So there is a conspiracy theory doing the rounds in the Middle East that 300, the new blood-soaked movie about the Ancient Greeks walloping the Persians back in 480BC, is actually neoconservative propaganda for a military strike on Iran.

Now, as much as I hate to spoil a bout of nuclear paranoia, I suspect that the real explanation for 300 may be rather more boring than a plot to raze Tehran. In fact, it may have a little more to do with the recent elections in Beverly Hills — the city to which many of the Hollywood executives responsible for such big-budget movies such as 300 go home at night.

Consider this, for example: about 8,000 of the 35,000 residents of Beverly Hills are Persians. On the whole they’ve done very well for themselves (and their community) — you can see them cruising around in their two-tone Maybach 57s between the flashier restaurants and their sprawling faux palaces on Beverly Drive. And before you get any ideas about sleeper cells, I should point out that most of these Persians are Jews who fled Iran in the 1970s after the fall of the Shah.

One such Persian is Jimmy “Jamshid” Delshad, a 66-year-old computer hardware entrepreneur, soon to be rotated into the position of Mayor of Beverly Hills, thus becoming the first Persian mayor of any city in the US. “I want to make Beverly Hills one of the safest cities in the nation,” he recently told The Wall Street Journal, presumably referring to all those terrifying parking violations on Rodeo Drive, and that incident back in 1983 when a female shopper felt briefly threatened by a man with inexpensive shoes.

But not everyone is pleased about the Persian invasion. For a start, several hundred Beverly Hills residents of the Will Rogers generation — the humourist was the first honorary mayor — lodged official complaints about their ballot being printed in Farsi (“New Ballots Went Too Farsi” read the headline in the Los Angeles Times).

There have also been tensions between Persians and European Jews at the local temple. The biggest concern, however, is over “Persian palaces” — massive, poor-taste mansions, complete with bronze statues, Romanesque columns and pink stucco walls, often built after demolishing an historic Spanish colonial property. Fearing accusations of racism, objectors have taken to referring to the Persians as “Canadians”, so that when a “Canadian mansion” is brought up during a planning meeting, like-minded people know what they’re talking about. To be fair, of course, many Persians also find these mansions objectionable, and Persians aren’t the only people responsible for building them.

So, yes: 300 could be neoconservative propaganda for a strike on Iran. Or it could be the result of a Hollywood mogul waking up one day to find his view of the Santa Monica mountains obscured by an enormous gold-leafed spire on top of a ten-car garage.

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