In The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters, Emily Esfahani Smith draws on personal interviews, the work of classical humanists, her own experiences, and the new field of social science she terms “happiology” to answer the age-old question of how to give life meaning. She concludes that there are “four pillars of meaning”—purpose, storytelling, transcendence, and belonging—necessary for personal fulfilment. Alice B. Lloyd writes in her review:

Our souls seek whatever pushes us beyond our selves and holds us there in contemplative service to something greater. Smith grants primacy to love. A story from the life of Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, unites the pillars. Frankl, then a prisoner in a concentration camp, was marching on a cold morning with his fellow inmates when he thought of his wife and realized, “love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: the salvation of man is through love and in love.” The giving of oneself unto another is always the first best reason to live another day.

Still, in the end, it’s hard to ignore the extent to which Smith’s four pillars—belonging, transcendence, purpose, storytelling—resemble the same psychic needs served by that old-time religion. It’s our secular age that relegates to social science such matters, like a person’s readiness to face death, that used to be settled more or less exclusively on God’s terms.

In fact, reading her accounts of psychological studies and groundbreaking therapies, I couldn’t get this one line from the 1980s movie The Creator out of my head: “When science finally peers over the crest of the mountain, it will find religion has been sitting there all along.”

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.