The students often like to talk about movies that they feel are Orientalist like 300 or Babel. They talk a lot about the possibility of U.S. aggression against Iran and the Iranian hostages being held by the U.S. in Iraq.

It is difficult for Iranian scholars and universities to retain their independence and to be seen as doing so, when cultural warfare is being carried out by some of their American partners. Indeed, such irresponsible behavior basically serves to intensify suspicion and in reality decreases the opportunity for real and meaningful dialogue.

President Ahmadinejad said that the Zionist state of Israel should no longer exist as a political entity. This has always been the policy of successive Iranian governments such as those of President Khatami and President Rafsanjani.

By dehumanizing others, among many other things, these people are also aiding the neocons and other forces of darkness to justify more war, more suffering, and more destruction.

One topic which often brings liberals and conservatives together in the U.S. is Iran. There is a general consensus that the Revolution was the embodiment of backwardness and barbarism.

In my opinion, the continued popularity of these gross distortions of Iran in the U.S. seems to reveal more about certain aspects of America than about Iran. It seems that the popularity of these memoirs is largely due to the fact that, while claiming to do the opposite, they regularly reinforce the dominant representations of Iran in America by constructing an exotic, backward, and barbaric Iran principally based on U.S. archives.

Americans should know that Iranians are just as decent, human and rational as other human beings. Sadly, the mainstream media in the U.S. regularly fails to recognize and reflect this.