Of those American Buddhists whose ancestors did not come from Buddhist countries, some 30 percent are thought to be Jewish. As Emily Sigalow documents in her book American JewBu, this phenomenon can be traced back to the first person in the U.S. to convert to Buddhism (a Jewish textile merchant) and to Barry Goldwater’s second cousin (a Buddhist priest), but really hit its stride after World War II, when the Beatniks discovered Buddhist meditation. Jesse Kellerman reflects on his own encounter with Buddhism in his review:

[O]n my honeymoon, my wife and I traveled through Southeast Asia. One of our first stops in Bangkok was Wat Traimit, home to a five-ton Buddha made of solid gold. Sammy, our guide, . . . handed me a small piece of gold leaf and invited me to place it as an offering. . . . I shrugged and started forward. Then my heart began to pound as I realized what was happening. At last the moment had arrived: my latent pagan nature had, somehow, come to fruition.

I could not, unfortunately, do that. I apologized. I meant no offense. I just couldn’t.

This gut-level aversion to idolatry, which took Kellerman by surprise at the time, helps him realize what these Jewish Buddhists are missing:

A religion that fails to transfer—to other locations, other times, other minds—is not a religion; it’s a lone weirdo shouting on a street corner. Everywhere Buddhism has traveled, it has molded to the shape of the place: Thailand, Burma, China, the Park Slope Jewish Center. Diaspora Judaism arguably provides the best example of survival through its peculiar combination of rigidity and adaptation. At the same time, I cannot and do not want to deny the melancholy of deracination. The terror I felt in Wat Traimit, that sudden threat of loss of self, ought not to be suppressed. These tensions strengthen us; they remind us that identity is local, temporal, and anti-fragile.

Siddhartha Gautama found enlightenment in Bodh Gaya, under the Bodhi Fig Tree. My ancestors, the Levites, stood on the Temple steps, singing psalms while the priests waded barefoot through blood and sacrificial smoke.

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.