Mark LeVine wrote Why They Don't Hate Us because he was scared. Scared of the implications of an American foreign policy: policy founded on misinformation about both the historical and present-day Middle East and the people who live there. And angry because he has spent over fifteen years living in and researching the Middle East: a Middle East where the distinction between 'them' and 'us' has little basis in reality. Writing against the backdrop of the war on terror and the Bush administration's axis of evil, Why They Don't Hate Us uncovers a world behind the mask of the suicide bomber, where the battle against religious zealotry and the worst excesses of globalization might one day be fought by people on both sides, under the banner of an axis of empathy.