In 2003, when the War on Terror was at its height, Eric Cohen authored a long reflection on the need to consider the moral and philosophical conundrums produced by advances in biotechnology. In so doing, he posed the question of “Why should we be concerned about bioethics in a time of war?” After all, with thousands of American men and women heading off to battle, was this not perhaps a time to defer discussion of such abstruse issues? Cohen turned to C.S. Lewis’s address to his students at Oxford, titled “Learning in War-Time,” for guidance.

The circumstances during which Lewis composed that speech—Britain during World War II—were very different from those of the U.S. in 2003, which in turn, are very different from the state of the world in 2020, when life everywhere seems poised to grind to a halt over fears of epidemic. Yet a common thread remains relevant throughout:

With so much horror, what room can there be for happy pursuits? With challenges so obviously large, why worry about problems so seemingly small?

The answer Lewis gave, in his typical way, was both sharp and deep: “The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. . . . If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life.’ Life has never been normal.” It has always been an uncertain mix of greatness and misery, joy and heartache, long-term plans and sudden disasters.

This insight cuts two ways: we should still laugh, still marry, still light Sabbath candles—if laugh less loudly, marry more urgently, rest less easily. For these are the human things to do. But just as war should not evict everything beautiful, it does not excuse us from self-examination in the midst of self-defense.

[W]ar (like disease) reminds us that we are mortal; and we are mortal because we are biological. The ultimate aspiration of biotechnology—or the biotechnology project—is to master and use the way our bodies work so that we might live as if we were not really bodies at all; or as if we could always make our bodies do what we want them to do without fail. Bioethics, at its best, reminds us of what it means to be biological—what it means to be born, to grow up, to make love, to have children, to grow old, and to die—always with the threat of having life suddenly taken away from us.

The remarkable advances in biotechnology in the seventeen years since Cohen wrote those words make them only more relevant. As reports arrive of Italian doctors making heart-wrenching decisions about how to allocate resources to patients, the ethical questions remain as urgent as ever.

Established in 2012 and maintaining branches in Europe, North America, and Iran, the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Network claims its goal is merely to show “solidarity” for imprisoned Palestinians. The organization’s leader, however, has admitted to being a representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a notorious terrorist group whose most recent accomplishments include murdering a seventeen-year-old girl. As Arsen Ostrovsky and Patricia Teitelbaum point out, Samidoun is just one example of how the European Union allows Iran-backed terrorists to operate in its midst:

The PFLP is a proxy of the Iranian regime, which provides the terror group with money, training, and weapons. Samidoun . . . has a branch in Tehran. It has even held events there, under the pretext of “cultural activity,” to elicit support for operations in Europe. Its leader, Khaled Barakat, is a regular on Iran’s state [channel] PressTV, calling for violence and lauding Iran’s involvement in the region. It is utterly incomprehensible, therefore, that the EU has not yet designated Samidoun a terror group.

According to the Council of the European Union, groups and/or individuals can be added to the EU terror list on the basis of “proposals submitted by member states based on a decision by a competent authority of a member state or a third country.” In this regard, there is already a standing designation by Israel of Samidoun as a terror group and a decision of a German court finding Barakat to be a senior PFLP operative.

Given the irrefutable axis-of-terror between Samidoun, PFLP, and the Iranian regime, the EU has a duty to put Samidoun and senior Samidoun leaders on the EU terror list. It should do this not as some favor to Israel, but because otherwise it continues to turn a blind eye to a group that presents a clear and present security threat to the European Union and EU citizens.