Ten com­mon mis­con­cep­tions peo­ple of the West have about Iran and its inhab­i­tants, as com­piled by Juan Cole, pres­i­dent of the Global Amer­i­can Insti­tute, Pro­fes­sor of His­tory at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan, and author of Engag­ing the Mus­lim World:

  • Iran is aggres­sive and has threat­ened to attack Israel, its neigh­bors or the US.
  • Iran is a mil­i­ta­rized soci­ety bristling with dan­ger­ous weapons and a grow­ing threat to world peace.
  • Iran has threat­ened to attack Israel mil­i­tar­ily and to “wipe it off the map”.
  • Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad per­son­ally threat­ened to “wipe Israel off the map”.
  • Ira­ni­ans are Holo­caust deniers.
  • Iran is like North Korea in hav­ing an active nuclear weapons pro­gram, and is the same sort of threat to the world.
  • The West recently dis­cov­ered a secret Iran­ian nuclear weapons plant in a moun­tain near Qom.
  • The world should sanc­tion Iran not only because of its nuclear enrich­ment research pro­gram but also because the cur­rent regime stole June’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion and bru­tally repressed the sub­se­quent demonstrations.
  • The Iran­ian regime irra­tional and crazed, so a doc­trine of mutally assured destruc­tion just would not work with them.
  • The inter­na­tional com­mu­nity would not have put sanc­tions on Iran, and would not be so wor­ried, if it were not a gath­er­ing nuclear threat.

Each of these ten items are tack­led method­i­cally by Cole and the brief piece is worth read­ing if you’re inter­ested in Iran­ian pol­i­tics (or American-Iranian relations).