A Republican House member from Michigan openly mused about the obliteration of Gaza during a town hall meeting last week, telling his constituents that “it should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima.”
“Get it over with quickly,” Rep. Tim Walberg said, according to a video posted online from the March 25 event in Dundee, Michigan.
His comments, in which he referenced the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan during World War II while discussing his opposition to U.S. humanitarian aid to Gaza, drew swift condemnation and calls for at least one resignation. He said his comments were taken out of context and that the clip only showed part of his response.
Justin Amash, a former House GOP colleague in Michigan and a Palestinian American, condemned Mr. Walberg for his comments, writing on X on Saturday that they “show a complete 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. “That he proposes to wipe out hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians, including my own relatives, who seek refuge in an Orthodox Christian church is reprehensible and unjustifiable.”
Mr. Amash, the only sitting Republican congressman to support President Trump’s first impeachment, left the Republican Party in 2019 as he faced attacks from Mr. Trump. Mr. Amash is running in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Michigan.
In a post on Sunday morning
“As a child growing up in the Cold War era, the last thing I would advocate for is the use of nuclear weapons,” he wrote. “In a shortened clip, I used a metaphor to convey that both Israel and Ukraine need to win their wars as quickly as possible without putting American troops in danger.”
Mr. Walberg’s office also provided an audio recording and a transcript of the exchange that led to his remarks. He was asked why the United States would spend money building a pier to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza.
“We shouldn’t spend a dime on humanitarian aid,” he said, according to the recording. “It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over with quickly. The same should be the case in Ukraine. Defeat Putin quickly. Instead of using 80 percent of our funding for Ukraine for humanitarian purposes, it should be 80 percent, 100 percent for the destruction of Russian forces if we want that.”
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2024-03-31 21:21:12
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