I will try to answer all of your questions:
As i said before I am secular and I am not happy with what is happening in Iran, but I do believe that the election was free, there might be some low percentage of cheeting but that's inevitable and exist everywhere.
Why group#2 got elected?
In order to understand why Ahamadinezhad is elected we need to understand the structure of the society in Iran. Last year Richard Rorty was invited to Iran and he had a speech in Tehran University, in that speech he said you cannot inject democracy into the society, democracy is a self-adaptive process and you cannot plan for it. He simply implied that you guys (Iranians) cannot have democracy, and of course that makes lots of intellectuals angry in Iran but I am totally agree with his insights. In Iran people are looking for a government that doesn't bother them and let them live! Ahamadinezhad was very unknown, and the only official post he had before election was being the meyor of Tehran for a short period of time, he also has PHD in Mechanical Engineering (Education considers as a very high value in Iran) from an accredited universtiy in Tehran. Most importantly he was not mullah (no turban!), before election when I was talking to people, they were saying (exact quote) "at least this guy doesn't have any turban and he is not connected to anybody". He is a perfect living example of populism. Actually i have the videos of some of his before election speeches for instance he said "I will bring oil money to everybody's home" or "Women can go and watch the soccer matches!" or "Who cares what kind of the dress our girls wearing, we need to put our focus on the economical issue" (take a look at this, two days ago in Tehran
http://www.farsnews.com/plarg.php?nn=M175747.jpg ) or "I will not drive Benz(Official government car) unless everybody in iran drive a benz" this was why he got elected as simple as that. One of his rival promised people to give everybody $100 if he get elected, can you believe that? and he get 8,000,000 votes!!! Don't get me wrong the same thing could have also happened in US but if somebody makes such a comment the media will crush him, but as i said before media in Iran is in hand of government and cannot freely act. But why they didn't stop ahamdinezhad you may ask? because on that time khamaneye prefers him to his main rival Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani is very powerful and somehow I cannot categorized him, but he is definitely partly in group#3.
What did i meant by ransom?
Before everything get messed up European were promising Iran if you stop the nuclear process we are willing to give some free trade options instead and also we will provide you different way of accessing the nuclear energy which is more advance and cheaper. And the Iranian negotiator were keep bargaining about the amount. And that was their biggest mistake. And also European mistake that didn't solve the problem quicker.
Explaining Israel comment?
Again I need to prepare a long introduction before answering this. A month ago parliament in Iran agreed to $50,000,000 yearly aid for Hemas. This makes lots of people mad, even the non-educated in the remote area, why? Let me explaing it to you in more detail. I agree that considerable amount of the people in Iran (I hesitate to say Majority I think it needs an election) do not like Israel and this is a political problem in Iran, but as an Iranian I am ashamed to say that they also hate Arabs (this one is a social problem and government still struglling to solve this), and this is more a racial problem rather than political one, which I think needs lots of planning to get fixed. When I say majority I mean %99+, hates Arabs, you can test this and call an Iranian an Arab and watch his reaction! This is also vice-versa, Arabs call Iranian, outsiders. After Iranian adapted Islam, they created another version of it and called it Shi'a (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi'a) of course majority of the Shi'as say this is BS, but believe me it was invented by Iranians. Majority of Arabs (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yaman, UAE, Pakistan, Palestine, Egypt, Syria) are sunni and they call Shi'as apostate (they call you infidel), and a huge subset of this sunnis are called Wahabis(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahabi all the 911 highjackers, all the suicide bombers, al-Qaida, Pakistan and Saudi basically US allies in middle east!) they believe if they kill a Shi'a they will directly go to heaven. Do you know three years before US invasion to Afganistan, Taliban beheaded (yes with sword) 12 Iranian diplomats in Iran embassy in Kabul (read guardian events on 1998
http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,557393,00.html) no really have you even heard of this before!
So you should understand the scenario in Iran is a bit different. Was those jewish comments for people? I don't think so. People hear these type of comments every day from the more important people in iran, but this was the first time a government official said it loud. Everyone in Iran were surprised about the world reaction to these comments, because Khomeini and other religious leader that have more power than ahamdinezhad were saying it literally everyday after the revolution. I believe those comments were mostly prepared to screw up the nuclear negotiations that government rivals were started. Larijani (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Larijani) was leading the negotiation and he is the trustee of Khamaneye, he was imposed to ahamadinezhad by khamaneye. Interestingly he was one of the presidential candidate who get the lowest amount of the votes because everyone knew his connection with khameneye, before election he used to manage the national TV in Iran.
About that book I would like to make you happy and promise you that I will read it, but there are lots of books in my priority list to read. For instance I prefer to understand more about pragmatism and also history of US but I will add it to my "Must Read" book difinitely.
How can we get rid of this regime? Hmmm! that's a good question, Iran probably is the only country in the middle east (beside Israel and not even Turkey) that its people is pro-west! but how can they get rid of this anti-west government i really don't know, all I know is war is not definitely an answer and make everything worse for the people of Iran but I believe it is comming, because US will get lots of benefit from this war (look what US government spokesman have to say about this
http://mediamatters.org/items/200603100008 ). This war can harm China, India, Russia and also European, so why not? Who the fucking cares about the soldiers, or "uncivilized" people of iran and their ugly and dirty children!
"Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?" Orson Welles' character, The Third Man(1949)
By the way listen to this one, Ahamadinezhad senior advisor yesterday said Emam Mahdi(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahdi)'s sword will behead some of the mullahs and will destroy US as soon as he rise!!!!!!! So be warned!
We are living in a mad mad mad world, I wish, we, the liberal people (preferably atheist!), could have our own country in our own planet!