In 1951, the radical historian Herbert Read invited a little-known poet named Emanuel Litvinoff to read his work at a distinguished London literary gathering. Litvinoff announced that he would be reading an ode to T.S. Eliot, who happened to be present. The poem began with praise, but then moved to a lyrical attack on Eliot’s anti-Semitism, deftly playing on the slurs found in his poems (“Bleistein is my relative/ and I share the protozoic slime of Shylock”) and eventually working up to this:

Yet walking with Cohen when the sun exploded
and darkness choked our nostrils
and the smoke drifting over Treblinka
reeked of the smoldering ashes of children,
I thought what an angry poem
you would have made of it, given the pity.

Jack Omer-Jackaman comments on the scene:

Had the evening seen only the performance of such an eloquently wrathful poem, had it seen only such a courageous display of Jewish self-respect and such a dignified rebuke of respectable anti-Semitism, then it would still have been enough to be worthy of recall and analysis. But it is the response to Litvinoff that remains instructive. The audience hissed, and both Read and the poet Stephen Spender publicly rebuked him. Read thought it was “bad form.” Speaking to the press after the event, Spender offered this chillingly obsequious banality: “He was classing Eliot with the people who committed atrocities on Jews, whereas I believe that anything Eliot has written about Jews comes under the heading of criticism.”

It’s hard to read that and not think of the English leftists who spew the vilest anti-Semitism and then insist they are merely engaged in “criticism” of Israel. Such “willful obtuseness,” Omer-Jackaman observes, was the typical English way of denying anti-Semitism then, and remains so today.

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.”