Re: where to start
All right, I'll answer point by point.
1: Fair enough about the Sunni/Shia situation - you obviously know more about that than I do, and sorry if I misrepresented things. Perhaps a better example would be the situation in Bosnia as it was for years - religious differences that had been bubbling for centuries, until suddenly - BOOM! Or the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda - that hatred was only decades old, but it led to millions dead in a shockingly short period of time.
2: I'll grant you that I haven't read the full issue this was in, so I may not have gotten the full situation; I was just going on my impressions given what I HAD read.
3: I'll grant you that they're a small minority - I wasn't saying 'all Muslims act like this', just that a certain subsection of them do. And say what you will, but it IS true that 'honor killings' and the like ARE a definite factor in some parts of the Middle East - I'm not saying they're something that everyone agrees with or goes along with, but they're out there.
4: He'd also been there. I'm not saying that your experiences are therefore invalid or anything, but multiple viewpoints on a situation tend to bring different facets of it into view. (And incidentally, the Peace Corps guy wasn't there to tell us horror stories - he'd actually really loved the middle east and its people, from what I recall; it was just that he HAD had some bad experiences there, and he told us those, too.)
5: Man, hang on a second. I will willingly grant you that I'm not as well-read on the situation as you are, but I would say that Persepolis IS 'the real dope', or some of it. Marjane Satrapi is an Iranian who wrote an autobiographical account of her experiences in Iran - I think that goes a bit beyond 'the talking heads on Fox and CNN'. (And I DO listen to Amy Goodman, just for the record.) A look at the riots occurring there even as we speak will tell you that what she says has a basis in fact.
6: I don't really think that's a valid argument. I don't know what the political sympathies of this comic's writer are, but I didn't really get the impression that the members of this society are supposed to be MONSTROUS (the fact that they're werewolves aside) so much as misguided. I mean, the girl's fiancee is actually fairly sympathetic up 'til the point where he suggests that he become a suicide bomber - and even then, this is clearly more the result of a deep religious faith than an outright act of malice. The writer may well be misrepresenting and oversimplifying the situation, but 'monstrous' is not the vibe I got - though, as I said, I haven't read the whole comic.