Gunman who shot 2 US lawmakers still at large as manhunt continues
The suspect, whom police identified as Vance Luther Boelter, 57, fled on foot when officers confronted him at the Brooklyn Park home of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, who were both killed.
The gunman earlier had shot and wounded another Democratic lawmaker, state Senator John Hoffman, and his wife Yvette at their home a few miles away, authorities said.
Minnesota US Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, said on Sunday morning that authorities believe the suspect is still in the Midwest, adding that an alert had been put out in neighbouring South Dakota.
"Clearly, this is politically motivated," she said, noting that the state's entire congressional delegation - Republicans and Democrats - issued a shared statement condemning the shootings.
The suspect left behind a vehicle outside Hortman's house in suburban Minneapolis that resembled a police SUV, including flashing lights, and contained a "manifesto" and a target list of other politicians and institutions, officials said.
Authorities had not publicly identified a specific motive as of Saturday evening.
Boelter had been appointed in 2016 by Walz' predecessor to a state advisory board, where he served alongside Hoffman, according to state records. Authorities said they were not certain yet whether the two had any meaningful interactions.
"There's certainly some overlap with some public meetings, I will say, with Senator Hoffman and the individual," Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans told reporters on Saturday. "But we don't know the nature of the relationship or if they actually knew each other."
ABC News, citing law enforcement officials, reported the list of targets featured dozens of Minnesota Democrats, including Walz, who was also the Democratic vice presidential candidate last year.
The killing was the latest in a series of high-profile episodes of political violence, including the attack on former Democratic US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband in 2022, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump during last year's presidential campaign and an arson attack at Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's house in April.
Republican and Democratic politicians across the country reacted with shock and horror and issued calls to tone down increasingly heated political rhetoric.
Klobuchar said she had seen both Hortman and Hoffman at a political dinner on Friday, just hours before they were shot.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Middle East Eye
an hour ago
- Middle East Eye
US senator asks tax authority to strip Muslim civil rights organisation of nonprofit status
Republican Senator Tom Cotton called on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on Monday to revoke the nonprofit status of the largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organisation in the US, accusing it of providing material support to terrorists. In his letter, Cotton accused the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) of purporting to be 'a civil rights organization protecting the rights of American Muslims' while having 'deep ties to terrorist organisations'. He alleged the organisation was listed as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestine Committee and that Cair participated in a meeting of Hamas supporters in Philadelphia. 'Tax-exempt status is a privilege, not a right, and it should not subsidize organisations with links to terrorism,' the letter said. Cair denounced the accusations as 'debunked conspiracy theories' in a statement sent to Middle East Eye. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters "Tom Cotton's baseless demand that the IRS target a nonprofit organization based on debunked conspiracy theories is an un-American political stunt straight from the McCarthy era and it's motivated by the senator's desire to protect the genocidal Israeli government from criticism," the statement said. Cair said it is an independent organisation that has spent over thirty years defending the US constitution, anti-Muslim bigotry and has "opposed injustice both here and abroad". Former Israeli prime minister urges Jewish Americans to bypass Aipac in Washington Read More » 'This is called moral consistency and Senator Cotton should try it, but he better check with his handlers at AIPAC first," Cair said, referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group that has contributed over $230,000 to the senator. This is not the first time Cair has been subject to attacks for its pro-Palestinian advocacy; the organisation is just the latest in a list of pro-Israel campaigns that Cotton has run. In December, the senator introduced a bill in the Senate that sought to eliminate the federal use of the term 'West Bank' and instead implement the use of 'Judea and Samaria', the biblical name for what is now the occupied West Bank, claiming the terminology aligns with Israel's historical and biblical claims to the territory. In November 2024, after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant on charges of using starvation as a method of warfare, as well as crimes against humanity, plus other charges, Cotton lashed out at the ICC. At the time, Cotton cited a US law that permits the president to use "all means necessary and appropriate" to free Americans or allies detained by the court. Passed in 2002, the American Service-Members' Protection Act, often referred to as the "Hague Invasion Act," was designed to shield US personnel from ICC jurisdiction. Rights groups argue the law aims to intimidate nations that support the ICC treaty. It authorises military action to rescue any American or allied citizen held by the court in The Hague, the Netherlands. 'The ICC is a kangaroo court and Karim Khan is a deranged fanatic,' Cotton wrote in a social media post on X. Khan is the chief prosecutor at the ICC.
