In 2011, the British pop singer Alex Clare had finally made it big: his first album was coming out, and he had been scheduled to go on tour with the singer-songwriter Adele. But Clare, raised in a secular Jewish home, had in the previous years embraced strict religious observance, and informed his producers that he would have to miss several concert dates because of Shabbat and Jewish holidays. The record company subsequently dropped him, until, as Paul Glynn reports

several months later, when the newly label-less singer suddenly found himself with a hit on his hands. “Too Close,” . . . from his debut album, began to work its way on to radio playlists and up near the top of the UK singles chart in April 2012, thanks largely to an appearance on a Microsoft advertisement.

“We have a saying in Hebrew, gam zu l’tovah, which means, ‘This too is good,’” says Clare. “We say that when something goes really badly wrong. It’s a crazy [thing] to have enough faith to say, ‘This right now is a really bad situation but ultimately God is good and life is good and this is for a greater good,’ whatever that might be. And in my case it really worked out that way.”

Nine years on, Clare is speaking to us around the release of his new single, “Why Don’t Ya,” another booming ballad which marks the end of his five-year hiatus. . . . The track . . . is an ode to his wife, with whom he “ran away” to Israel in 2015, with their firstborn (they now have three children) to “focus on spirituality” and study the Torah and the Talmud.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”