Remember that time an Apple employee in the U.S. state of Georgia refused to sell a computer to a woman he had heard speaking Farsi because ‘our countries have bad relations’?
Well me and the 29 other people who signed the change.org petition do!
But then Reuters produced a confusing story: ‘Despite sanctions, Apple gear booms in Iran.’ Aside from the obviously unintended but still kind of vulgar and insensitive pun, the headline illustrates the deep divide between the picture of Iran and Iranian people as vastly different from us and worthy of sanctions and bombing, and the reality that Iranians are human beings like us who need to piss everyone off with their annoying thoughts on the Internet while looking down on non-Apple users.
Iran and the US, after all, have many things in common: they hated the Shah because he was a brutal dictator supported by the US, and we hated the Shah when he failed at being a brutal dictator. They have lots of oil, we love oil. They suppress freedom of speech and political activities, we are awesome at that, too!
Iran, really, we have so much in common.