Last month, mainstream American news outlets reported that Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, had issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, in the 1990s forbidding the production of nuclear weapons. The reports, based on a recent statement by the Iranian intelligence minister, are nothing new: mention of the fatwa has appeared in Western media for years, and it has been cited by policymakers and analysts as evidence that the deeply religious regime has no intention of putting its nuclear program to military use. But the problem with this line of reasoning, writes Sean Durns, is that no such fatwa exists:

Iran’s spy chief, [by citing the supposed ruling], is . . . engaged in a longstanding, and recently renewed, disinformation campaign. . . . Tehran has long used claims of a nuclear fatwa as part of its propaganda. . . . In his September 24, 2013, remarks before the UN General Assembly, then-President Barack Obama said, “The supreme leader has developed a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons.” Both Hillary Clinton and John Kerry echoed Obama’s remarks.

In April 2010, Khamenei wrote a letter to the Tehran International Conference on Disarmament and Non-Proliferation referring to nuclear weapons as prohibited. But this is not a fatwa. . . . Since 2004, Iran has published hundreds of newly issued fatwas online. They run the gamut from political to religious and cultural issues, addressing subjects as varied as dancing to taking medicine that contains alcohol. No fatwa against nuclear weapons has surfaced.

Although there isn’t any evidence of an Iranian nuclear fatwa, there is growing evidence of Iran’s nuclear activity.

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.”