Across the land comes the cry, "why do they hate us?" That any Americans can in this day and age can still be surprised their nation is hated by many people from Morocco to Indonesia to Nigeria is by far the biggest surprise. We have learned little from 9/11.

Those angry Muslims are not rioting and burning because they hate Christianity, fast food, America’s consumer society, democracy, or feminism, as we are endlessly misinformed by politicians and media.

The fury does not come because Muslims are somehow irrational, primitive, violent beings.

Nor is the hate video, which was actually seen by only a limited number of the world’s one billion Muslims, the real cause of the violence we have been witnessing: it is merely the spark that ignited the combustible haze of anti-Americanism that overlies over much of the Muslim world.