When news broke that Donald Trump, his wife, and several members of his staff tested positive for COVID-19, many of the president’s resolutely secularist detractors immediately saw this as divine retribution. Kevin Williamson comments:

In the 1980s, the belief that God was inflicting a horrible, deadly disease on people as a punishment for their sins and to make an example of them was the kind of thing trafficked in by . . . low-rent bigots. Today, it is an idea put forward by, among others, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times and the comedy writers of Saturday Night Live. . . . “In a moment that feels biblical,” Dowd writes in her invariably banal New York Times column, “the implacable virus has come to [the president’s] door.” Imagine having written that about, say, Michel Foucault in 1982 or Freddie Mercury in 1987.

Saturday Night Live reveled in Trump’s being shown up by a partnership of “science and karma,” which is a strange pairing. . . . (Whatever you think of karma, it is not scientific.) But the writers of SNL don’t take such propositions any more seriously than Maureen Dowd does the adjective “biblical,” which she seems to take as a synonym for “poetic” or “ironic.”

About that karma: Westerners cut off from Christianity—and, hence, cut off from the mainstream of Western civilization—have an especial weak spot for vaguely understood Eastern concepts. Karma may be the most abused of them, but zen is in the running, too. . . . The culturally deracinated may not entirely understand the nature of their predicament, but they cast about instinctively for a paradigm within which to organize their prejudices and sensibilities, and so sundry exotic spiritualisms come into fashion because they provide the illusion of an organizing principle without all that yucky “Thou shalt not!”

Zen is a category of housewares on Amazon, and karma is how American cowards say, “He had it coming.”

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.