A recent resolution passed by the European Parliament expressed concern about “hate speech and violence” taught in schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), an organization generously funded by the EU. While UNRWA’s critics have long documented the ways its schools inculcate anti-Semitism and support for terrorism into students, until recently Europe has studiously ignored this information. Shany Mor writes:

The resolution reflects two trends in European engagement with the Palestinian issue. First, the Europeans are increasingly concerned about anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement in Palestinian educational materials. They are also troubled by the use of European aid money to fund activities that encourage violence or terrorism by Palestinian factions.

Second, policymakers in Europe are finally beginning to ask tough questions about the kind of organization UNRWA is and whether it is facilitating peace at all. UNRWA’s corruption, its mismanagement, its turning a blind eye to the misuse of its facilities by terrorist organizations, and especially its anti-peace educational materials are now on the agendas of the European Parliament as well as an increasing number of actors in European domestic politics.

UNRWA’s biggest problem, [however], is not corruption or mismanagement or even incitement. UNRWA exists not to mitigate the effects of the Arab-Israeli conflict but rather to exacerbate them. Rather than solving the refugee problem, UNRWA’s dishonest recognition of descendants of refugees perpetuates this problem and ensures that the unrealistic demand for a Palestinian “right of return” will continue to stymie final-status peace negotiations in the future, just as it has since the failed 2000 Camp David summit.

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.”