I decided that we don’t need to see Bushnell’s last act, setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in D.C. You can find the video if you look. Publicizing that pointless suicide only gives some small purpose to a deranged stunt that doesn’t deserve the attention.
The 25-year-old a cyberdefense operations specialist with the 531st Intelligence Support Squadron at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas self-immolated Buddhist-style two days ago, dousing himself with gasoline and saying on the scene, “I am an active duty member of the US Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide.”
” I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” he continued, “but compared to what people in Palestine have been experiencing at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.”
“This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal,” he added, and shouted “Free Palestine!” in flames as his last words.
Whatever. Ram-a-lam-a-ding dong.
His speech made no sense, just as his suicide made no sense. Such fatal grandstanding aims to bypass logic, facts and persuasive arguments by appealing to the visceral emotions of fools. It is self-terrorism, which, I have to admit, is one of the better varieties. He didn’t harm anyone but himself (and anyone who cared about him) and he’s not going to do any more harm. That’s in his favor, at least.
Not much else, though. There is no “genocide” in Gaza, only a necessary war, and one that could and should end immediately with a release of all the hostages taken by Hamas and an unconditional surrender by the Palestinians. Bushnell was apparently raised in a cult called the Community of Jesus on Cape Cod. At least most pro-Hamas Americans on college campuses and elsewhere were indoctrinated into the binary victim mindset of the progressive movement the usual way, by the U.S. education system and the news media. That’s a lot safer, no doubt about it.
Those addled people are still kicking and can praise Bushnell, like the social media fool who wrote, “Aaron Bushnell’s memory will be honored. His act is extreme like he described it. Yet, it is his noble message that matters. His sacrifice is now part of the sacrifices of the Palestinian people in its struggle for dignity. Rest in power!” No, you idiot, there’s nothing honorable about a selfish, useless suicide, and his “memory” will last about, oh, maybe 48 more hours, if that. Presidential candidate Cornell West, whom Harvard regarded as sufficiently wise enough to be professor, tweeted, “Let us never forget the extraordinary courage and commitment of brother Aaron Bushnell who died for truth and justice! I pray for his precious loved ones! Let us rededicate ourselves to genuine solidarity with Palestinians undergoing genocidal attacks in real time!”
That’s our Cornell!
Those around the web who are inclined to be charitable are giving Bushnell credit for “commitment.” So if you really, really, really believe in a cause, the way to show it is to set yourself on fire! Good plan. Calling that commitment is an insult to hard-working activists who aren’t narcissists or mentally ill. Misguided is better.
On his substack, conservative blogger Jim Treacher was even less sympathetic than I am. He wrote in part,
“In a world where ‘12-hour hunger strike’ isn’t considered an oxymoron, where hashtag activism is as far as most of these miserable bigots go, at least Bushnell had the courage of his convictions. He was willing to die for what he believed in: hating Jews.
If you don’t want to live in a world where the Jews have the right to defend their own lives from insane terrorists, you don’t have to.”
Good for Treacher. I also enjoyed the the reaction of one of Althouse’s commenters, almost none of whom expressed any more than pity or contempt for Bushnell (“Such appallingly poor fuel economy…,” one wrote).
“If you want to kill yourself, do it in a way that they can harvest your organs, at least, you lazy bastards,” he said.
Ethics Alarms 
He left a rather large carbon footprint.
You can send the new keyboard to 2707 Westminster Place, Alexandria, VA.
ouch.
jvb
I consider him a Darwin Award candidate. He clearly improved the gene pool by his actions. Laudable.
“Those around the web who are inclined to be charitable are giving Bushnell credit for “commitment.’ ” (bolds mine)
The difference between being involved and being committed?
Think of eggs-n-bacon; the Chicken is involved, but the Pig is committed….
PWS
I think that the discourse around Israel is disheartening… Both sides are so firmly entrenched that it isn’t funny, and neither side is really willing to grapple with the real issues the other side is facing… This reminds me of abortion, where one side views the issue as a bodily autonomy issue, the other side views it as a murder issue, and they are bound and determined to not understand their opponent.
Take this for example:
There is no “genocide” in Gaza, only a necessary war, and one that could and should end immediately with a release of all the hostages taken by Hamas and an unconditional surrender by the Palestinians.
