Reportedly acting on a tip from the Mossad, Belgian police discovered and arrested a married Iranian couple in Antwerp who had a powerful bomb in their car. The same day, German police arrested Assadollah Assadi, a member of Iran’s diplomatic mission in Vienna, who had provided the bomb and ordered the couple to use it to attack a rally being held by an Iranian opposition group in the French town of Villepinte—an event that prominent American political figures were expected to attend. Struan Stevenson comments:

Despite clear evidence that Iranian embassies in Europe are now used as terrorist bomb factories, EU lawmakers on July 5 nevertheless approved plans for the European Investment Bank to do business with the theocratic regime in Iran in a desperate bid to keep the 2015 nuclear deal alive. The EU appeasers seem to think that if you keep throwing steaks to the tiger it will become a vegetarian.

Opponents of the regime inside Iran are regularly imprisoned, tortured, and hanged, often in public. An estimated 100,000 political prisoners have been murdered since the ayatollahs seized control of Iran in 1979. Outside the country, the mullahs’ preferred option is assassination or terrorist attacks. They have trained Ministry of Intelligence and Security agents implanted in every European embassy. Their job is to track down and eliminate political dissidents or enemies of the fundamentalist regime. . . .

Although the Iranian terrorist plot was foiled on the eve of a visit to Austria by Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani and his foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Austrian president went ahead with the meeting in a sickening act of appeasement. In a blind panic over President Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal, Iran is desperately trying to bully and cajole the EU into making up any shortfall caused by renewed sanctions, and Europe seems tragically happy to comply. . . .

Europe needs to wake up. Iranian embassies should immediately be closed across the EU and their diplomatic staff expelled. The days of kowtowing to this medieval and murderous regime are over. Europe must show that we support the Iranian people in their ongoing uprising and their bid to end the tyranny that they have suffered for four decades. But for the vigilance of the Belgian Security and Intelligence Service and the Belgian and German police, dozens of innocent people would have been maimed and killed in Villepinte. Murderous attempts of this magnitude can no longer be ignored.

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.