Last Thursday marked the 143rd birthday of the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, who killed himself in 1942, facing the complete collapse of the world he knew. Jay Nordlinger writes:

Zweig grew up in a “golden age of security,” as he terms it. This sense of security was imparted to widening circles of people, not just the comfortably off or advantageously born. Even the Jews, such as Zweig and his family, felt secure. . . . Vienna was a great, open, liberal city. The “genius of Vienna,” writes Zweig, was that “it harmonized all national and linguistic opposites in itself.” Nowhere, he says, “was it easier to be a European.” That was then.

Zweig saw most of that security collapse with World War I and the disintegration of the tolerant and multiethnic Hapsburg empire. Yet he understood well that this security was for the most part illusory to begin with, “a castle in the air,” as he put it—a theme that occurs again and again beneath the surface of his fiction. And it’s worth noting that some of his contemporaries saw through the illusion in real time, among them Theodor Herzl, a fellow Viennese Jew Zweig admired very much, who had embraced Zionism before the younger writer had published his first book.

As bad as things were in the wake of World War I, Zweig, unlike Herzl, lived to see them get much worse. Nordlinger continues:

“More and more clearly,” writes Zweig, “I began to detect a certain insecurity in people’s behavior as they started to waver. Your own small personal experiences of life are always more persuasive than anything else.” Yes. One day, on the street in Salzburg, Zweig noticed something telltale.

An old friend of his avoided greeting him. The next day, to make up for it, the friend called on Zweig at home. The truth was plain: it was becoming dangerous to be friendly in public with Jews—even world-famous ones. Zweig went into exile, in England.

To some Jews today, this might sound more than a little familiar.

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.”