Gulf Today
2 hours ago
- Gulf Today
A ray of housing hope is emerging in Washington
Matthew Yglesias, Tribune News Service Housing affordability is a key issue for the American consumer on which the Trump administration has done nothing useful. From tariffs on construction material to higher budget deficits driving up interest rates to deporting building trades workers, virtually every policy lever is being thrown in an anti-supply direction. At the same time, good news may be coming from Congress where last week the powerful Senate Banking Committee passed an important package of bipartisan housing reforms with unanimous support. The only fly in the ointment is that the package is so ambitious, and the emergence of consensus between Republican Chairman Tim Scott and ranking member Elizabeth Warren so unexpected, that little groundwork has been laid for advancing these ideas in the House. But if champions for these ideas can be found in the lower house, Congress would have the opportunity to get something critical done on the long-neglected issue of federal housing policy. One particular aspect of the package that I've been following for years is the somewhat obscure topic of chassis requirements for manufactured homes. Most aspects of housing policy are state and local in nature, but since the 1970s the federal government, through the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, has been the primary regulatory of houses that are built in factories and transported to their ultimate destination. The process of transporting these 'trailers' generally requires them to have an attached chassis that allows them to be transferred from the factory to their destination. But HUD, for no particularly good reason, requires the chassis to be permanently attached to the structure. This requirement was adopted amidst a boom in the market share of manufactured homes as part of a deliberate regulatory crackdown pushed by traditional homebuilders and affiliated labor interests. The chassis requirement is not single-handedly responsible for the shrinkage of the manufactured housing sector, but it is a big factor as the chassis makes it hard to site trailers on top of basements, hard to engage in architectural innovation, and easy for exclusion-minded local governments to discriminate in favor of stick-built homes. Both Scott and the Biden administration were agreed on the desirability of repealing the chassis rule and promoting a new boom in manufactured housing. But in the previous Congress, Scott paired chassis reform with an effort to roll back some Consumer Financial Protection Bureau regulations that he felt were unduly squelching the market for entry-level mortgages. Former Senate Banking Chairman Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, strongly objected to Scott's mortgage changes and the whole thing was deadlocked. Brown lost last his Senate seat in November, but that meant he was replaced as top Democrat on the committee by Warren — the CFPB's biggest champion — in a way that made progress seem, if anything, less likely. But rather than continue the deadlock, Warren worked out a deal that includes Scott's proposals on both manufactured housing and mortgages and expands them by some other ideas. One of these is the Build More Housing Near Transit Act long championed by Democratic Rep. Scott Peters of California which would have the Department of Transportation prioritize funding mass transit projects in places that are relaxing zoning requirements to allow dense construction near the stations. Another is the Housing Supply Frameworks Act that would direct HUD to promulgate a set of best practices for supply-friendly local land use planning. The Better Use of Intergovernmental and Local Development for Housing Act (the name makes no sense, but it lets them call it BUILD Housing) and the Unlocking Housing Supply Through Streamlined and Modernized Reviews Act both streamline National Environmental Policy Act reviews for infill housing, along with a few modifications or the creation of new pro-supply grant programs. A very intriguing development is a small $200 million competitive grant program for local governments that take regulatory action to increase housing supply. This is a notion that has been kicked around in Washington in concept form at least since President Barack Obama's second term but was stymied by, among other things, questions about how to measure compliance. A new Census product based on the agency's Master Address File allows for housing production to be measured at the Census block level for the first time. This administrative improvement makes it possible to take the idea of 'race to the top, but for housing' from concept to legislation. The $200 million isn't enough to radically alter American housing policy, but it will do some good on its own while more importantly allowing advocates to field test the new measurement system and lay the groundwork for more aggressive ideas. If the grant program is a small carrot, Warren of Massachusetts and Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana worked together on a provision that would wield Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) as a stick by depriving high-priced communities that stymie new housing of their federal grant money. For years now, even the most YIMBY-minded Republicans have tended to shy away from the federalism implications of conditioning federal grants on zoning changes. CDBG is perhaps an easier program for them to get to yes on since it primarily goes to urban areas where Democrats live.
Middle East Eye
4 hours ago
- Middle East Eye
Eighty years after Hiroshima, calls to 'nuke Gaza' show how little has been learned
On 22 May 2025, the register of all victims of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima was brought out from its stone-chamber cenotaph at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, following a silent prayer at 8.15am - the exact time the bomb fell 80 years ago. The register lists 344,306 names, with one volume dedicated to those whose identities are unknown. Marking the 80th anniversary, the city allowed media to view the inside of the chamber for the first time. That very same day, as Hiroshima quietly marked its dead, Republican Congressman Randy Fine went on Fox News to suggest that a nuclear weapon be dropped on Gaza. Despite his history of incendiary and extremist remarks, he was not the first US politician to make such a statement. A year earlier, on 21 March 2024, Republican Congressman Tim Walberg also suggested dropping a nuclear weapon on Gaza, "like Nagasaki and Hiroshima". The previous November, less than a month after Israel began its assault on 7 October 2023, heritage minister Amichay Eliyahu, of the Jewish Power Party, told a Hebrew radio station that a nuclear bomb should be dropped on Gaza. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Some Israeli commentators warned that calls to "nuke Gaza" risked drawing international outrage and undermining Israel's long-standing policy of nuclear ambiguity - its refusal to confirm or deny possessing such weapons. After Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suspended him from cabinet meetings and publicly disavowed the remarks, Eliyahu claimed his words were "metaphorical". Since Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza, comparisons to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took place three days later on 9 August 1945, have been invoked by a range of figures. The frequency and flippancy with which politicians and pundits have entertained - and at times encouraged - the nuclear destruction of Gaza has struck a nerve in Japan, where anti-war and pro-Palestine sentiment has surged. The frequency and flippancy with which politicians and pundits have entertained - and at times encouraged - the nuclear destruction of Gaza has struck a nerve in Japan Last year, Nihon Hidankyo, the group representing living atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha), won the Nobel Peace Prize. One of its leaders, Toshiyuki Mimaki, said aid workers in Gaza deserved the honour instead. Earlier that year, the mayor of Nagasaki refused to invite the Israeli ambassador to the city's memorial, despite public criticism from Israel's embassy and its supporters. Japan's pro-Palestine mobilisation has not been confined to civil society. In July 2025, Reiwa Shinsengumi, a five-year-old left-wing populist party led by former actor Taro Yamamoto, overtook the century-old Japanese Communist Party in the lower house and gained an additional seat in the upper house. Reiwa's platform includes an explicit opposition to Zionism and support for Palestinian rights. After nearly two years of a live-streamed genocide, the Japanese response carries a particular historical resonance. In a country where the devastation of nuclear war is a living memory, casual calls to obliterate Gaza reflect the same logic of annihilation. That this recognition comes from survivors of mass destruction - who have stood publicly with Palestinians in Gaza - underscores not only the cruelty of such rhetoric, but the ease and impunity with which it is voiced. Eighty years after Hiroshima, politicians' open calls for the extermination of an entire civilian population - even as Palestinians are starved, bombed and incinerated - reveal how little has been learned, and how thoroughly such apocalyptic violence has been normalised. Reanimated memory The harrowing images emerging from Gaza - skeletal infants, children burned, dismembered and sniped at by US-supplied weaponry, and a region reduced to rubble - have reverberated globally. In Japan, these scenes have cut even deeper, reanimating historical memory and evoking haunting parallels with the wide-scale destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - entire cities levelled, where virtually no buildings were left standing. Photographs of mutilated and burned bodies, taken by the US military in 1945, were shown to the Japanese public as a chilling display of nuclear horror, and later appeared in the 1959 French film Hiroshima Mon Amour. This assertion of colonial dominance echoes in Gaza today, where Israeli soldiers have live-streamed their sadistic acts in what human rights groups describe as war crimes broadcast in real time. In both cases, the violence is not only inflicted, but