Letter to U.S. President Biden (February 2024)

<via online form at https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

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February 22, 2024

Dear President Biden:

Re: The Gaza War and America's Role

Even if Israel were to complete its mission to bomb Gaza back to the Stone Age (following America's playbook from Vietnam?), the numbers of dead, maimed and injured wouldn't rise to Holocaust levels. But is it necessary that there be parity for Palestinians to atone for the sins of Germany? And why our obsession with the ranking of state-sponsored exterminations? What does it say about us when bloodlust revenge is not satiated by Old Testament 'eye for an eye' vengeance, when annihilation of the other—innocents and combatants alike—is perceived as a God-given and unqualified right to self-defense and retribution? This sounds like the barbarous bloodletting in 17th century Christian Europe that prompted Grotius to write his magnum opus On the Law of War and Peace. Regrettably, voices like that of New York Governor Kathy Hochul seem to want us to ignore the laws that we've tried to put around humanity's recurring internecine warfare.

I am only one, but I have a voice and I have a vote. The people of Gaza, on the other hand, have no mouth and yet they must scream at what is happening to them. Just imagine the heart-rending Fallen Leaves memorial in Berlin with the agonized and agonizing faces of human beings but with this difference—there are no mouths to release the screams. Perhaps, this is why we don't truly hear as Gaza's children die by the thousands, targets of American-made bombs killing them from the sky.

Our own celebrated American history has many examples of how we have at times given in to our baser nature—what Solzhenitsyn would have called the Devil in all of us. Let's break with that past and that instinct whenever we can. Now would be a good time.

In the name of what's best in humanity, please do what you can to end America's complicity in Israel's total war against the innocents of Gaza.

Regards,

Peter McMillan

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The following were not included in the letter to the President.

Photo 1: Shalechet (Fallen Leaves) Jewish Museum, Berlin via Wikimedia Commons

The image of a face with no mouth is from Harlan Ellison’s short story, ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.’