Independent of what I think about the Airman’s actions, there’s a legitimate risk that he came prepared to go down fighting. Can’t really blame the secret service for playing it safe.
It someone is committed enough to a cause to set themselves on fire, who the fuck knows what else they’re willing to do? Who in their right mind would not treat the situation with caution?
The guy was trying to make a point. Is it unreasonable to assume he might try to make the point another way if the original plan doesn’t work out?
There was a car chase in LA in the late 90s. The truck being chased stopped on an overpass. The driver lit himself on fire. Then he jumped out and ran around because he was on fire. Then he grabbed a gun from his truck and shot himself in the head.
Yeah firing off rounds just all over the place is totally safe.
I’m just imagining some dude standing there stalwart while a dude on fire is firing off rounds into the crowd. “HE CANT AIM. HE CAN JUST BURN YOUR OR FIRE OF RANDOM ROUNDS!” 🤣
I really don’t get what all you heavy breathing troglodytes are struggling with here. If you are on fire you can still do other shit. That truck driver could have pointed the gun at someone else. That’s why he gave it as an example. But holy shit bro, tell me more about your fucking incredible ability to read the intentions of all people past, present, and future that set themselves on fire.
if it’s such a huge risk then why is it impossible for you to mention a single example of someone on fire shooting a cop? let’s all go around making up hypothetical situations that have never previously occurred to excuse our wrongdoings
I think you are right. Somebody who lights themselves on fire could try to ignite other people. The cops are just following their training and trying to make sure that the guy doesn’t try to harm others.
And saying the cops are cowardly for this behaviour doesn’t really make sense, I don’t think. They’re thinking the guy could try to hurt others, so they’re prepared to stop that.
This article does a much better job of describing what happened. Does not make the cop look better.
Authorities were heard asking the man – “May I help you, sir?” – at first but as soon as he was engulfed in flames they started yelling at him to get down on the ground. They even drew their guns on the burning man before someone pushed them to get fire extinguishers to extinguish the fire.
Edit: What damn freedom in those moments though. I mean you can yell at the guy engulfed in flames all you want with the threat of ending his life, but he knows he’s already ended it.
Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me, indeed. I wish the man had chosen another way to protest, but WTF does he give a shit about threats from a fucking cop at that point?
It’s weird how many people in this topic are trying to downplay the action and dismiss it as a momentary thing, easily forgotten.
If this makes it to the 6:00 news I guarantee you this will not be easily forgotten.
Edit: There’s a newer version of the article that states the man has died from his injuries. When you view the article above at the beginning of it there’s a link to go to the newest article on the subject.
Edit2: Added YouTube links to news reporting on this subject…
Going to stop at these three, as there are many more, and don’t want to take the time to add them to the list here. You can find them by searching on YouTube for “u.s. airman set himself on fire outside israeli embassy in d.c”.
In the mid to late 1990s, my conservative father drove all around the south Puget Sound area complaining about those “Damn California Drivers” cuz, you see, they were under attack by all these out of state types. It wasn’t until my brother finished Marines training in San Diego and my parents drove down to see his vacation. I was living in CA at the time so they stopped by and suddenly my father goes “wow, people are really good at negotiating the roads here”.
In the end, it was easier for him to talk about how these horrible people coming from CA were ruining the area than it was to accept that people in South Puget Sound are and have always been asshole drivers.
“My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m 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… FREE PALESTINE!”
I saw the video he made on tik tok last night before it was removed. Fucking brutal. But the guy pointing the gun at him was frozen. I’ve seen it before and it’s happened to me. The brain just shuts the fuck off. System overload. He’ll have the memory of that horrifying moment right along side the memory of the failure of his own mind and body completely failing him, forever. People were shouting “we need fire extinguishers not guns” but the guy just couldn’t do anything, even after the guy had collapsed and the fire was put out, he was still locked in place aiming his pistol at the body.
The Airman who self immolated could have spent the rest of his life trying to make a difference for Palestinians, now he can never help, and he’ll be forgotten in a couple of weeks of the news cycle. If anyone ever feels the need to do something, help, don’t hurt. Hurt never helps.
I will remember this. He acted on the frustration millions of other people feel. I don’t know what the impact will be but the Arab Spring start with one immolation.
I’m sure he thought he was making a difference, but in reality the only difference he probably made was that the fire extinguishers on Embassy Row will be checked for expiration dates.
The police officer suffers from lack of adequate training. Your fire fighters, medics, nurses, physicians, etc would jump right in. The police are only taught to see the public as their enemies, and this is the result.
the man in Air Force uniform said he was “an active duty member of the U.S. Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide.” Filming himself walking, he said that what he was going to do would be minimal compared to what is happening to Palestinians. He then set himself on fire and repeatedly shouted “Free Palestine.” […] In the video the airman identifies himself as Aaron Bushnell
holy FUCKING based
this is the only type of military worker i will thank for their service. i hope he is able to recover.