also staged and justified through self-serving myths that confer moral legitimacy. Although the Empire of Japan was a brutal colonial force that committed war crimes across East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not deployed to end the war. Rather, they served to establish US postwar supremacy in the Asia-Pacific region after the Soviet Union declared in 1943 its intention to enter the Pacific Theatre once the war in Europe had concluded. By early 1945, diplomatic discussions between Japan and the Soviet Union regarding the terms of surrender were already under way, including before and after the Potsdam Conference, which brought together the US, UK and USSR from 17 July to 2 August. Even the choice of Hiroshima as the first target was not predetermined. The original plan was to strike Kokura (now Kitakyushu) on the island of Kyushu, but heavy cloud cover threatened to obstruct aerial surveys of the bomb's impact and aftermath. Hiroshima, on the island of Honshu, was selected instead due to its clearer skies. Myths of war Of the many myths invented to rationalise imperialist mass murder, few are as enduring as the US claim that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were somehow necessary to save lives. In his 1955 memoirs, former US President Harry Truman claimed that the use of nuclear weapons on Japan "saved 500,000 American lives". Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage of Israel's war on Gaza However, records from the Joint War Plans Committee, dated 15 June 1945, estimated American military casualties (not including Japanese military or civilians) of 40,000 killed, 150,000 wounded and 3,500 missing - totalling 193,500 - if the US were to invade Kyushu and then Honshu from the south. On 18 June, in a memo from General Douglas MacArthur to General George C Marshall, MacArthur agreed with this estimate and wrote that he regarded "the operation as the most economical one in effort and lives that is possible". Unlike the deadly Battle of Okinawa, which took place from 1 April to 22 June 1945 and claimed 150,000 Indigenous Ryukyuan lives, and around 50,000 US and 100,000 Japanese soldiers, the Joint War Plans Committee expected a mainland invasion to be far less lethal, given the multiple points of entry into Kyushu, unlike the heavily militarised island of Okinawa. From Okinawa to Palestine: How the US military machine connects occupied territories Read More » Instead, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed an estimated 246,000 people, most of them civilians. Between 10 and 20 percent were Zainichi Koreans - themselves victims of Japanese colonialism who were brought to Japan as labourers after the empire's colonisation of the Korean peninsula in 1910. The myth that dropping the bombs "saved lives", therefore, only holds if Japanese and Korean lives are excluded from the calculation - if, in the logic of war, only American lives matter. Yet this distorted claim remains fervently defended by right-wing American and Zionist nationalists. On a recent episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored, hardline pro-Israel commentator Rabbi Shmuley Boteach cited Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ask whether Truman "was a war criminal" for authorising the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians, including children. Morgan, unsurprisingly, responded "no", insisting that neither Truman - the only US president to authorise nuclear attacks on civilian populations - nor Winston Churchill - who presided over the 1943 Bengal Famine that killed up to 3.8 million Bengalis - could be considered war criminals. Weaponised history The invocation of Hiroshima is no longer limited to historical debate. It is now a rhetorical device used by Israel apologists to justify the destruction of Gaza. On another recent Piers Morgan episode, Clay Travis, a far-right US radio host and successor to Rush Limbaugh, linked the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor to the atomic bombing of Japan in a discussion about "proportionality". The invocation of Hiroshima is no longer limited to historical debate. It is now a rhetorical device used by Israel apologists to justify the destruction of Gaza He drew a parallel between those events and Hamas's 7 October attack, which he referenced to excuse Israel's starvation, bombing and collective punishment of Gaza. The historical absurdity of such comparisons reveals just how deeply entrenched the myth of the atomic bombing's necessity remains in the American psyche - and how central it is to the political and media machinery now condoning another genocide. When the Japanese Empire attacked Pearl Harbor (its Hawaiian name, Puʻuloa, was renamed by the US Navy), it also targeted other American military