John S. Hancock lives in Concord.

When Hisham Awartani and two of his lifelong friends were brutally gunned down during the Thanksgiving Day holiday in Burlington, Vermont, President Joe Biden denounced the shooting by declaring “there’s no place in America for violence and hate.” However, only two weeks earlier Biden, full of his own self-righteous anger and indignation, had vigorously fanned the flames of Islamophobic hysteria across the globe by announcing that he had personally seen photographs of some of “forty babies” allegedly beheaded by Hamas.

“I never really thought that I would see, have confirmed, pictures of terrorists beheading children,” Biden told his shocked worldwide audience. Biden though was not telling the truth, he hadn’t seen any such photographs or received confirmation of them because the allegation concocted by a fanatical Israeli settler was false.

Nevertheless, Biden used the lie and repeated it in rallying support for the continuation of Israel’s over seventy-five-year war against a captive Palestinian people. Biden’s complicit with mass murder as he provides the two thousand pound bombs Israel prefers dropping on a defenseless population which is wiping out entire neighborhoods and families.

Dina Abu Muhsien, age 12, lost both her parents, brother, sister and her own right leg in a bombing by Israel. She was recovering from her injuries at the Nasser Hospital. Dina, who aspired to be a lawyer to advocate for justice, while in her bed was murdered on Dec. 17 when struck by an Israeli artillery shell.

This is not Israel “defending” itself, neither is murdering over 21,672 Palestinians in Gaza including over 8,800 children, 6,300 women, 312 doctors, nurses and other healthcare personnel or killing 142 United Nations staff and 106 journalists. Nowhere in Gaza is safe. Twenty-four hospitals sheltering tens of thousands of civilians have been mercilessly bombed and attacked along with ambulances, United Nations schools, mosques, universities, churches, bakeries, utilities, thousands of houses and even graveyards are destroyed.

Human Rights Watch accuses Israel of deliberately “depriving Gaza’s population of food and water, a policy spurred on or endorsed by high-ranking Israeli officials and reflecting an intent to starve civilians as a method of warfare.” The United States expresses no interest in keeping 2.2 million Palestinians from starving or in preventing deaths from the looming threat of epidemics.

Dysentery and watery diarrhea could soon kill more children in Gaza than have died as a result of indiscriminate Israeli bombardments.

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Masha Gessen, the 2023 Hannah Arendt Award winner, eruditely compares Israel’s invasion of Gaza with the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. Reports of the summary executions of Palestinians, expanding the slaughter already underway, are surfacing including from Jerusalem’s Deputy Mayor Arieh King who sent a photo of naked Palestinians in Israeli custody and wrote that the “IDF is exterminating the Nazi Muslims in Gaza.”

Atrocities occur when there are no witnesses around. Al-Jazeera journalists courageously try to cover the whole war zone but they’re often killed by the IDF.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s manipulation of religion having the IDF’s rabbis invoking the biblical Amalekites, whom God told Saul to wipe out every man, woman and child, his reincarnating them as Palestinians is incitement to commit murder. IDF soldiers chant and sing that they’re going to “wipe off the seed of Amalek” and that there are “no innocent civilians” in Gaza.

Gaza has been an Israeli concentration camp, particularly since the imposition of Israel’s illegal 2007 military blockade. Now Gaza is an Israeli death camp.

The idea that Biden, who demonstrates no understanding regarding the daily terrors and injustices that the Israelis have inflicted upon the Palestinians including denying them their fundamental human rights during a fifty-six-year occupation, would genuinely be interested in the establishment of a Palestinian state is absurd. His empty gesture promising to do exactly that came as an act of desperation in the aftermath of the “Battle of the Border” where Hamas militarily defeated Israel’s Gaza Division, two battalions of the Golani Brigade, armored units and a billion dollars worth of fortifications followed by the kidnapping and massacre of Israeli civilians.

On the West Bank where Palestinian homes are being demolished at a record rate and their land continues being stolen for illegal Israeli settlements some 318 Palestinians have been killed after Oct. 7 by the IDF and settlers. Israel which tortures prisoners has incarcerated 4,800 Palestinians since Oct. 7.

The Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, in his commanding and compelling Christmas sermon “Christ in the Rubble: A Liturgy of Lament” in Bethlehem said that “if you are not appalled by what is happening, if you are not shaken to your core, there is something wrong with your humanity.”

He added, “Gaza today has become the moral compass of the world. If you fail to call this genocide, it is...a darkness you willingly embrace.”