While the Jews of Calcutta live in a multicultural city with a large Muslim population, not unlike Toronto and Montreal, they do not exhibit the fears that Canadian Jews reasonably have. This Jewish community was founded in the 18th century by enterprising emigrants from Aleppo, Baghdad, and elsewhere in the Middle East, and its members are thus known as Baghdadis. Yet despite high levels of tolerance increasingly rare in the diaspora, the community is shrinking. Sayan Lodh reports on attending the funeral of one of Calcutta’s last Jewish grandees, Flower Silliman:

The often-empty synagogue was again full of life, filled with people whose lives Flower touched in one way or another.

Hebrew and English songs were performed by Catholic students, originally from Mizoram, attending college in Calcutta. A family friend, Aparna Guha, sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” while Muslim students of the city’s Jewish Girls School—Flower had been the school’s oldest living alumnus—sang “Shalom Aleichem.” . . .

Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jewish community has fewer than twenty members. . . . Nearly all the remaining Jewish institutions (synagogues, schools, and cemetery) of Calcutta are now maintained by Muslim caretakers. Moreover, most of the students in the city’s two Jewish schools are Muslim. Due to similarities in religious and dietary rituals, Jews in Calcutta primarily employ Muslims as [domestic] helpers and cooks.

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.”