about Persia is that its’ people taken as individuals are not instinctively religious fanatics. They’re too intelligent. I worked alongside a software engineer in the early aughts who was brilliant, and entirely secular. Ditto my current cardiologist, who is a leading light in the U of Michigan department. It’s a damned shame that Persia was in a weakened condition when the Arabs arrived with their new religion, and overthrew the Zoroastrians. And more recently a damned shame that that idiot Carter failed to support the Shah when he needed it. A secular Iran would have been as powerful an ally as Israel in the middle east. As with everywhere else, the mental disease which calls itself Islam is what turns people violent, aggressive, and stupid. Like a low-budget horror movie script, except it’s real and it never ends.
I met a fellow on a job site who was from Iran. He insisted that he was Persian, not Iranian.