At the risk of sounding tu quoque, what did a Saudi Prince’s donation of twenty million dollars to the Kennedy School recently have to do with Dean Walt’s “research paper”?

Radical Arabs’ hostility to the USA began in the first Eisenhower Administration when Nasser decided to become the enemy of the US. Since he wanted to be a socialist dictator it made more sense for him to be “nonaligned” in favor of the USSR than with the US, despite the earnest efforts of the Eisenhower Administration to make him a friend of the US. At the time the policy of the US was very cool towards Israel (it did not warm up until the Kennedy Administration). Under Eisenhower the US had an arms embargo on Israel.

Nasser’s Egypt spent many years and great efforts at propagandizing against the US in the Arab world. Such is Egypt’s cultural influence there that this enmity has had lasting results, and the Islamists have inherited it despite their on-again-off-again hostility to the secular dictators. The anti-American propaganda lies of the Soviets have also had an influence. These intellectual toxins have spread to other parts of the world now. It is the other side of the coin now of antisemitism, the two are inextricably intertwined. The Islamists also hate the USA for its “Immorality”, such as allowing women out of the house without being covered from head to foot or allowing mixed dancing (a practice that shocked Sayyid Qutb in 1948 and helped convice him of the evil of Western culture). So the USA would be in trouble in the Muslim world even if there were no Israel, and the origin of the anti-American movement there has little or nothing to do with Israel.