On Friday, the British House of Commons passed a bill allowing doctors to help terminally ill patients kill themselves. Rabbi Shlomo Brody explains why this shouldn’t be counted as progress:

Proponents of the bill claim that supervising doctors will ensure that patients are aware of other treatment options, including palliative and hospice care. Such promises ring hollow when palliative care is woefully underfunded by [Britain’s] National Health Service (NHS). . . . Suicide becomes a palpable option when you are suffering and have no other recourse to alleviate your pain. This is a particularly tragic trajectory since palliative medicine has greatly advanced to help so many patients around the world. Sadly, the NHS has fallen behind.

Jews have always taken pride in our commitment to medical care alongside with protecting society’s most vulnerable citizens. . . . Both reason and religion teach us to stop this from happening.

In fact, Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, who must be cautious about stepping into political debates, announced that he felt “a moral obligation to express deep concerns about [the bill’s] implications.” He wrote:

In our daily prayers, Jews declare our belief that the soul given to us by God is pure, that He instils it within us, and that eventually He will take it from us at the right time. We believe that life is a sacred gift bestowed upon us by God, and that it should always be treasured as such. . . . The “medicalization” of death, in which assisted dying becomes just another treatment option available to a patient, represents a major paradigm shift in the values that underpin our society. The purpose of medicine is, and has always been, to heal and ease pain—never to end life.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”