Thanks dang. The note about scale makes sense; I can't really tell how I would've read the comment before the edit, but it seems plausible that I would've read it similarly to you. And the point about how people respond: it makes sense, thanks. The couple of remaining issues I have:

First: it bothers me that you responded to everything EXCEPT what I had clearly indicated to have been the most important part of my last comment (I marked it as "VERY important")! I can't tell if that means you agree with it, or if you disagree with it, or if you have no idea what to say, or if you forgot to respond to it, but it was literally the only part of my comment that I really hoped for a reply to (which I mentioned in the first line), reproduced here:

>> Second (VERY important), I do think your initial response was excellent. But in your second reply you suddenly went off the mod-rails and provoked a far more awful response when you started calling him "nationalist". Until this point, no particular person had been targeted, and the entire chain had been civil. (Again -- I very much admired how professional and otherwise excellent your initial reply was.) Yet you suddenly derailed and single-handedly flamed him like this. That was just awful and I really did not expect to see it from a mod who's trying to teach users how to avoid provoking others. It honestly made it that much harder to take the rest of what you said seriously and, IMO, completely sent across the wrong message.

Second:

> In your analysis of the original comment you skipped over "Iran is not Saudi Arabia or anything like that". To me that means you're not reading the comment nearly closely enough to assess how provocative these things are.

Interesting! I'm not sure if this is a case of a misunderstanding. I didn't skip over it at all, but rather it never struck me as provocative at all, and it still doesn't. Let me put the context around the quote, because I think it is crucial:

>>> despite our theocratic regime, really I have to mention, Iran is not Suadi Arabia or anything like that. Girls and Boys do get the almost exactly same education, they have great opportunity to be a successful scholar in any branch of science they want

"Despite our theocratic regime" indicates pretty well that this isn't intended to be an Iranian-Saudi fight. There was no hint of the topics that usually come up when that topic arises (notably terrorism and funding of such). The author is clearly not happy with his own government either (again: "despite our theocratic regime"), so the nationalism accusation seems off too. The quote "anything like that" is clearly intended to refute the counterargument "OK, they're not the same, but they're pretty darn close right?". Best as I can tell, Saudi Arabia is pretty clearly chosen here as a point of comparison because it is much more likely to be well-known to and well-understood by the readers, and everything stated after it is merely drawing comparisons using as unbiased- and undisputed-facts as possible. You could honestly substitute any countries here with similar facts ("Italy is not Greece, we haven't defaulted in our history [I think this is true? not sure]", "Turkey is not Iran, despite our Muslim heritage we don't require women to have head coverings", "Britain is not America, we don't allow people to carry guns in public", etc. are some I can think of) and I would feel the same way: it's not provocative at all, it's just stating a well-known, pretty undisputed fact to draw a comparison to illustrate differences that are clear to the writer but not the reader. (If you still find the comment provocative despite all this, I guess we can agree to disagree here. Again, this entire issue is secondary to my first comment above.)

Thanks for the replies!