On the afternoon of March 11 in Japan, an 9.0-magnitude earthquake rocked the east coast of the island country just outside of Sendai. The quake sparked a tsunami that engulfed entire cities, upended entire homes on their sides and tossed boats and cars like toys. To add to the devastation of such a natural disaster, some cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, as well as the backup power supplies that were to be used in case of emergency, were damaged during the quake, forcing residents to flee the area and workers to pump seawater into each of the plant’s six reactors in an effort to cool the fuel rods they hold. And, to add to an already complicated recovery process, rescue workers have been slowed down in their search for survivors by freezing temperatures and snowfall, which also adds hypothermia as a cause to increase an already rising death toll.

As of Wednesday, the toll sat at 4,314 with another 8,600 people missing, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. Another half-million people who survived the incident were left homeless by the sweeping tsunami and are currently staying in shelters, mulling over how to rebuild their lost lives.

Does that sound like the punchline to a Godzilla joke to you?

The day that the disaster began, hundreds of thousands of users on Twitter made jokes about the incident, making allusions Japan was covering up a Godzilla attack with reports of the tsunami. #Godzilla was one of the top trending topics of the day.

The jokes continued Wednesday as users posted tweets like “Look at the bright side Japan. Now you know what Would happen if Godzilla actually existed” and “My thoughts regarding the current state of Japan: If the Japanese can survive Godzilla, they can survive anything!”

Of course, everyone is entitled to react however they want to any given occurrence, but ask yourself how you would react if someone outside of the U.S. made King Kong jokes on 9/11.

Not only are such remarks grossly inappropriate in content, but they are immensely untimely. They are akin to some of the inappropriate Holocaust jokes, which also poke fun at the loss of countless human lives, but the Holocaust happened more than 70 years ago. The person who immediately reacts to death and suffering by poking fun at it is no better than a kid that finds a dead bird and pokes at it with a stick just for fun.