THE United States has never formally apologised for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and 9 1945 respectively.

Nor, until May 2016, had a sitting US president ever even visited the city of Hiroshima.

It was president Obama who did so, just seven years after his April 2009 speech in Prague where he had promised that “as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon,” the US had a “commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

For that eloquent but empty speech, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize later that year.

By the time Obama visited Hiroshima, delivering more eloquence but still no apology, his administration had already pledged to spend one trillion dollars of US taxpayer money over the next 30 years to upgrade and effectively expand US’s nuclear weapons arsenal.

On Friday morning in Japan, the US snubbed the Nagasaki commemoration of the US bombing of that city because Israel’s ambassador had not been invited to attend.

The US pulled its ambassador, former Obama chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, from the ceremony, quickly followed by Britain, which withdrew its ambassador Julia Longbottom from the proceedings. Several other Western countries also stayed away.

The hypocrisy of this was unmissable. The US was choosing to shun a memorial recalling a tragedy for which it was responsible, the US bombing of Nagasaki having cost at least 70,000 lives.

And it was doing so in order to protect a country that, one month into its brutal attack on Gaza had already dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives there, equivalent to two nuclear bombs over an area of just 360 square kilometres, far smaller than Hiroshima’s 800 square km in 1945.

The UN has described Israeli’s use of heavy bombs in Gaza as “raising serious concerns under the laws of war.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, US’s largest Muslim civil rights organisation, released a statement saying that it “condemned a decision by the US ambassador to Japan to reject an invitation to attend Nagasaki’s annual peace memorial ceremony marking the day an atomic bomb was dropped on that Japanese city because a representative of the far-right genocidal Israeli government has not been invited.”

The stand taken by Nagasaki’s Mayor Shiro Suzuki had not been replicated three days earlier in Hiroshima where a student-led occupation protested against the Israeli ambassador’s inclusion in the memorial there.

Encamped near the landmark Hiroshima dome, whose shell serves as a persistent reminder of the devastation of that day 79 years ago, the demonstrators persisted despite metal barricades and a strong police presence. 

“We have overcome the ban on gatherings by force and are starting our morning rally in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome as scheduled,” they posed on August 6. 

“The iron fences and baggage inspection gates that were prepared to keep us out no longer serve any purpose. The riot police kept repeating ‘warnings’ over loudspeakers, but were unable to lay a finger on the rally. It was a complete victory.”

Activists in Hiroshima also held an “Alternative Peace Ceremony” after the top Palestinian diplomat was excluded from the official Hiroshima event guest list.

Recalling the “unspeakable horrors” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Waleed Siam said, “We, too, bear the scars of a relentless campaign to erase us.”

A “die-in” protest was also held outside the Israeli embassy in Tokyo.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. She is the curator and editor of Beyond Nuclear International and the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear