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| Dr. Antonio Stango |
Recently
Linda Mason of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership wrote an editorial for CNN, suggesting that Americans have a
mistaken view of the people of Iran. She describes a recent trip that she took
to the Islamic Republic and the surprise that she felt at finding the people to
be warm, open, and interested in Western culture.
I’ve
heard this argument many times before, but I have a hard time believing that
the average westerner views everyday Iranians, as Mason says, through the prism
of the 1979 hostage-taking at the US embassy. I’m sure that the average
American understands that that incident was the work of a group of Islamist
revolutionaries, and not the entire population of the country, working in
tandem.
About
half of the population of today’s Iran hadn’t even been born yet at the time of
the revolution and the hostage crisis. A person would have to have a
one-dimensional view of the country and its people to believe that such events
reflect on the character or ideologies of people who had nothing to do with
them.
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