Well there are certainly many things about the US for people in the Middle East to hate. Osama bin Laden and his Taliban buddies must rather dislike our habit of allowing women to go out in public with their faces uncovered. His admirers and financial supporters in Saudi Arabia certainly must be appalled by the behavior of women in American movies and television - if their women see too much of it they might start asking why they aren't allowed to drive cars, too.
And then there's this business of allowing Jews to live among us relatively unmolested - heck, not only do we not kill them, we mostly can't even be bothered to burn down their synagogues! This policy is quite unpopular both in Syria ("The Jews have tried to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality with which they betrayed Jesus and in the same way they tried to betray and kill the prophet Muhammad." - Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, upon meeting Pope John Paul II) and among Egyptians ("We express our thanks to Hitler, of blessed memory, who on behalf of the Palestinians took revenge in advance on the most vile criminals on the face of the Earth. Still, we do have a complaint against him, for his revenge on them was not enough." - from a column in Al-Akhbar, a paper sponsored by the Egyptian government.) On a similar note, we allow large statues of the Buddha to be built within our nation, and make no attempt to blow them up.
The spectacle of our presidents quietly leaving office every four or eight years must be deeply resented by the presidents of Iraq and Lybia, as it might give their subjects dangerous ideas.
I'm not going to claim that the US has never made a mistake or committed an abuse in its relations with the rest of the world. But for the US to change itself enough that the followers of bin Laden and Assad and Arafat no longer hate us would require changes to our political system, our culture, and to the way we treat women and religious minorities, that I'd rather not see us make.
If there are any (presumably feminist) women in the group you're dealing with, tell them that if we lose, they'll look real cute in a burka.
outSTANDing!