Neither of you are wrong. There are genuine reasons for hatred of the West in the Middle East, AND the Islamists are doing their best to whip up that hatred even more and weaponize it.

That said, "organic" hatred towards the US is much more common in the Arab world than in Iran. Smarter people who live under totalitarian regimes tend to become distrustful of the message that the regime goons are relentlessly pushing, and if that message is "Death to America", the underground reaction will be "America must be cool if the idiots up there hate it so much".

I saw the same with my own eyes in late-stage Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Regime propaganda is one thing, its effect on the people another. It usually works much less than expected.