The airman, who filmed the incident and could be heard yelling “Free Palestine,” was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries after collapsing to the ground.
The U.S. Air Force member who set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., in an apparent protest against the Israel-Hamas war has died, according to a U.S. official.
Next of kin notification is continuing, so the Air Force won’t release his name until 24 hours after the final notification is complete.
The District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Medical Service Department responded to a call about a person on fire outside the embassy just before 1 p.m. Sunday, and found the flames extinguished by the Secret Service’s uniformed division.
…Well good. Living through stuff like that is awful.
We should not encourage others to commit suicide by making this man into a martyr. Regardless of the horrors being committed in Gaza, it is important to not glorify this type of protest. Suicide contagion is a real, documented, and dangerous phenomenon.
Self immolation protest should be reserved for deaf ears and as a very last resort. This guy did not need to do this as everyone knows this is a bloody genocide whether you’re for it or not. The lines have already been set and his death won’t invoke any change of mind.
So someone going out on their own terms is wise to you than a genocide. Gotcha.
No idea why your comment has been downvoted. I dare downvoters to self-immolate themselves if they think they have balls to protest like this.
I see you’re simultaneously for and against the sanctity and value of life so long as it doesn’t coincide with the message the airman wanted to spread.
With all due respect, FUCK that. A man gave his life to send a message. I will honor him and his courage, and I will meditate on his message as a way of honoring him.
Nah, FUCK the mindset that suicide is noble.
RIP, I respect his anti war ideology but people shouldn’t be hurting themselves to make a point. I highly doubt this is going to make the impact he thought it was going to do. He might have had mental health issues and felt suicidal.
Sure made a hell of an impact on me.
Self immolation started the Arab Spring.
This form of protest goes back a long way - famously by Buddhist monks during the Vietnam war.
It’s also very similar to hunger strikes, in my opinion. There was Bobby Sands and his comrades, of course. There were hunger strikes protesting the brutal conditions at Guantanamo Bay, resulting in force feeding techniques condemned as torture by the international community.
Do all of the people performing acts of self harm in protest to bring attention to a situation they consider intolerable suffer from mental health issues? Do people who join the Marines and put their lives at risk in the infantry because they think they’re “defending their country” have mental health issues? Do drone pilots, who in no way put themselves at risk of harm but who absolutely and knowingly end up killing arbitrary civilians have mental health issues?
If you ask me, I’d say yes to all of those. I’d say the same about politicians who pass laws to ban medical care to patients, and I’d say the same about the people who vote for them.
So people protesting via self-immolation, protesting via hunger strike, joining the military in a role that risks death are suicidal. People joining the military in a way that causes death, or who pass legislation that causes death, or who elect politicians who pass legislation that causes death are homicidal.
What should we do about all of that?
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Like so many in Palestine. Especially the thousands of children.
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Because it’s clear from your comment and your comment history that you are a fan of genocide.
Just like people hated white apartheid south Africans in the 80’s (a regime supported by Israel when everyone else was sanctioning them, by the by), so too will people hate genocide justifiers.
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This was Aaron Bushnell’s statement immediately prior to self-immolating:
I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers — it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
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This you?
I truly beleive that this falls under sacrificing yourself to save lives
Nope. Wrong continent for that. Now if he was on active duty in the IDF you would have an argument.
Yep, that’s you.
Anyone justifying the IDF’s actions is cheerleading an intentional genocide. You are cheerleading the intentional murder of over 15,000 children, so far.
Now that starvation is hitting, those numbers are going to ramp up fast.
Remember, starvation kills the children of a population first. There is no food in the Gaza Strip because Israel is intentionally blocking its entrance at the Rafah border.
Today a 3-month old Palestinian baby boy took his last breath because he starved to death. He wasn’t even alive for Oct 7th.
You’re ‘subtly’ criticizing people who are critical of Israels ongoing campaign of genocide.
