I am working on a paper for my class on Multicultural Issues in Human Services.  Why the Rest Hates the West was recently recommended to me and I'm reading it now, both for personal interest and as research for my paper.  In the introduction, Pearse begins to make the case that the Rest hates the West because, among other things, we think our values are the best and the only ones which matter.  They see our hypocrisy when we say, "Our value of moral relativism (AKA tolerance or openness) is the only value that's valid," which is, in itself, a claim of truth.  They also recognize the emptiness that has become the Western way of life and fight against it.  Pearse puts it better:

The truth is that we, in our hyperprosperity, may be able to live without meaning, faith or purpose, filling our threescore years and ten with a variety of entertainments - but most of the world cannot.  If economics is implicated in the conflict, it is mostly in an ironic sense: only an abundance of riches such as no previous generation has known could possibly console us for the emptiness of our lives, the absence of stable families and relationships, and the lack of any overarching purpose.  And even within us, the pampered babies who populate the West, something - a rather big something - keeps rebelling against the hollowness of it all.  But then our next consumer goodie comes along and keeps us happy and distracted for the next five minutes.  Normal people (that is, the rest of the world), however, cannot exist without real meaning, without religion anchored in something deeper than existentialism and bland niceness, without a culture rooted deep in the soil of the place where they live.  Yet it is these things that globalization threatens to demolish.  And we wonder that they are angry?" (p. 29)