I grew up in a town that had a lot of wealthy Iranians. A lot of them are the children of the people who left Iran during the 1979 revolution and are raised as atheists and say the typical orientalist nonsense about Islam, like their European counterparts , they view Islam as a race and racialize Islam as Arab and Arabs as monolithically Muslim. its worse , some say we aren’t Muslims because we aren’t Arab, what ??? It’s so odd to me because these people who are raised as atheists start claiming they are Zoroastrianists or whatever , and never have they ever read any religious text of this religion by the people who are the founders or prophet of this religion. They are so accustomed and conditioned to hearing Islam is evil and bad , and hear that Iran was Zoroastrian before becoming Muslim and they start wearing bird necklaces of some Zoroastrian god they know nothing about. This is so weird to me. I do not understand what is up with these people’s literal hatred for Islam. One guy I met who is also of the diaspora said , we were forced to convert to Islam. But this does not make sense to me because when I was reading on Islam spreading in what we call today Iran , much of Iran was converted to Islam by other Persian dynasties, the Muslim majority population took hundreds of years and did not occur under the rule of any Arab empire, heck the Umayyad did not force convert populations to Islam they had policies discouraging conversion to Islam , so there’s a contradiction going on , especially when we consider how much Persian people have enriched the Islamic tradition , had Islamic revival movements , and played a major role in the Islamic tradition and for even spreading Islam. So I am very very suspicious of the validity of the classic Islamophobic claim these diasporas love to adopt , say and spread. Not to mention that when these diaspora Iranians go on their Islamophobia, they use material from the Sunni corpus of Islam to distort for their Islamophobic rhetoric , much like their European counterparts and predecessors heavily relying on distorting the Sunni corpus of Islamic theology for their Islamophobia, never do I see these diasporas distort or use the Shi’i corpus to distort for their Islamophobia which is weird to me as Iran is mostly shi’i and not Sunni.

I also find these types to also echo a whole bunch of white supremacist talking points too. I met one guy who is Iranian but raised in Canada and listening to him you would have thought this was a white supremacist. He was so against native people’s rights where we live and was parroting typical right wing racist rhetoric on why indigenous people should not get their land back. I’ve met a lot who are also very anti-black as well and say typical classic racist stuff about black people here. It’s crazy but I got into an argument with one guy who’s of the Iranian diaspora because I did not validate his claim of whiteness (he was going on about his supposed whiteness and being prideful and arrogant about it too (even in skin colour wise he is brown and hairy), as someone born and raised in the west, I said , you’re not white , and he was so pissed off and triggered and started being racist towards me).

I don’t understand these people. They sound so much like Zionists it’s gross. Why are they like this ?