MICHIGAN – A Republican House member from Michigan openly mused during a town hall meeting last week about wiping out the Gaza Strip, telling his constituents that “it should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima”.
“Get it over quick,” Representative Tim Walberg said, according to a video that emerged online from the March 25 event in Dundee, Michigan.
His remarks, invoking the United States’ atomic bombings of Japan during World War II while discussing his opposition to US humanitarian aid for Gaza, drew swift condemnation, including at least one call for his resignation. He said that his remarks were taken out of context and that the clip showed only part of his response.
Mr Justin Amash, a former House Grand Old Party colleague in Michigan and a Palestinian American, denounced Mr Walberg for his comments, writing on social media platform X on March 30 that they “evince an utter indifference to human suffering”.
“The people of Gaza are our fellow human beings – many of them children trapped in horrific circumstances beyond their individual control,” Mr Amash wrote. “For him to suggest that hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians should be obliterated, including my own relatives sheltering at an Orthodox Christian church, is reprehensible and indefensible.”
Mr Amash, the only sitting Republican member of Congress to support President Donald Trump’s first impeachment, left the Republican Party in 2019 while facing attacks by Trump. Mr Amash is running in the Republican primary for the US Senate in Michigan.
In a post on X on March 31 morning, Mr Walberg, 72, a former pastor and a long-time House member who represents southern Michigan, sought to clean up his remarks and accused his critics of twisting his words.
“As a child who grew up in the Cold War era, the last thing I’d advocate for would be the use of nuclear weapons,” he wrote. “In a shortened clip, I used a metaphor to convey the need for both Israel and Ukraine to win their wars as swiftly as possible, without putting American troops in harm’s way.”
Mr Walberg’s office also provided an audio recording and a transcript of the exchange that prompted his remarks. He had been asked why the United States was spending money to build a pier to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza.
“We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid,” he said, according to the recording. “It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick. The same should be in Ukraine. Defeat Putin quick. Instead of 80 per cent of our funding for Ukraine being used for humanitarian purposes, it should be 80 per cent, 100 per cent to wipe out Russian forces, if that’s what we want to do.” NYTIMES
