Recently Israeli security personnel raided the offices of several non-governmental organizations because of their close ties to Palestinian terrorist groups—receiving widespread condemnation, and not just from the usual corners. The State Department spokesman Ned Price said that American senior officials were “concerned” about the raids and stated pointedly that “independent civil-society organizations in the West Bank and Israel must be able to continue their important work.” Price added that the U.S. would examine any information about these groups passed on by Israeli authorities, but it had so far not seen any evidence it considered damning. Melanie Phillips notes, however, that ample evidence that the NGOs in question serve as fronts for terrorists is readily available in the public domain:

Since 2007, [the Israel-based group] NGO Monitor has published numerous reports based on open sources that have documented the close connections between a number of NGOs and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Last year, NGO Monitor identified a network of thirteen such groups, including the seven identified by Israel, linked to the PFLP and funded by European or other governments.

Moreover, some countries whose governments have expressed outrage at Israel’s action have themselves identified such links. [An] investigation commissioned by the United States Agency of International Development (USAID) described [one such Palestinian group], the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, as being the PFLP’s agricultural arm.

In 2020, the Netherlands government admitted that part of a Dutch aid package was used to pay the salaries of two of this agricultural union’s employees charged with murdering Rina Shnerb, a seventeen-year-old Israeli who was killed in 2019 by a roadside bomb in the disputed territories, and it temporarily halted those aid payments.

But how can these governments maintain that they have seen no evidence to support Israel’s claim? What they actually mean is that they reject Israel’s evidence. This may be because the political and diplomatic parts of government often don’t know what the counterterrorism and security parts are discovering. . . . What’s more likely, however, is that such governments simply refuse to engage with any evidence that would undermine their own strategy against Israel.

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.”