In an interview published on Monday, the Taiwanese foreign minister Joseph Wu warned Yaakov Katz about the implications of Israel’s reliance on Beijing, citing an American diplomat who said, “you must be doing something right when China gets upset.” In response, a Chinese official reportedly threatened to curtail relations with Israel. In the original interview, Katz also sketched some of the reasons why Taiwan is particularly wary of China today, as well as the complex history of Israel-Taiwan ties.

On Monday—just before he sat down for the interview—Wu said that around eighteen Chinese jets crossed into Taiwanese economic waters. . . . He said that over the last year, China has flown 972 sorties into Taiwanese air-defense identification zones and more recently, deployed an aircraft-carrier strike force to the east of the island. Taiwan, he added, is the number-one target of Chinese disinformation efforts and cyberattacks.

The interview with Wu came just a week after U.S. president Joe Biden warned that China was “flirting with danger” over Taiwan, and promised to intervene militarily to protect the island if it is attacked.

Israel-Taiwanese relations are complicated, mostly due to Israeli concerns that overt diplomatic ties with the island nation will upset China, one of Israel’s largest trade partners. Earlier this month, for example, the Foreign Ministry reportedly ordered Israeli diplomats stationed around the world to refrain from inviting Taiwanese officials to Israeli events or from participating in events organized by Taiwanese diplomats.

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.”