Emil Fackenheim was one of the most important and profound Jewish theologians of the postwar era, perhaps best known for his famous formulation of a “614th commandment”—in addition to the 613 rabbinic tradition identified in the Torah—“to deny Hitler the posthumous victory” by preserving the Jewish people and religion. James A. Diamond reviews Kenneth Hart Green’s new study of this rabbi’s thought:

As Elie Wiesel put it, not only man but the Idea of Man died as well at Auschwitz. Green’s exhaustive study is in a profound sense an extended investigation of how Fackenheim channeled Wiesel’s lyrical perception into a philosophical one.

But here is what I found most problematic with Fackenheim’s philosophical theology: . . . while moving away from divine revelation, and at the same time, salvaging some transcendent authority for moral imperatives rooted in Auschwitz, he resorted to characterizing its source as a “negative Absolute” variously emanating from “demonic,” “diabolical,” and even “Satanic” forces. It is difficult to understand how this does not amount to some form of dualistic gnosticism, acknowledging Evil as some ontologically independent power.

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.”