Remember Iran's so-called Green Revolution in 2009? And, more to the point, the resulting Green Pundit Rush to Judgment?

This was, as noted here in June 2009, the widespread assumption that " `the Persian street' is filled with Our Kind of People: anti-Khomeini, anti-sharia, anti-Islamic Revolution, anti-regime, anti-nuke, pro-West, pro-Israel, pro-secular masses yearning to "free"--  in the specifically Western sense, which emphasizes the rights and will of the individual, and not the Islamic sense, which speaks to a "perfect enslavement" to Allah."

Andrew Bostom flags new Pew poll results that demonstrate the fallacy of this assumption, which has only ossified in the intervening years.

Bostom writes:

Pew polling data released June 11, 2013 (from face-to-face interviews with 1,522 adults, ages 18 years of age and older), reveal an entirely different reality. When asked, “Do you favor or oppose the implementation of  Sharia law, or Islamic law in our country?”,  83% favored its application. A largely concordant finding demonstrated that only 28% of Iranians were at all concerned (i.e., 9% “very,” and 19% “somewhat” concerned) about “extremist religious groups” in the nation.

These data provide the sobering context in which the recent Presidential election of Hasan Rowhani—an unabashed Ayatollah Khomeini-supporting Shiite cleric, and long term political apparatchik of the theocratic regime—must be viewed.

Will hard data affect soft analysis?