Famed even in his own lifetime for his vast erudition and single-minded devotion to study, Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman Kramer (1720-1797)—better known as the Vilna Gaon—became after his death a symbol of old-fashioned learning and piety. A bookbinding from a volume of the Bible that once belonged to the Gaon was recently put on auction in Jerusalem, as the Jerusalem Post reports:

As proof of its . . . origin, an antique slip of paper glued to the inner binding attests, “Tanakh studied by the teacher and master of Israel, the pious Vilna Gaon, may the memory of the righteous be a blessing.” Additionally, the inside paper lining of the back of the binding states the name of the owner: “Rabbi Yaakov Moshe, grandson of the Gaon.”

[Thus], this 18th-century Tanakh was apparently bequeathed by the Vilna Gaon to his grandson Yaakov Moshe of Slonim, son of Rabbi Avraham, the son of the Vilna Gaon, who was a prominent Torah scholar who toiled to edit and publish his grandfather’s legacy.

[T]here are very few remaining items known to have belonged to the Vilna Gaon or even to have been touched by his hands. Among the extant items is his set of the Talmud with his personal annotations.

As the Gaon did not write for publication, much of what are now known as his commentaries were in fact the annotations he wrote in the margins of his books, brought to the public posthumously by his sons. Most of his other works were manuscripts located among his effects after his death.

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.”