 In large part due to their support of Israel, Gaddafi despised the United States, considering the country to be imperialist and lambasting it as "the embodiment of evil".He rallied against Jews in many of his speeches, with Blundy and Lycett claiming that his anti-Semitism was "almost Hitlerian".His views later shifted; in 2009, he stated that "the Jews have been held captive, massacred, disadvantaged in every possible fashion... [they] want and deserve their homeland."