My wife and I were newlyweds living in an apartment in Tampa on Buffalo Ave just east of the Hillsborough River. I was a newly promoted senior auditor with a Big-8 firm .... working crazy hours 7 days a week. Across the street lived a group of Iranians (I assume) who celebrated the revolution all night long or so it seemed. Man I despised those people for interrupting what little sleep I was getting.
Yeah, I think so but the Taliban used the invasion by the U.S.S.R. as an excuse to destroy their own country from within while we gave them weapons to fight the Soviets... copying what happened in Iran.
religion, without separation of church and state.. which is why we have to fight for that separation to remain in-tact, despite what a good portion of social conservatives want..
We can’t take our freedoms for granted. Our democracy is special and over 30 percent of the country are willing to give it up to a conman for various reasons I can’t comprehend.
Trump was vilified by the 30 percent of the country that wants to eradicate freedom for religious people.
Never read 'Kite Runner' but I did read 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' by Khaled Hosseini. Also a beautiful book. I'll add this to my list.
We don’t need to go over our history with religion prior to separation of church and state, how it got used to justify abominable acts towards fellow humans, and how it still negatively impacts us in ways.. Religion deals in presumed absolutes, whether it comes from the Middle East or the West, and needs to be guarded against.
Don't give texas any ideas. I interacted with an Iranian student when I was in high school (late 1970's) who insisted that Cambodia of all places was the free-est place in the world. After I finished laughing I told him he had no idea what the hell he was talking about.
Speaker Johnson would love a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. Too many either want that or think we already are. The founders were explicit about not having an official state religion. We would be wise to adhere to that. btw that in no way restricts anyone's ability to worship as they see fit.
Say what? Eisenhower appointed the Shah to demonstrate his love and affection for the iranian people and their well being!
Didn't the Western World pretty much try that for .....what, around 800 - 900 years? Some call that era the Dark Ages. it's curious to me that Christian Nationalists seem to forget they ran roughshod over Western Civilization for hundreds and hundreds of years. Now they want to go back to that peculiar form of control. Perhaps the GOP should consider studying a little history, things called the Enlightement and the Renaissance.
Let's also not forget that while this is horrendous, US allies such as Saudi Arabia are just as bad or worse. This tends to get reported here more commonly for that reason. Not just to try to whip up hatred for a US enemy, but by well-meaning Iranian exiles trying to inform the world and perhaps influence US policy towards outright regime change. There are members of the Saudi diaspora with similar sentiments, although they are far fewer and they have less motivation in terms of thinking they can influence US policy.
Exactly this I think I concluded Shias bad Sunnis good in my teens. It wasn’t until 9/11 that I realized it was fundamentalists are all bad. The Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia are as bad as the republican guard in Iran.
