On January 14, Mahmoud Abbas visited Rome to attend the opening of a Palestinian embassy in Vatican City, thus cementing the Holy See’s formal diplomatic recognition of a notional Palestinian state. Giulio Meotti comments:

[While in Rome, Abbas] met with Pope Francis for the third time since the start of his papacy four years ago. The high-profile get-together took place in the middle of the Palestinian attempt [in Paris and at the UN] to bypass peace talks with Israel and to internationalize the Israel-Palestinian conflict. . . . By opening the Palestinian embassy during this critical time of intensified anti-Israel animosity, was the Pope justifying the Palestinian-Arab attempt to isolate the Jewish state and to impose on it unacceptable conditions of surrender through international pressure?

Unfortunately, Francis’s papacy has been marked by a long list of anti-Israel gestures that do not advance the cause of peace that the pope claims to champion. When the pope visited Israel in 2014, he was photographed praying at Israel’s security barrier, which had been created simply to stop the wave of Palestinian suicide-bombing attacks against Israeli civilians. The pope stood before graffiti that compared Palestinians with Jews under the Nazis. . . .

Pope Francis then accepted an invitation to visit—along with Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, the grand mufti of Jerusalem—the Temple Mount, Judaism’s most sacred site and also the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina. But this is the same Palestinian mufti who justifies terrorism against the Israelis by saying, among other inflammatory declarations, that “the hour of resurrection will not come until you fight the Jews.” . . .

During these four years, Pope Francis has continually put significant barriers in the way of peace between Israelis and Palestinians—a peace based on dialogue, mutual respect and the end of conflict. Instead, this supposed man of peace has strengthened Abbas’s refusal to negotiate with the Jews—the Christians’ “elder brothers,” as Pope John Paul II bravely called them—and to end hostilities with them.

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.