But what to make of this misdirected allegation : is it utter dishonesty or utter ignorance? Either way, it is actively or passively part of a disinf… - Koenraad Elst

According to the cover text on his book, Eaton is professor of History at the University of Arizona and “a leading historian of Islam”. Had he defended the thesis that iconoclasm is rooted in Islam itself, he would have done justice to the evidence from Islamic sources, yet he would have found it very hard to get published by Oxford University Press or reach the status of leading Islam scholar that he now enjoys. One can easily become an acclaimed scholar of Hinduism by lambasting and vilifying that religion, but Islam is somehow more demanding of respect.

Rather, the Iranian division of society has a similar origin as the same division in Indian society. The Iranians came from India, as Shrikant Talageri has convincingly demonstrated. Moreover, the division is a natural one, present in every society. It may be tempting to push responsibility far from you, preferably to a foreign source, but in this case the Iranian option doesn’t fulfil your wish. Their status of “foreigner” is ambiguous, given that they came from India and are one of the “five peoples” alongside the Vedic tribe, deemed to descend from the two brothers Anu c.q. Puru, two of the five sons of Yayati. Iranians are quite present in the Veda, such as through the sages Bhrigu and Cyavana.

But that "pogrom" was a media invention... With this atrocity propaganda, the media provoked the Muslims into a "retaliation" which was all too real.