Nation: We're Going to Kick Your Butts

Waving American flags and carrying an outsize picture of John Wayne, 1,500 angry Texans marched on the Iranian consulate in Houston. In Beverly Hills, police arrested 136 anti-Shah Iranian demonstrators who were attacked by a mob shouting, "Deport! Deport! Deport!" In Springfield, Mass., 30 Iranian students demanding the Shah's extradition were pelted with rocks, bottles and eggs. At the University of Minnesota, students hurled snowballs at protesting members of a Muslim student association. A few blocks from the White House, 900 Iranian demonstrators traded taunts, and even a few punches, with jeering bystanders chanting, "A thousand for one!" in an ominous reference to the 60 or so American hostages in Iran.

Similar outbursts took place across the nation last week, as angry Americans focused their rage on the nearest available symbol of the Khomeini regime: some 40,000 often militant Iranian students attending U.S. colleges and universities. Many Americans suddenly decided that these students were no longer welcome. New York Congressman Leo Zeferetti called for the immediate deportation of the Iranians who had dangled a 140-ft. banner from the Statue of Liberty demanding: THE SHAH MUST BE TRIED AND PUNISHED. After wrapping up his report last Thursday night, Cleveland Sportscaster Gibb Shanley set fire to a small Iranian flag. "I know it's not sports," he explained to his television audience, "but it is an Iranian flag. Anybody from Iran in this country who does not like it here should leave." Station WEWS-TV received 600 calls about Shanley's symbolic gesture, only 15 of them unfavorable. At the University of Texas at Austin, a student knocked over the table where several Iranians were seated. Shouted another Texas student at an Iranian schoolmate: "If you hate this country so much, if it's a filthy stinking cesspool, why don't you go back where you came from? If you try to push the American people around, we're going to kick your butts."

The majority of Iranian students were, and are, bitter opponents of the Shah. But some have grown accustomed to life in the U.S., and many have no wish to return to the uncertain prospects of Khomeini's Iran. Temporarily, at least, the U.S. has become an uncomfortable haven for the students. "People are going to start calling for our heads," worried one Iranian at Columbia. To avoid the ire of Americans, many Iranian students have adopted a low profile, saying little or nothing about recent events in Tehran. "Iranians usually don't take things passively," said Marilyn Thompson, director of foreign students at Central Y.M.C.A. Community College in Chicago. "But right now most of them feel that they better cool it or they will be sent home."

The students who will talk are divided. One faction, though adamantly opposed to the Shah, is equally dismayed about the course of Khomeini's revolution. Said Djabbari, 22, one of the 900 Iranians at the University of Southern California, explained this: "We wanted a democracy, not a theocracy.

I think the seizure is extremely irresponsible and in defiance of all international laws. I don't understand why such a student action can be endorsed by the legitimate government of any nation." Others staunchly defend the embassy seizure. Said an accounting major at Chicago's Roosevelt University: