The spreading and sprawling map of open violence against America around the world and the surreal spectacle of federal agents investigating an obscure Christian filmmaker as the cause of this violence ought to make us reflect: why do they hate us?  Why do they hate America?  Why do they hate Israel?  What have we done, except to exist and be happy, to offend them?

It is vital in asking this question to know just who "they" are.  An easy and incomplete answer is "radical Islam" or just "Islam."  But in fact, we are hated not just by radical Muslims, but by profoundly secular forces in the Arab World: the Ba'ath Party, for example, was the brainchild of an Arab Christian.  We are hated by the remnants of the hoary tomfoolery of Marx, whose Soviet disciples have long called us, an ocean away, the "Main Enemy."

We are, of course, hated by Americans like Obama, who was nursed on malice towards his homeland and who grew up in the shadowy alternative universe in which anti-Americanism is dogma.  Those who hate us and live within our midst include radical feminists incoherent with rage when speaking of the loving God of Christians and Jews and who consider his followers their worst foe, but who are docile as doves in dealing with the true misogyny of Marxist realms, radical Islam, or most old-world social systems like foot-binding, the Suttee, and the near-slavery of women in Imperial Japan.

Those who hate us hate Israel, too.  Colonialism is often cited as the reason, but that is profoundly silly.  Israel was founded by immigrants who granted full citizenship to anyone, regardless of race or creed, who wished to become a citizen.  America, alone among all the great powers, never build a vast empire like Britain, Turkey, China, France, Russia, Germany, or Japan. 

Part of the reason why they hate us is because we, America and Israel, are lands of poor immigrants who have made good.  America in particular demonstrates that the "huddled massed yearning to breathe free" could not only become rich in America, but also live together in peace.   Those who came had faith, and that irks those who stayed behind, whose rage at that truth is often shocking. 

There is another divide, however, and that is based upon fidelity to the traditions of Judeo-Christianity and contempt for that moral system.  Recall that the same Obama group which quickly blamed riots and murder upon an anti-Islamic film recently created a Democratic Party platform in which God and Jerusalem had been wholly omitted, and then had convention members jeer when those two vital words were put into the platform.  Religious Americans are much more likely to support Romney and oppose Obama.

There is a vast divide of faith which separates conservative Americans and Israelis on one side and the rest of mankind, which hates them, on the other.  Americans are profoundly religious, and despite a full court press by secular progressives over sixty years, "Red State" America is much more religious than "Blue State" America -- and America, taken as a whole, is dramatically more religious than European nations, with the percentage of Americans who consider religion "very important" 50%, compared to 22% in Spain, 21% in Germany, 17% in Britain, and 13% in France.  

The Bolsheviks long ago recognized that chic European (or American) agnosticism was politically very close to militant Islam, which is why virtually every Muslim "leader" of the last sixty years has also wholeheartedly embraced some incarnation of socialism and rejected our foundational documents' famous language about all men being endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.

This is also why Keller, in his 1936 book Church and State on the European Continent, wrote: "Fritz Lieb compares Bolshevism with Islam, the strongest enemy of the Christian faith[.] ... Leninism is a camouflaged secular religion[.]"  This is why, during the 1950s, Moscow was writing of the "progressive role" played by mullahs and why in a November 1951 article in the Telegraph-Herald, William Ryan noted: "Communists have infiltrated in the Muslim brotherhood, now in the forefront of the chaos in Egypt after having been suppressed by some time."

It also explains why the Soviet Union so passionately and wickedly supported Arab Muslims in their war against Jews in Palestine before the Second World War began.  The Jewish people and religiously serious Christians are the common enemies of all those unsavory groups which seem, only superficially, to have nothing in common. 

They hate us for simply being who are and nothing else.  The same animus against Israel which flames openly in the Middle East simmers in the agnostic nations of Europe.  The same bile which led to the scornful "Jesusland map" of America leads Islamic radicals to hate religiously serious America much more than they hate Marxist China or irreligious Europe.

As the grim day draws near when Iran can kill millions of Israelis for the "crime" of being Jews and when an American political party can "forget" God in its platform and investigates Christian filmmakers for crimes committed by Libyans, we need to know just why they hate us: not for our wickedness -- Israel is much kinder to Muslims than Islamic nations and American Christians raise private funds for missionary hospitals in Muslim lands -- but because our way is good.