I have. I've carefully catalogued each and every reason I've heard that they hate us. I have friends from Asia, from France, from Germany, from the UK, from Australia. I've listened to people from all over this wonderful planet. And I've come to some conclusions.

They hate, dislike, attack, or disapprove of us because we're too:

• Pious or godly - I can't read much criticism of U.S. policy from Europe without hearing "theocracy" invoked. Our faith is wrong-headed and simplistic.
• Impious, ungodly - For exteremists like ObL, we're wrong for not submitting to sharia. To moderate Muslims, we're still a godless Satan.
• Moral - Again, the Eurocritic mocks us for our prudery. No breasts on television. Smoking sections. How totalitarian, how facist.
• Immoral - Brittany Spears is a slut, so say my Muslim friends. See how immoral "Christian" women are? And since the U.S. is a Christian nation, they say, see how hypocritical the U.S. is?
• Isolationist - Bush attempted not to be involved in the Mideast. Clinton, Kosovo. The U.S. was being insensitive, and backwards by trying to ignore the rest of the world.
• Interventionist - Can I count the ways we're accused of "throwing our weight around"?
• Weak, Pacifistic - Bin Laden and Al Queda feels we are cowards who will run from a fight. This encourages them toward greater acts of "glory".
• Powerful, Violent - Yes, are willing to use millitary force when necessary. Like England. Like France.
• Idealistic - Yes, our notions are simplesse themselves. Saddam promises to disarm to stop war. Saddam does not. War resumes. Much too simple, much too idealistic.
• Realistic - No, wait, when our motives aren't our simple-minded idealism, its our avarice, greed, and duplicity. We're in it only for the oil. Our opponents, we presume, have no motives worth questioning, only the U.S.
• Homogenous - After bilingual, trilingual... "What do you call someone who only speaks one language? An American!" the joke goes. We supposedly have no culture nor interest in others.
• Diverse - Yet we are one of the most truly diverse nations on the planet. And, problems notwithstanding, we're a lot more tolerant place to be than many others. And I'm including Europe here. But we get a lot of internal criticism for allowing unassimilated immigrants, some who say they hate us, to live here illegally.
• Stingy - We hear endlessly how we're so cruel for not supporting (funding) this or that initiative or government; usually, we're concerned the money goes to some tin-pot dictator.
• Profilgate - Among those we support are some pretty unsavory governments, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. We're criticized for this giving this kind of international aid. Realpolitik is not brought up as a possible motive.

I could go on this way, but you get the idea. We're too beautiful, or is it too ugly? Either too quiet or too loud-mouthed.

I remember reading about something similar from G.K. Chesterton. He and his peers spent their time roundly criticising Christianity. But it seemed each critic said it was wrong for an entirely different reason:

This began to be alarming. It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with. What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?

Finally:

And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape.

... And thus, that it was the critics who were disproportionate, that their criticisms were more reflections of their own awkwardness in those areas.