There are Muslims who love America - in Iran

http://www.iht.com/articles/518452.html

Nicholas D. Kristof

Finally, I've found a pro-American country.


Partly because being pro-American is a way to take a swipe at the Iranian regime, anything American, from blue jeans to "Baywatch," is revered. At the bookshops, Hillary Clinton gazes out from three different pirated editions of her autobiography.
.
"It's a best-seller, though it's not selling as well as Harry Potter," said Heidar Danesh, a bookseller in Tehran. "The other best-selling authors are John Grisham, Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel."
.
Young Iranians keep popping the question, "So how can I get to the United States?" I ask why they want to go to a nation denounced for its "disgustingly sick promiscuous behavior," but that turns out to be a main attraction. And many people don't believe a word of the Iranian propaganda.
.
"We've learned to interpret just the opposite of things on TV because it's all lies," said Odan Seyyid Ashrafi, 20, a university student. "So if it says America is awful, maybe that means it's a great place to live."
.
One opinion poll showed that 74 percent of Iranians want a dialogue with the United States - and the finding so irritated the authorities that they arrested the pollster. Iran is also the only Muslim country I know of where citizens responded to the Sept. 11 attacks with a spontaneous candlelight vigil as a show of sympathy.
.

Left to its own devices, the Islamic revolution will collapse, and there is a better chance of a strongly pro-American democratic government in Tehran in a decade than in Baghdad. The ayatollahs' best hope is that hard-liners in Washington will continue their inept diplomacy, creating a wave of Iranian nationalism that bolsters the regime - as happened to a lesser degree after Bush put Iran in the axis of evil.
.
Oh, that one instance when I was treated inhospitably? That was in a teahouse near the Isfahan bazaar, where I was interviewing religious conservatives. They were warm and friendly, but a group of people two tables away went out of their way to be rude, yelling at me for being an American propagandist. So I finally encountered hostility in Iran - from a table full of young Europeans.
.

.