Iran is a huge country and much, much more sophisticated than most people imagine... It certainly has the potential to be at least the way Turkey is to most Americans.

Iran is a huge country and much, much more sophisticated than most people imagine... It certainly has the potential to be at least the way Turkey is to most Americans.

There has always been a confusion in the West about -Islam and about the Middle East and the assumption that the countries are Arab. Iranians very much object to that. They are very proud of their own history, but they have this real inferiority-superiority complex thing about the Arabs and the position of Islam in Iran. One of the reasons why Shi'a Islam is so entrenched in Iran is because it has allowed the Iranians to distinguish themselves from the Arabs, who are mostly Sunni.

Americans tend not to distinguish between political rhetoric and real intentions, which can lead to great misunderstanding.

It's probably more frustrating to me as an Iranian living in America than it is when I'm over there. Inside Iran, people are actually quite well educated about America. There are things they don't understand, particularly in the government, but the people, by and large, know the American sensibility quite well, and the reverse is not true. There's a lack of knowledge about Iran and the Iranian people.

If you are an [American] politician it's very hard to imagine. "Now we are going to treat these guys as our equals? That's ridiculous. What have they ever done to deserve that?"

He had undoubtedly not availed himself of the ministry archives, archives that might have revealed to him that Iranian diplomats in Paris, from this, his own Foreign Ministry, had taken it upon themselves to issue Iranian passports to Jews escaping the very Holocaust they were aware of, but that he now denied.