Whether it be by trying to downplay Aarons heroism, or by responding to a jpost article that really looks to be false that the Houthi (a racist term, like calling the US government ‘The Kennedys’, the government of Yemen is Anserallah.) are lying about supporting Gaza when they have actually been amazingly consistent.
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It’s horrible that someone feels this situation is so dire that they need to resort to this.
However, I also don’t know that this will achieve anything any more than it did in Vietnam.
What? The photograph of Thích Quảng Đức was hailed by JFK as one of the most influential photographs in history and a turning point in Vietnam.
The Vietnam War ended 12 years after he did that. I wouldn’t call that a success.
Undoubtedly this man suffered from mental health issues, that were only exacerbated by social media echocambers. Please remember that other users dont care about well being. r/acebush1 You can see by his post history, what kind of mental state he was in before this happened.
Free Palestine. RIP Aaron Bushnell.
I dislike this. I’ve seen first hand what serious burns do to people, both in the immediate and long term. Imo, this is there should be no speech louder than this, but it just kinda gets an “oh, damn, really? Man. What’s on the next channel?” reaction. I dislike that people resort to this when they’re going to get ignored, and I dislike that it largely is ignored except for a fleeting moment of sensational headlines.
“Imo, this is there should be no speech louder than this”
I really don’t know what you were trying to say there, but you managed to fuck it up so badly it makes no sense.
“Imo, this is there should be no speech louder than this”
I really don’t know what you were trying to say there, but you managed to fuck it up so badly it makes no sense.
That’s an awfully rude response to not being able to extrapolate this from the quoted bit:
“A man felt so deeply that this was wrong, and so powerless to get the attention of anyone who could even consider doing anything to help, that he doused himself in gasoline and burned himself to death in public, leaving behind his family and everything he cared about. Maybe people should pay attention to such a strongly sent message, and consider whether there are valid reasons that someone might feel so strongly about this topic.”
The problem is, as far as I see it, that this doesn’t change minds. Thousands of children are dead now. Unless you’re totally ignorant of that, in which case you will be totally ignorant of why he killed himself in this manner, it’s not going to make you suddenly care about Palestine when exponentially more dead children who didn’t die by their own hand will not.
It’s easy for far away things, even horrific things, to just seem like trivia with no real salience to our lives. A statement like this is meant to wake people up that caring about the victims of our foreign policy is something for Americans to do. We as Americans have some small input into the process by which our taxes fund a genocide. And even if we don’t, maybe famously “empathic” Joe Biden might spend a second thought on the morality of his actions.
As I told someone else- after Thích Quảng Đức’s suicide by setting himself on fire, the Vietnam War raged on for 12 more years.
Based on that, this is, unfortunately, not going to have any effect.
Oh I’m sorry that self-immolation isn’t a magic “stop” button and movements and social change take time to play out. Claiming it was inconsequential is just fucking insanely ahistorical. Next up, “Rosa Parks’ protest had no effect on the Civil Rights movement because it took 9 years for the Civil Rights Act to be signed”.
I would say that’s a little different from a president saying it was a turning point and then the guy who followed him massively escalated the war.
If Rosa Parks did her protest, Kennedy never got the Civil Rights Act passed and Nixon went back to encouraging segregation until he had not choice but to promote civil rights, that would be an apt comparison.
Nope, they’re both stupidly ahistorical statements to make. Ending the war wasn’t even the target of the protest, just an arbitrary end result you say wasn’t achieved quickly enough.
So neither of these people set themselves on fire with the goal of ending a war?
Or discredit him as a libtard crazy. That is what people on the other side of this argument have been saying. I hate this world.
The base’s Pavlovian rejection of anything said by an accused outsider has got to be one of the Republican party’s biggest real “achievements.”
Or maybe I’m giving them too much credit. Mixing simple “ill will towards others” with a dash of “confirmation bias” will produce a very similar result.
