Last week, the Turkish ambassador to the Jewish state presented his credentials to President Isaac Herzog, ending a four-year period without an ambassador, and signaling the gradual thaw in relations between Jerusalem and Ankara. Yet Hamas continues to use Turkey as its base of operations. Yoni Ben Menachem writes:

Several senior leaders of Hamas and their families now live permanently in Turkey, and some have received Turkish passports. In addition to engaging in terrorism, the Hamas officials have also established their own businesses. [The Hamas politburo chairman] Ismail Haniyeh’s son, Hazem, moved his family from Gaza to Turkey, meaning that the Hamas head has transferred almost his entire family from Qatar and Gaza to Turkey. Details of their exit from Gaza were leaked from Egyptian lists of residents departing via the Rafah crossing on Egypt’s border. In response, Gazans expressed outrage on their social media.

The intelligence branch of the military wing of Hamas continues to operate unhindered in Istanbul, with the approval of Turkish intelligence, despite Israel’s protests. Senior Israeli security officials have revealed details regarding some of the activities of this branch in the field of intelligence beyond directing and funding terrorist activity in Judea and Samaria. According to security sources, the Hamas branch in Istanbul collects intelligence on Israel for Iran in exchange for large sums of money.

In the branch office in Istanbul, there is a special monitoring room where Hamas terrorists who have been released from Israeli prisons and who understand Hebrew fluently, along with members of the Hamas cyber unit, monitor the communication networks and phone calls of the IDF, social networks, and computer communications. This information is then passed on to Iranian intelligence.

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.”