On Tuesday, the funeral of a ḥasidic rabbi in Brooklyn attracted a large crowd and, despite the efforts of its organizers—in coordination with municipal authorities—the police eventually dispersed the crowd. The same evening, New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio made the following announcement over Twitter, “My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the [New York Police Department] to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.”

John Podhoretz, addressing de Blasio directly, writes:

[L]ike moral ciphers from time immemorial, you decided to seek your jollies by attacking Jews.

There’s no way to read your tweet from Tuesday night in an exculpatory fashion. . . . Your own police department helped arrange street closures for the funeral with the Satmar Ḥasidim. People came out to show their respects to the dead. They were wearing masks. Yes, they showed up in greater numbers than was safe. That is clear. But the very same police officers who set up the pylons closing the streets to car traffic could have limited the numbers, the way they do on New Year’s Eve around Times Square.

What we saw here was therefore a failure of authority. Your authority. Not a failure of “the Jewish community.” And yet, when you announced you were going to the site personally to address this outrage, what you saw were: bad Jews.

Under your watch, as mayor, there has been an anti-Jewish crime wave in this city. Last year alone, anti-Semitic hate crimes rose 29 percent, prominently featuring the random sucker-punch attacks we’ve all seen on video. After remaining shockingly silent about them for a very long time, you finally spoke out in December 2019. In appointing a task force to look into the violent assaults on Jews in the five boroughs, you said, “An attack on the Jewish community is an attack on all New Yorkers.”

Maybe you should appoint a task force to investigate yourself.

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.”