"After two years of living and traveling I was thrilled to travel to Europe and then home where the world was more familiar and therefore more comfortable.”

If you can describe a return to a stable democratic sphere with freedom to express ideas and to conduct your interpersonal life as you saw fit as merely being the “familiar” and the “comfortable,” then as a committed liberal it seems futile to try to argue with such entrenched relativism, which many of your other comments exude as well.

I am indeed a person upset with the state of the world because as a independent woman, agnostic and a lesbian I affront the “sensibilities” as you put it of too many of the cultural and religious groups which the New Left has spent forty years defending at the expense of classical liberal values. As a young person I furthermore have to live with the consequences of your generation's effect on our society.

"If it weren't for our greed for oil in 1953, Iran would be a thriving democracy - do you know what I'm alluding to? Didn't think so."

To claim that Iran would still be a democracy if not for the overthrow of the Mossadeqh government is speculative at best. Many nascent democracies in that period including Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan suffered coups (with to without Western intervention) and the consequences reverberate to this day.

Moreover it is baseless arrogance for you to assume that I am ignorant of Iranian history and its current cultural ethos, although as an American citizen I am rightly or wrongly banned from traveling to Iran and thus have not seen it first hand. You celebrate this alleged urban debauchery but maybe if Iranians put that energy into overthrowing the Islamic regime they might actually get to experience real freedom and economic growth. But then again maybe the modern Iranian has just been too enervated by thirteen centuries under an alien religion brought by Arab invaders to have the self-confidence it takes to live free lives. 'Submission' is just so much easier, non?

"Is there a single thread relating to the Islamic world that you haven't missed posting your hatred and venom on?"

Islam is a critically important issue on the world stage and my comments obviously threaten your position enough that you are reduced instantly to the most base name calling. I mean you are so concerned about my comments on Muslim world that you make no effort to offer any substantive response to my assertions.

Your argument that Iran is a developing nation and should be given moral leway is entirely specious.

A) The US developed with no template of a more civilised society to guide it. Westerners pioneered the concept of human rights as a self-evident concept (religions may offer innate rights but only till you tread on god's toes), including ending slavery and coporeal punishment. Our on-going failings in living up to our own avowed principles are widely elucidated and discussed.

B) Iran claims to follow god's perfect revealed word in Qur'an. They raise themselves to the most arrogant heights and then they get beset by well-deserved criticism. What a pity.

Playing favorites is an illiberal and indefensible practise which ultimately is patronizing to the 'developing peoples' upon whose behalf it is offered. They are human beings responsible for their own failings and with the ability to not repeat our (Westerners') mistakes.