Iran successfully launches indigenous Chamran 1 satellite into space

In my country you can send your children to any kind of religious or secular school, or school them at home. Education is not in any sense a feedback loop with a particular mainstream culture. Nor is it inculcating the law of the land as a belief system.

When I say 'personal opinion', I don't care where it arises from: Be it religion or heresy, or what your government has taught you or what your ancient culture dictates, that's just your opinion. Somewhere, someone believes otherwise.

Democracies which function well seek to strike a balance between those, not to obliterate the minority.

Minorities win in America, in every sense. Immigrant cultures and subculture and counterculture lead to innovation, to the extent they're allowed to thrive. The law recognizes this and, in large over a long time, adjusts to accommodate. Integration in the US is in many ways tolerance.

Hong Kong was a highly successful democracy until its freedom was taken. Taiwan is a democracy which respects minority opinion. Both are/were tolerant of protests which could never take place in mainland China. Who is even to say that China's government has anything to do with protecting culture or majority belief? A majority in China may well believe that their government is illegitimate, but simply cannot say so because "bodily survival takes precedence", exactly because the current order does interfere in threatening says. Although certainly, even this suppression of the majority pales in comparison to the horrific treatment of minorities there.

What does it have to do with the CIA coup installing the shah? Easy:

1) what happened in Iran? Socialist revolution, allied with a religious party ... followed by the religious side attacking their leftist "allies" when the state was toppled.

2) I find it hard to believe that Khomeini ordering his troops, after a referendum, to start executing leftists, and blinding yet more leftists (gouging one or two eyes out, which they have Hezbollah do again in last year's "woman, life, freedom" protests). It's a lot tougher to disagree with this strategy knowing that in the next country over leftists killed, tortured and maimed the clergy.

Like in most socialist revolutions (like in the red vs white terror in the Soviet Union), you were better off as one of the soldiers killing revolutionaries than you were as a "victorious" revolutionary. The reason leftists, at least the leaders, did a revolution turned out, surprise!, not to be social justice but power for themselves, and so they're far more scared of their allies than the police and army forces they need to keep control of what they've won.

Leftists brought the ayatollahs to power. Yes, this was partly in reaction to a British/US ("CIA") coup 20 years earlier, but ...

And I get it. Leftists have no allies willing to destroy western (or even non-Western) states for them anymore. So now they ally with islamists, who also want to destroy western states. What happened in Iran is a very in-your-face example of what would happen if a socialist-islamist alliance actually achieves anything: immediate terror attacks on leftists, followed by constant repression. And, to make matters worse, the Iranian population is screaming about this, regularly drawing attention to the problem. Which is a huge problem to grow leftist parties, because leftists don't have any other allies.

And yes, I'm not very leftist, but I must say, it is absolutely baffling to me that leftists would ally with conservative muslims, even if the Iran example did not exist.