Radical jihadists loosely affiliated with Islamic State (IS) and, like IS, adherents of the Salafi school of Islam have carried out a string of attacks against Hamas officials and offices in Gaza. Hamas has retaliated by making arrests and destroying a mosque affiliated with the movement. Danny Rubinstein explains the dispute between these two terrorist groups:

The first and foremost ideological difference [between the two] is that Hamas is a national Palestinian organization. Its goal is to fight solely against Israel inside the borders of the Palestinian homeland. Hamas’s leader, Khaled Meshal, has declared on numerous occasions that Hamas will not operate outside of Palestine. Those declarations earned the group the opportunity to participate in the 2006 election in Gaza and enter into a unity government with Fatah.

This is not the case with the Salafist groups affiliated with IS. Their ideology is anti-national. They have attacked, and still are attacking, Muslim Brotherhood leaders—such as the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Hassan Yassin . . . —who incorporate a national component in their ideology.

It is no wonder that those zealous, anti-national Muslim groups are flourishing in places where the national Arab leadership has failed. Arab nationalism has enabled the establishment of states within borders set by the imperialists. Now, when one by one those countries disintegrate, the Islamic State movement, unbound by national borders, rears its head. We see this happening in Iraq and Syria and to some extent in Libya and Yemen as well. Is this also the fate awaiting the Palestinians, who have not yet succeeded in establishing their own national state?

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.