Michigan Representative Tim Walberg appeared to float the idea of using nuclear weapons against Palestinians in Gaza during an interaction with constituents at a town hall last week.
The comments came in a video posted to social media from March 25 that appeared to show Walberg answering a question about President Joe Biden’s plan, announced in his State of the Union address, to build a floating military port to bring aid into the besieged territory.
“We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid,” Walberg replied before mentioning the two Japanese cities on which the U.S. used atomic weapons in 1945, killing hundreds of thousands. “It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.”
The ordained Baptist pastor added that U.S. aid should be directed to support Israel’s war “to defeat Hamas, and Iran, and Russia, and probably North Korea’s in there and China too, with them helping Hamas.”
A report earlier this month from a group monitoring food insecurity found that about half of the Palestinians in Gaza face “catastrophic food insecurity,” while a State Department official told Reuters on Friday that famine is “quite possibly” already present in some northern parts of the strip.
Walberg’s office provided a full transcript of his remarks to several media outlets, which revealed similar comments about U.S. support for Ukraine against Russia. “Instead [of] 80 percent in Ukraine being used for humanitarian purposes, it should be 80 to 100 percent to wipe out Russia — if that’s what we want to do,” he said, according to The Washington Post.
The representative’s comments immediately drew backlash from both Muslim civil rights leaders and fellow members of Michigan’s congressional delegation. Dawud Walid, Executive Director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, put out a statement Saturday calling Walberg’s comments “a clear call to genocide” that “should be condemned by all Americans who value human life and international law.”
Fellow Michigan Representative Elissa Slotkin called Walberg’s remarks “a reprehensible thing for anyone to suggest, especially an elected official and someone who considers himself a man of faith.” Slotkin went on to mention Michigan’s high population of Palestinian and Arab citizens, telling Walberg to “put himself in the shoes of the many Michiganders who see themselves in the casualties in Gaza.”
One of those citizens is former Representative Justin Amash, who in 2010 became the first-ever Palestinian-American to serve in Congress, and who has had family members killed in Gaza. “The people of Gaza are our fellow human beings — many of them children trapped in horrific circumstances beyond their control,” Amash, who served alongside Walberg, wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “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.”
Both Walberg and a spokesperson defended his comments as metaphorical. “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,” Walberg said Sunday, The Guardian reported. “The use of this metaphor, along with the removal of context, distorted my message, but I fully stand by these beliefs and stand by our allies.”