This is subjective, and those things aren’t mutually exclusive. The reality is that Israel isn’t blameless in this. There’s not much they could be doing differently, and I think the Bushnell’s of the world are either uninformed or hopelessly naïve, but I think we do ourselves an awful disservice by pretending that “our team” is perfect.
Look at Russia/Ukraine – Ukraine isn’t perfect. Up until the invasion, Ukraine was most famously in the news for having been part of the Burisma scandal. It’s a deeply corrupt country with a lot of roots in soviet culture. But they’re a helluva lot better than Russia, and we can support them, full-throatedly.
Which I do. I also support Israel. But I’m too old and too tired to performatively carry water for people behaving badly out of some misplaced team-building circle-jerk exercise.
Israel is a country who’s entire history can be summed up as “waited for an excuse, was given one, and responded as harshly as they thought they could get away with.” The deaths and suffering in Gaza are almost certainly more dire than they reasonably have to be, and that is a choice that Israel’s military have made.
If there’s “not much Israel could be doing differently,” how are they not blameless? If you have no options, you have no problem.
I also don’t understand “waited for an excuse, was given one, and responded as harshly as they thought they could get away with.” Please elucidate. The UN’s solution was a guaranteed recipe for conflict, but the Jews could hardly turn it down—though they were stuck in the middle of the desert with everyone around them furious about it. The nation was attacked from almost the second it came into existence, then again, and again. The Palestinians rejected offers of an independent state because they are still dedicated to wiping Israel from the map. Their tool has been terrorism, and any concession by Israel justifies terrorism. It’s a bad-ass nation because it has to be. No?
“If there’s “not much Israel could be doing differently,” how are they not blameless? If you have no options, you have no problem.”
Two things:
First: There’s a difference between “Not much Israel could be doing differently” and “Nothing they could be doing differently”. I can’t see into the decision HQ of Israel, so I’m not going to pretend that I know what their thought process is, but I would be genuinely surprised if they have justification for all of the bombs they’ve dropped in a way that would pass muster with the ICJ. Take that for what it is, because the ICJ is kind of toothless in this scenario, but someone’s opinion has to count for something.
Second: “Not much that Israel could be doing differently” could have been continued on to say: “Now that we’re in the situation we’re in.” Ever since the second intifada, there’s been a lack of seriousness on the part of Israel when it comes to a two state solution, they’ve instead expanded settlements, and made moves like they’re going to start outright annexing area C. Israel did not and does not need to expand the settlements. There is no justification for that. They could stop.
I also don’t understand “waited for an excuse, was given one, and responded as harshly as they thought they could get away with.” Please elucidate.
After the British mandate for Palestine ended, the one nation to emerge from the mandate was Israel, but it was a much smaller Israel than what we have now, obviously not encompassing even the entire area of the mandate. Israel has never waged an offensive war, but they have managed throughout the conflicts with their aggressing neighbors to take chunks of land. This happened to Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. And then whenever Israel is attacked internally, they respond by putting in draconian measures to deal with the Palestinians… The way they issue building permits in the West Bank is a great example, another is the incredibly lax treatment of obvious bad actors within the IDF. I’m not saying these are unjustifiable, only that Israel has a proven track record of doing everything they think they can justify, and that there’s a difference between doing what you can justify and doing the right thing.
America had less justification to attack Canada during the war of 1812 than Israel’s neighbors had to attack Israel in 1948. Britain didn’t keep Detroit.
The problem is that everyone thinks they have a justification in that corner of the world, whether you personally accept them or not, and so for any kind of reconciliation, people are going to have to back away from what they think they can justify, and embrace what they can do to actually forward the situation. If Israel was serious about peace, they will probably have to suck up some amount of terrorism, because the Palestinians aren’t monolithic, and there’s no universe where the entire population moderates instantaneously. Israel doesn’t seem inclined to do so, responding to every attack with raw-nerve reaction time.
