I personally know a man who lost his wife (mother of their 3 kids) when Hezbollah bombed the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires. 85 civilians were killed, but then again mostly Jewish so not exactly "random" either.
It always amazes me how many Western activists approach the world like a Hollywood movie. If Saudis are bad, and Trump is bad, then obviously their Shia rivals must be good!
Although I think if only west could stop buying their oils then they both will suffocate. There is not a single country with rich oil in the Middle-east that uses the money from oil for their people. They all have first and second class citizens.
https://tompepinsky.com/2017/01/06/everyday-authoritarianism...
What you hear in the news about Iran is not its everyday life. Imagine if you lived in a country where the only news you saw in the media about the US was violence and police brutality and just all the bad stuff. How would you have imagined it would be like to do something mundane, for example go down the street to buy some milk? You would have imagined that you would get mugged for sure, maybe shot during mugging, then tased by the police that decided to arrest you when you called 911 for an ambulance, and handed a million dollar bill for the hospital stay, and then you have to spend the next 30 years in a for-profit prison as a slave getting constantly sexually assaulted.
The interesting thing is Iranian media portrays the US in the same caricaturistic manner that the US media portrays Iran. My family were legitimately concerned about my safety when I announced my intention to go to Texas for a PhD. Probably as worried as you would be if you had to move to Iran.
(I ended up going to Canada instead, so it's all good.)
by no means are they some altruistic peace lovers, but considering other countries in the region, US could get much more if they would be allies since technically there are no obstacles (apart from 1979 US embassy issue, but nobody got killed, all released eventually... worse things happen, ie Behgazi and nobody cares if it serves some agenda).
If you go there nowadays, all the signs are in 2 languages - Farsi and English. Everybody speaks at least a bit English. Compared to say France :)
It's weird, it's almost like pioneering and supplying technology (VBIED's) to kill American troops, and founding terrorist organizations to kill American allies somehow sours the relationships between the two countries.
If blowing up random civilians is the definition of terror then I'm sure the Syrian government would qualify.