Don’t hate service members. Most of them are poor kids looking for a way to get to college. That said, you should absolutely criticize our military and it’s leaders.
No, suicidal. Nothing about his death makes any sense to anyone. Wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out he was experiencing personal problems or mental health issues.
Yes it is. Doubt that is the case here at all. It was a profoundly stupid act that leaves everyone scratching their heads. Best comparison I’ve seen is if a Confederate soldier set themselves alight to protest slavery and even the Union is going wtf.
Getting killed by the IDF smuggling relief supplies into or people out of Palestine is dying for a cause. Going to fight and die in Ukraine is dying for a cause. Running into a building to save people is dying for a cause. This wasn’t dying for a cause any more than if he’d gone on a shooting spree or blew up a building and said it was for Palestine…simply saying Free Palestine while committing suicide contributes nothing to the issue aside from more tragedy.
I wonder if the deceased left any writing that might give a glimpse of his state of mind.
Its war and a very old war. The world did a very stupid thing by creating Isreal and displacing Palastine. Anyone with a sibling should be able to predict the never ending chain of tit for tat such an act would engender. Lots of ethnicities dont have their 'own country'. Why should the world create an ethno-state for Zionist and not say, one for Kurdish people?
At this point everyone in power in that region has been in power too long, they lost the pot, and arent even considering peaceful solutions. People with heart see children dying on both sides, and it hurts, man, hurts bad. Even more if you have your own babies.
Im going to speculate now
The deceased spent his adult life believing in justice and service and courage but being confronted with the grim reality that the leaders are cowardly murderers on both sides he had an "are we the baddies?" moment and if the deceased was already struggling with depression he could easily internalize that trauma and let it become self loathing. I think the suicide is his way to condemn those he percieves as culpable. Like saying the situation is so rotten he would rather be on fire than put up with another day of mans inhumanity towards man, or saying we arent worthy of his continued participation.
And that makes sense… but regardless of his mental state at the time, I’m not speaking about his motivations or disagreeing with them. In fact, I agree with his views and can empathize with feeling hopeless to help.
It’s possible I feel so negatively about his decision to end his own life is because I empathize so strongly with the guy. I’m a veteran (in fact, after seeing where he was stationed and his job, it’s pretty likely that I was stationed on the same base and worked in the same windowless building as him) and I also feel like I’ve been complicit in acts I find abhorrent by means of serving in the military of the nation that perpetrating or supporting those acts. I also have issues with depression, anxiety, and PTSD. I never met this guy, so I can’t say I’ve walked in his shoes… but I do know this. The people who can be outraged by anything the Israeli government does are already outraged.
I’d have rather had him donate time and money to a candidate he believes in, or protest, or whistleblow if he had access to information we don’t that makes things even worse - as unimaginable as that seems, or just try to leverage his personal relationships to try and convert someone who might listen to him. The world doesn’t need empathetic martyrs… it needs empathetic leaders and fighters.
I think it takes a great deal of mental health issues to self-immolate, no matter how good the cause, but that doesn’t change the fact that this airman died in protest of genocide.
For all you know he self immolated because he hadn’t been taking his meds. In any event it was a dumb, painful, pointless way to die for somebody who has NOTHING to do with the conflict. If he thought as an airman he was contributing somehow, he could have just resigned.
I bet this is netflix’s fault for showing firebenders in avatar burning people alive. These impressionable youth in the Air Force can’t tell reality from fiction, y’know.
Poor guy, he should have talked to a veteran first. We’ve been killing ourselves in front of government buildings for years now and nobody pays attention.
In Islam, committing suicide is considered as a major sin and the person committing suicide has to face damnation and the wrath of Allah in the Hereafter. Indeed, Allah forbids paradise for him. According to the Quran there is nothing more precious than life.
Will the actual Gaza strip people admire this protest?
On the one hand because Islamists purposefully misinterpret the message of Allah.
On the other hand it has an extremely complicated historical development that cannot be understood without western imperialism in the Middle East. I can recommend the documentary Hypernormalisation that gives a very rough overview of how it came to be in the larger context of failing western imperialism and the hypocricsy of modern politics.
I would not consider christianity to do so in a milder form. For instance Christianity still has a missionary mission, which is not relevant in Islam. While Islam has been encouraging science and research, Christianity has been strongly rejecting it, etc.
Christianity suffers from two main problems in this regard. The first being that the Bible is a political collection of various stories of the Gospel and time after. The second being the long time between Jesus lifetime and the first written reports. This is fundamentally different to Islam, where not only the revelation, but also the life of the prophet Mohammed are well documented and preserved. The Quran is still in its original text and translations are from the direct arabic source. If you read an english bible it was translated from latin by some guy in the middle ages, and the latin version is a few hundred years older, but was translated from old greek, which was translated from older aramaic writings. it is impossible to be a true to the bible christian, because there is hundreds of different versions and they are all representing a political motive in one way or the other. Core concepts of christianity, like Jesus being the literal son of god and the concept of trinity didnt exist until hundreds of years after, when the church wanted to find a way to make christianity more digestible for pagans. Even the core christian holidays, Easter and Christmas are just rebranded pagan holidays using pagan themes.