“The” achievement. It was enabled by humanity’s shitty heuristics and still developing (it will never get to develop, I don’t think) ability for longer term thinking.
It wasn’t hard to do, but they sure kept at it.
If we can’t fix it, if the world continues on a slide to shit, if it’s all doomed to a stupid end then I have but one desire:
That when the echelons at the top tumble alongside the rest of civilization, they try at the end, right at the very 11th hour to recall their rabid masses because they need them to listen…
Only to hear back “Fake news” as the rabid mass of blind hatred they built tumbles down their would-be world too.
There are days your wish seems to be the most likely outcome in the long run.
The base’s Pavlovian rejection of anything said by an accused outsider has got to be one of the Republican party’s biggest real “achievements.”
I see this in every argument on Lemmy.
I wish I could say I was surprised.
This was an active duty servicemember. I share your pessimism that anything will change, but I don’t think Biden can NOT comment on this. That should at least drive awareness. I’m sorry I have nothing less hollow than that to offer.
Self immolation started the Arab Spring.
We have no idea what still happen.
no speech louder than this
It’s loud about the strength of this guy’s conviction but it provides no actual argument or information. I don’t think it’s cause to change one’s opinion about Biden’s foreign policy one way or another. In fact, I’d go further and say that it probably should be ignored as much as possible in order to avoid motivating other people to do the same thing.
I disagree. Fairly certain it got politicians attention. When your own soldiers are standing outside of your house setting themselves on fire it’s probably best to pay attention to the message.
It wasn’t “soldiers”, it was one guy. One person who wasted their life, instead of lobbying for what they wanted.
Now he’ll never get to vote, donate, or campaign for what he believed in. He actually hurt his cause in the long run.
“No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.”
– General George S. Patton
What if he felt those things were less effective than self-immolation? Because I certainly do.
You change your vote based on people killing themselves? Like if you are pro-choice and a pro-life person killed themselves, you would change your mind? Do you look up stats on the number of people on both sides who kill themselves and compare them? Do you think suicidal people are a good basis for a system of government?
If you do any of those things, you are not a normal voter. Voters do not care about that at all. It grabs attention, but just talking to your friend about who you’re voting for is much more persuasive. If you kill yourself people rightfully think you have mental issues.
You’re going out of your way to misunderstand this.
This can sway my vote and yes, things that people are willing to give their lives for are very compelling to me.
I’m not allowed to change who I vote for in this system.
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I’m not supporting the cop’s actions, but the guy was staggering around and was engulfed in flames. If he went and hugged someone like the EMS, there would be two people dead. I imagine he kept his weapon on him in case he decided to run towards someone.
It may not seem like a weapon, but when someone is on fire from gasoline and walking, they’re a clear and present danger to the people around them.
This is not an accurate recounting of the video. The “may I help yous” were over a second or two as he was trying to light himself, not a long period. The “get on the ground” started basically as soon as the fire lit and continued until he collapsed at which point the presumed speaker with the gun came on screen and continued to actively dance around the first responders trying to put Bushnell out so that his shot line would remain clear.
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Why bring up the terrible cops reactions to a statement of the person’s convictions?
Because of no one should have to watch the video
https://imemc.org/article/us-soldier-self-immolates-in-protest-at-israeli-embassy/
the Secret Service officers and Metropolitan Police who were present at the scene watch for a full minute, saying, “May I help you sir?” and as he’s on fire scream at him to get on the ground, but do not otherwise engage. One cop appears with a gun drawn on the man after he collapses, still consumed by flames.
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Oh no not cop hating when they keep showing they need major reforms
We already know the arguments. All that is left is for us to weigh it for ourselves. What this man did was heavy and affects that weighing process.
EVERYONE STOP SYMPATHIZING WITH THIS MAN HE WAS INSANE AND VILE PERSON he celebrated the death of 3 US service members. he also celebrated the massacre at the party
EVERYONE STOP SYMPATHIZING WITH HIM, because of a few angry bullshit takes he had on the internet. Because doing that removes your eligibility for sympathy.
