While vacationing in Nantucket last week, Joe Biden was photographed walking out of a bookstore holding The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017. This book is the work of the retired academic and former PLO spokesman (a position he held long before the group made a pretense of forsaking terrorism) Rashid Khalidi, one of the deans of anti-Israel pseudo-scholarship. Jonathan Schanzer describes meeting Khalidi in February 2001, while searching for a dissertation adviser:

Khalidi asked me what I wanted to study. I told him that I wanted to conduct comparative research on the ideologies of violent Islamist movements in the Middle East. That sounds like something Zionist think tanks study, Khalidi told me.

I flinched. But I didn’t back down. I told him that al-Qaeda, Hamas, the Taliban, and other groups had been terrorizing the region in recent years. The news was filled with stories about their attacks. But few academics had taken the time, at least back then, to understand their motivations. Khalidi responded negatively. He told me that these news reports were wildly exaggerated. He said that this was the way newspapers sold advertising.

So, I asked him: What would you have me study? He looked at me for a moment. The room was eerily quiet. “Palestinian poetry,” he said.

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.”