Yeah, Arabian and Persian cultures are two totally different worlds, cultures, languages, etc. But in America a friend of mine, Bangladeshi, who worked retail, was angrily told he should "go back to Iran!" Everything from Greece on eastward is fuzzy Muslim land where everyone's the same, 'til you get to China where Americans' perception radically changes.
There are depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in Iranian art, which are forbidden under Islamic codes in the Arab world, that exist from centuries ago -- but these are often defaced, as Persians had not been so keen on adopting the "art can only be in the form of abstract Mosaics" ideal of Arab Muslims.
The increasingly nutty Ron Paul, who recently said Roe V. Wade ought to be overturned, and that the Dept. of Education ought to be abolished, actually did try to bring up the CIA overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran in a bitter debate on Bill O'Reilly's show, but O'Reilly cut him off with an "Alright, alright, we don't need a history lesson here!" even though it was totally pertinent.
What's remarkable is that the CIA overthrow info is clearly out there, not hard to find, and is uncontroversial. But no one knows it.
A decade ago a friend of mine, Sherean, had dual Iranian-American citizenship. She was born on a US base in Iran before the 1979 revolution, to an American dad and Persian mom.
-B.
bhandari at berkeley.edu wrote:
"Most Americans know very little about Iranian history, including the fact that Iran is Persian, not Arabic. Also little known is that the CIA funded and engineered a coup in 1953 against Mohammed Mossadegh, a democratically elected leader chosen by Time magazine as Man of the Year just two years earlier. In his place, the United States installed the Shah of Iran, who turned over 50 percent of Iranian oil production to U.S. oil companies."