Him being an idiot doesn’t mean he was a bad person. Does he have some record of doing something actually “VILE”?
doing something actually “VILE”
yes celerating death of American soldiers , he was deranged but in no way someone who deserves empathy
Ah, the propaganda muckraking train has already left the station, I see.
Empathy is not the same thing as sympathy.
Even if your comment is truthful, you come across as hysterical and insane.
Doesn’t matter to Biden.
I do t even think a general strike would make him stop supporting genocide.
Hed watch America burn if it meant he got to watch Palestinians burn alive as well.
Biden doesn’t represent Dem voters. And it’s going to hurt him in November, maybe even so much that trump wins again.
Why can’t we just stop running these shitty candidates who are a coin flip away from losing to the worst candidate to ever hold the office of president?
DNC says no. We must be happy with the pseudo Republicans they put forward
It seems like the entire world is caught in this trap. On one side you’ve got actual fascists, and on the other you have feckless liberals who can’t seem to get it through their heads that this isn’t the 90s anymore.
They’re neoliberals, not liberals.
It’s James Carville followers who want Reaganomics and Bill Clinton social stances.
Which is better than what republicans want, but in any sane political system, they’d be the right wing option in 2024.
Even if neoliberals got 100% of what they wanted, we’d still be fucked.
Which is why 1/3 of people don’t vote, even when modern Dems hold the presidency, House, and Senate; it’s still not enough to fix the majority of our issues.
Honestly I don’t understand this thing of thing. If you are so for freeing Palestine, or against Israel, and limited to being one person, wouldn’t it make more sense / do more overall good if you can take down at least one israeli with you? Instead of burning down alone.
Frankly, it barely counts as a symbolic gesture.
I think most Americans have lost their empathy and this type of commentary right here highlights it.
Most Americans believe everyone else in the world is also American and views thing with skewed American morals, and this type of comment right here highlights it.
No, bro, you can’t magic-mirror this kind of criticism.
Ignoring empathy, the fuck is one dude killing himself supposed to achieve?
Change the mind of the ultra wealthy influencing the decisions whether or not the US involves itself? They don’t give a fuck if some random military dude dies. It’s what they want. War makes a lot of people a lot of money.
Also. One does not simply ignore empathy. That would make you a sociopath so thinking in that mindset is insane to me.
The goal is to create public discourse around the topic would be my understanding. Again. You are hating on him for picking an avenue and doing it. What have you done other than argue against his actions?
Not killed myself, that’s for sure lol.
Take down one israeli ? so, which one ?
Now if the other 30 mil military personnel all over the world follow this man’s example civilians in Palestine and everywhere could, at last, live in peace
That is a nice way to say you want the equivalent of the population of Texas to die.
The equivalent population of Tejas that supports and brutally murders for a terorristic warmongering nation? Hell yeah.
I would very much prefer something clicks in their heads so they can see how horrible their acts are, then find an honest way of living and maybe even try and amend some of the harm they’ve done to humanity and the world.
Oh! And you can also add cops, that would be the population of Illinois, for a total of ~42.5 mill or the equivalent of the population of California and Utah combined.
🫡
This guy was brainwashed by reddit’s echocamber, someone found his account Acebush1
You’ve been brainwashed by yourself
Hi Hasbara, hows it going today?
tbh better being brainwashed and radicalized than not giving a fuck about kids dying to a genocide.
There’s a lot of room between caring about Palestinian kids and killing yourself.
I don’t know about brainwashed, but he was indeed a deeply troubled person.
Has anyone else noticed a surge in social media posts using history stories about US teenagers under the ago of 18 that signed up for military service illegally, but the stories have these folkloric and heroic side that we never afford child soldiers of other nations and conflicts ?
So weird.
No but I’m not sure where I would consume such content. Is that Facebook or something?