My favorite verse in the bible is 'I make my arrows drunk with blood'
Most people dont realise the ancient jewish culture was poly theistic for a long time before writing stuff down became popular. Yaweh was just their war god. That is why the first commandment says 'you shall have no other gods before me' because, they had other gods, just Yaweh became the 'god of gods' because Jews (and everyone else to be fair) were a nation of bloodthirsty warmongering expansionists at the time. But Im not afraid of sad little Yaweh, he lost because the opposing army had chariots before and I have a car.
In the present day, Islamist terrorists use suicide bombs because it is basically their best tactic for getting the other side to start shooting women and children and seeing every single person as a potential deadly threat. It causes their targets to often restrict their own freedoms (9/11 anyone?) The overall idea is a death by 1000 cuts. They know they cant take on the USA in a toe to toe battle, no one can, USA can delete any country they want (not without consequence but my point is USA holds every advantage in an oldschool war) so they dont do that. Instead what wahhabists try to do is get the USA to embroil itself in forever wars to drain them financially and psycologically. This also wont work, because the country who's currency has become the worlds main way to store wealth and transact buisness can just make more forever as long as it isnt too much at one time, and a comfortable populace doesnt revolt over a few thousand soldiers dying 3000 miles away if its for revenge. Heck we dont revolt over a few thousand homeless people dying needlessly every year. There is very much is enough to go around, but it cant, must sit in investment portfolio instead.
Notice how Hamas and co. dont often suicide bomb Isreal? Its because the IDF doesnt need encouragment to shoot women and children, IDF and zionists already love doing it, they joke about it and enjoy it much like teenagers on a farm shooting gophers. Ghouls!
The one from the NYT even has some wild cynical phrasing in it:
The man was taken to a nearby hospital with life-threatening injuries.
No embassy staff members were injured, and all were accounted for, according to Tal Naim, a spokeswoman for the embassy.
Nothing in the previous paragraphs was there any indication of harm to others, but they still felt the need to subtley suggest that maybe he was a danger to others. It’s also driving me crazy that they’re referring to the spokeswomen by their names but keep referring to to him as “the man”
“I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” a man said in the video, echoing language that opponents of Israel’s military action in Gaza have used to describe the campaign.
This strikes me a lot like Russia’s ‘Special Military Operation^tm^’ did when they were soft-peddling their war in Ukraine
Are we surprised that most media outlets are propagandists for Israel? I’m slower than many but that was made abundantly clear to me buy October 8th or 9th.
Except this entire subgenre of suicide is a form of protest. Pretty convenient to justify looking away when veterans and service members are killing themselves in public on purpose.
That’s just the thing with these protests (I’m not talking about this one). I mean the ones stopping traffic and interrupting political events. Eventually, this atrocity in Gaza will come to an end and all the protesters who didn’t cause the end of anything will cheer and think they did so along comes the next atrocity and they will repeat the same nonsense until we have some idiot putting Gatorade on plants.
You say that but then people in France have 30 hour work weeks and months of paid vacation per year. Parental leave and free healthcare are also nice. How did they get this? By blocking roads, making the government shut down, and then demanding change. In the US, we only get people complaining about protestors.
Using the numbers from January. France has a population of 68.5 million. The US has 335 9. You can figure out why we are not France. If you can’t, I have no idea what to tell you.
But protests can effect change. While no American protester will change Israel's genocide, American protesters may be able to remove American support of Israel's genocide of Palestinians. You might say that that wouldn't save more than a handful of lives temporarily, but it would lessen the black mark on America's soul. Not eliminate, but lessen.
No, you interupt the ones in power who try to ignore what’s going on or speak half truths in the aid of complete atrocities. You don’t shut up because shutting up is to let them have their way. I actually think the ostrichs putting their heads in the sand are the ones who will enjoy the electrolytes getting to their mouths when we get to that point not the people trying to avert disaster. You’re wayyy off base dude.
New generations and all, but this sort of thing has happened dozens of times and caused no change. It turns out that our overlords indeed do not care about us.
“Maybe if I shoot around him, the air from the passing bullets will blow the fire out! And if I miss and hit him, surely the blood will douse the flames! I’ll be a hero!”
I appreciated that the police made it a point to mention they searched the entire area for bombs, like they thought it was most likely the protest was somehow intended as a distraction. Like they actually think it makes sense in their head that some crisis actor would actually light themselves on fire for like $50 so the real terrorists could… you know what, it’s too crazy and stupid to even finish typing out. Police departments are just jobs programs for violent idiots.
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