Iranian Context

One of the UB Med Students was over for lunch this past shabbes. As I am not so fluent in Med School jargon, I was grilling her on Iran and popular sentiment there. She mentioned that every morning at the beginning of school all the students would chant, "Death to America. Death to Israel." (much like I used to say, "I pledge allegiance to the flag..." without really knowing what those words meant). "My parents," she said, "told me to keep quiet when they said death to Israel."

Being Jewish, I can't imagine that she went to a particularly extreme school growing up. The notion that this was the climate 20 years ago in moderate Iran is perfectly terrifying.