installations on the island of Oʻahu, including the marine base at Mokapu Peninsula, now home to the Kāneʻohe Marine Corps Base Head (MCBH). But what is often omitted from such narratives is that Japan's military action in the Hawaiian Islands occurred within the context of US imperial aggression - namely, the illegal overthrow of the sovereign Kingdom of Hawaiʻi in 1893, with which Japan had maintained a peace treaty since 1871. Glorified annihilation The atomic bombings of Japan continue to hold a powerful grip on the American and western imaginary, framed as life-saving, morally righteous acts and triumphant displays of technological might and imperial dominance. Their use in 1945 was not, as many still claim, a response to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Rather, it marked a strategic assertion of US supremacy across the Pacific in the postwar era - a campaign extended through decades of nuclear weapons testing. On 1 March 1954, the US detonated "Castle Bravo", its first high-yield thermonuclear bomb, on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The blast irradiated the 23-man crew of a Japanese tuna boat and inspired the original Godzilla film later that year, with the monster serving as a metaphor for nuclear destruction. Fallout from the test forced the displacement of Indigenous Bikini Islanders, who remain exiled from their ancestral land. Yet while Japanese popular culture reckoned with the trauma of nuclear war, the West transformed it into spectacle. The designer of the modern bikini swimsuit named it in commemoration of the 1946 "Baker" atomic bomb test on Bikini Atoll. Today, SpongeBob lives in "Bikini Bottom". The nuclear arms race became, in the West, a source of humour, fashion, and even children's entertainment. Christopher Nolan's 2023 film Oppenheimer extends this tradition, centring the guilt of a white American physicist while omitting the civilian death toll in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ecological devastation of nuclear testing, and the displacement of Indigenous Pueblo farmers to make way for the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. This aestheticisation of mass death follows centuries of American mythmaking, propaganda and nationalist storytelling - a mythology that glorifies technological violence and depends on the erasure of its victims. This moral and cultural detachment has consequences. In a shocking moment during a 2014 showing of Godzilla in a Philadelphia cinema, the American audience hissed when a Japanese character delivered an impassioned speech against the use of nuclear weapons. A film born of nuclear trauma was consumed as pure entertainment in a culture that scorns its victims. It is this same genocidal worldview that now allows American and Israeli politicians to openly call for "nuking" Gaza and other declared enemies of US hegemony. For decades, Israel has positioned itself as a global innovator of military technology, boasting of weapons that are "battle-tested" on Palestinians. During its 2014 assault on Gaza, surveillance footage of targeted buildings was displayed at international arms expos to advertise Israeli drones. Similar showcases have accompanied the current war, with Israeli officials reportedly promoting new weapons systems based on their performance in Gaza. Whether in Japan, the islands of the Pacific or in Gaza, the ideology that enables the mass killing of civilians remains intact. It endures through the systematic dehumanisation of its victims - Indigenous peoples, colonised populations, and now Palestinians - whose suffering is reduced to data points, sales metrics or propaganda fodder. And as this system of annihilation reaches its most violent and unrestrained expression in Gaza today, the world continues to look away - or worse, to hiss. False equivalence If some in the West scorn or dismiss victims altogether, others do acknowledge the horror in Gaza, only to dilute it with misleading historical comparisons. The growing trend of comparing the scale of destruction in Gaza to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki risks obscuring, rather than illuminating, the nature of Israel's assault. Consider political commentator Peter Daou's viral post on X from 26 July 2025, which superimposed Gaza onto a map of New York and read: By the way, this is the size of Gaza. Basically a train ride from Brooklyn to Yonkers. Now imagine this slice of NYC being subjected to the equivalent of 6 Hiroshima bombs, mass starvation, drones sniping children, hospitals demolished, and aid workers massacred. The intention behind such posts is understandable, as many wish to convey the sheer scale of devastation in a small, densely populated area. But these analogies are dangerously imprecise. The total tonnage of