Author: Holly Dagres

Holly Dagres is an Iranian American analyst and commentator on Middle East affairs. Currently living in Egypt, she is the assistant editor at the policy journal, the Cairo Review of Global Affairs. Follow her on Twitter at @hdagres.

“We were white until the Arabs came and raped our women,” is the sort of thing you’ll hear Iranian Americans say, when expressing their distaste for Islam. A reverse Orientalism in a sense, they will often refer to Arabs–Gulf Arabs, mainly– as ‘locust eaters’ (malakh khor) (More…)

In 2007, when former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared during a Columbia University appearance, “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country,” many chuckled. It seemed to verify the average person’s preconceptions of the country as being primitive and socially backwards. (More…)