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Why did people dance in the streets of Palestine when they heard that the Twin Towers had fallen? Are they insane? Evil? Mr. Shenkman moves beyond the daily headlines to explain why so many people hate us today and what can be done about it.

An Iraqi student on NBC News, April 2002, says he loves American culture and would like to study in the US, but if I have to choose between Harvard and Jihad, I'll choose Jihad. What could be scarier?

Since 9-11 we have been filled with questions, one above all others: Why do they hate us? Why did people dance on the streets of Palestine when they heard that the Twin Towers had fallen? Are they insane? Evil? Some on the Left say it's the price of our arrogance, the way we throw our weight around the world. President Bush says it's because they don't understand us. Others say it's because they're envious of our wealth and power. Still others suggest that Arab regimes, in particular, are using us as scapegoats to obscure their own failures.

Mr. Shenkman, in an exciting lecture rooted in history, shows that people have hated us and loved us for hundreds of years. In the 18th century intellectuals in Europe said "America is degraded and degenerate" even claiming that the animals here were grotesque. In the 19th century conservative governments regarded us and our example of self-government as a heinous threat to their very existence and denounced us. In the 20th century the Soviets demonized us.

And yet all the while we were loved, too, millions immigrating to the United States in the largest movement of human beings in world history. Mr. Shenkman moves beyond the daily headlines to explain why so many people hate us today and what can be done about it.

Our great sin, he says, is naivete, an old American tradition. Because we believe in freedom we think everybody around the world does--and that they agree with our definition of freedom. We do not understand that other people sometimes mean to do us harm. (We think: We are sincere therefore we aren't a threat to anybody. They think: America is powerful and a threat to everybody: The Great Satan!) We are naive not only about the world but about ourselves. Believing we are good, we overlook the ways in which the use of our power leads others to think badly of us. Protected for 200 years by the Atlantic and Pacific, we came to believe that we existed outside history. Bad things happened to other people, not us.

The price we have paid for our naivete has been high. Time and again we have retreated from the world as if it can be ignored, in the 1930s ignoring Hitler, in the 1990s largely ignoring Osama bin Laden. Each time the results have been disastrous.