conventional explosives dropped on Gaza cannot be meaningfully compared to even the earliest nuclear weapons, let alone those in today's arsenals. The atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 were fission-based weapons with yields of 15 and 21 kilotons, respectively. By contrast, modern thermonuclear weapons use both fission and fusion, resulting in vastly larger blast radii and destructive power, sometimes up to 3,000 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan. For example, the overall yield of the two bombs - "Little Boy" on Hiroshima and "Fat Man" on Nagasaki - was 15,000 and 21,000 tons of TNT equivalent. Modern thermonuclear weapons can have yields up can yield up to 10 megatons - or 10 million tons of TNT equivalent - such as the weapon tested over Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands on 1 November 1952, more than 700 times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Even so-called "tactical" nuclear weapons today can carry payloads of 100 kilotons or more - five times the destructive force of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. A Palestinian man amid the damage caused by an Israeli strike on the UN-run Sheikh Radwan Health Centre in northern Gaza City on 6 August 2025 (Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP) President Barack Obama's nuclear modernisation programme upgraded over 1,550 US warheads with precision-guided missile delivery systems, at a cost of $1.25 trillion under the 2011 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with Russia. All of these weapons have horrifying short-term and long-term destructive effects. While Israel has a nuclear arsenal, perhaps one reason it does not use such weapons on Gaza is the simple proximity of its own population centres. Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and surrounding Israeli settlements lie just 44-48 miles (71-78km) from Gaza - well within reach of radioactive fallout. Though the intensity of bombing in Gaza is extraordinary in the context of 21st-century conventional warfare - with reports of US-supplied GBU-31, GBU-32 and GBU-39 bunker buster bombs levelling entire neighbourhoods - even these powerful bombs do not approach the destructive scale of nuclear weapons. So simply comparing the tonnage of explosives to "six Hiroshima bombs" is misleading - and, frankly, does not compute in the American mind, which has long glorified nuclear weaponry as a "life-saving" and "technological miracle". The destructive force of even six "Little Boys" would quite literally kill everyone, not only in Gaza, but across the surrounding Israeli settlements, possibly reaching the rest of occupied Palestine and poisoning the Mediterranean Sea and nearby freshwater sources. The entire region would become a kind of Chernobyl. Remembrance and resistance In the run-up to President Donald Trump's June attack on Iran, there was speculation that he might order a tactical nuclear strike on Iran's Fordow nuclear plant. Instead, he reportedly authorised the use of GBU-57 bunker buster bombs, which weigh 30,000lbs (13,607kg) and can only be deployed by a B-2 stealth bomber - unlike strategic nuclear warheads, which can be launched via ballistic missile. The tactical nuclear weapon under consideration was the B61 thermonuclear bomb, which remains in the US stockpile in versions with yields ranging from 0.3 to 300 kilotons - the upper limit being six times the power of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Israel-Palestine war: How racist discourse fuels Israel's settler colonial genocide Adam Miyashiro Read More » That we now live in an age where serious talk of using nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state - a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty - can be entertained in defence of an undeclared nuclear power that has signed no such treaties, should give us pause. It should also force us to interrogate the language we use when we speak of nuclear threats - whether literal or metaphorical - and to ask who is permitted to wield them without consequence. On this day, 6 August 2025, the 80th anniversary of the first use of an atomic weapon on a civilian population, we must honour their memory by uplifting the courage of the hibakusha who have stood in solidarity with the Palestinian people - especially those in Gaza - and resisted US imperialism and its agents in Japan. Their defiance reminds us that remembrance without resistance is hollow. To truly honour the victims of Hiroshima is to confront the political systems that treat some lives as disposable. It is to reject the dehumanisation and racial hierarchies that sustain violent military occupations - from the islands of the Pacific to Palestine. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
