Where is the compassion? The outrage? The most minimal sense of fairness? The belief that murdering children may not be appropriate?

A recent letter in the Gazette devoted one sentence to calling the Hamas attack wrong and then shifted to a fundraising appeal for Palestinians on the West Bank. These are the same Palestinians who celebrated in the street about the Hamas attack that killed 1,300-plus people, the largest one-day death toll in Israel’s history and equal to about 65,000 people in American terms. Imagine the U.S. response to a bunch of fanatics from Mexico or Canada coming into the U.S. and murdering that many people.

The letter identified where the deaths occurred as Israel-Palestine. If they could find a way to be honest for one moment, they would have to acknowledge that all the deaths were in Israel, no deaths were in Palestinian areas, and that all of the dead people were Jews or their friends.

Hamas has one mission, and it is not to make life better for their people. It is to kill Jews and eliminate the state of Israel. They have even now called for the murder of Jews all over the world. That would include Jews who are sympathetic to the difficulties that the Palestinians face, especially in view of the current Israeli government. But that would not matter. To Hamas, Jews are just Jews and are the enemy. Hamas is Isis, Taliban, and Nazis.

To gloss over horror and outrage is to deny it. As a society we do that with slavery, Native American genocide, and other topics that don’t fit with some beliefs. The murder and mutilation of children cannot be ignored or justified and cannot be considered a military operation.

If the Arabs, whose actions some people will justify regardless of the cruelty, really cared about their ethnic cousins, they would absorb the population of Gaza and give its people better lives. Instead, Egypt denies the residents of Gaza a route to safety. Saudi Arabia does not use its vast wealth and territory to help them. Why? One reason is that the people of Gaza are useful pawns in the goal of eliminating Israel, so their cousins let them suffer.

There is no right or fairness or justification for many acts. Among them are the murder of babies, raping prisoners, holding hostages, killing unarmed teens and adults at a festival, and on and on. This attack was heinous and hateful. It was not done to seek a better life for Gazans. It was only done for hatred. Now we see it can also be used for fundraising.

David Sloviter lives in Amherst.