What's Wrong With Persia

There are several pro Persian reviews of the film 300 over at Yahoo movies, shouldn't they be more concerned about the immanent nuclear immolation of modern Persia a.k.a. Iran?:

This movie is completely wrong by ohbabyjoon (movies profile) Mar 9, 2007 22 of 105 people found this review helpful What do you guys have against persians by making movies like this or alexander? Whatever greece has as far as art, science, their buildings, culture, and etc has it all from persians. persians rulled the whole world for soooo many years and decades, whats your point of degrading this powerfull nation?

I'm not sure if this person is serious. What's wrong with Persia? What's right with it, then or now, other than great rugs made by child labor? I don't think the concept of democracy came from Persia. Homer, Plato, Socrates, Sophocles, Sappho, diners, etc. ditto. I guess the answer to her question is that in our infancy, western tradition was nearly strangled in it's crib time and again by Persia. So yeah, from a Western perspective, Persia is the enemy. Don't take my word for it, read VDH.

So almost immediately, contemporary Greeks saw Thermopylae as a critical moral and culture lesson. In universal terms, a small, free people had willingly outfought huge numbers of imperial subjects who advanced under the lash. More specifically, the Western idea that soldiers themselves decide where, how, and against whom they will fight was contrasted against the Eastern notion of despotism and monarchy — freedom proving the stronger idea as the more courageous fighting of the Greeks at Thermopylae, and their later victories at Salamis and Plataea attested.