I’m not saying that they don’t have the right to do that, or that it isn’t justified… Just that it isn’t effective, unless what you’re aiming for is the status quo… Which is what I think they’re interested in.
l believe many people misunderstand the nature of the current war in Israel. The state of Israel, and by extension the military arm of the IDF, is in a unique geopolitical situation. They are surrounded on all sides by hostile state actors, which have waged war on Israel in the past. There are also half a million citizens living in various settlements outside of Israel itself. This means the IDF must be able to deter both full scale military assaults as well as long term and low intensity insurgent attacks against the settlers. The Israelis have always survived by making sure that their response to these threats is both asymmetric and overwhelming.
The attacks of October 7th called into question the ability of the IDF as a deterrent. Israel can not afford to project weakness; look at the history of wars with Israel’s neighbors. Look at what is happening right now in the region with Iran-backed militias attacking US military outposts and international shipping if you want an example of how middle eastern states respond to weakness.
This is a perfect example of ethics zugzwang. The only way to continue the projection of Israeli military supremacy, which they view as integral to survival of the Israeli people, was to shatter the ability of Gaza to resist. The IDF knew this was going to be a long and bloody battle, with heavy casualties to their own forces and massive collateral damage to the people and infrastructure of Gaza. Yet to do otherwise would essentially be to admit defeat and forever discredit the IDF as a deterrent force.
They are surrounded on all sides by hostile state actors, which have waged war on Israel in the past.
This blurs truth. Israel has signed peace agreements with almost all of their neighbors and are working on the rest. There hasn’t been an external incursion into Israel since Lebanon in 2006. If you go far enough back into the History of any country, they probably had a fight over the border with every other nation surrounding them, and those conflicts were probably most concentrated around the original formalization of the nation’s borders. America waged wars of conquest against both Canada and Mexico…. At some point, history has to become history, and progress gets made.
This means the IDF must be able to deter both full scale military assaults as well as long term and low intensity insurgent attacks against the settlers.
Why?
What is the imperative for there to be settlers in areas that aren’t Israel proper?
This is one of the largest detriments to peace, the settlements are always, always one of the top three issues. And the answer can only be: Because Israel wants more, and they think they can get away with them. You could make the argument that there are strategic positions like the Golan heights, and that makes sense, but there’s no reason to settle families there, particularly if you ever want the conflict to end, because 1) the Palestinians resent the practice and 2) if borders ever get drawn, you’ll have to abandon most of them.
This idea what the IDF has to defend the settlements is a problem of their own making. Sure, they have a duty to protect their people. They don’t have to let their people be there.
The only way to continue the projection of Israeli military supremacy, which they view as integral to survival of the Israeli people, was to shatter the ability of Gaza to resist.
And what’s going to happen now? How’s that working out? The last intifada started in 2004, when fully 70% of Palestinians were either not born yet or too young to understand what happened. They were fed constant bile and hatred by parents bittered by their culture and experiences. This is a radicalizing experience. No one in the area is going to think better of Israel because of this, the best they can hope for is fear. Meanwhile, they’re just going to be angrier and more desperate, in settlements with ever shrinking borders. What do you think is going to happen?
But the threats to Israel come from WITHIN Israel’s borders. Until 1967, Egypt controlled the Gaza strip after seizing it from UN control and made the Palestinian government a puppet, relocating it to Cairo. Nobody complained about their ‘refugee’ status or their lack of rights, Egyption ‘occupation’, etc. Jordan seized control of the part of ‘Mandatory Palestine’ that was earmarked for a Palestinian state (the 2 state solution) and controlled it until 1967. During the 6-Day War, Israel conquered both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The UN intervened and dictated how Israel could use/administer these regions. The people in the West Bank continued to be treated as Jordanian citizens until 1982.
This whole mess could have been avoided if the UN had treated Israel like any other country and allowed them to take control of their conquered territory. You don’t have a bunch of ‘refugee’ Germans living on UN stipends in Gdansk protesting the Polish ‘occupation’ do you? The Germans were expelled from Danzig and the rest of the ceded territory to Germany and got on with their lives. Poland treats that land like everywhere else in Poland.
But the threats to Israel come from WITHIN Israel’s borders.
Right…. So why mention the boogeyman of foreign states?
This whole mess could have been avoided if the UN had treated Israel like any other country and allowed them to take control of their conquered territory.
No, it wouldn’t… Because what do you do with the people?
Long gone, even then, are the days where you can simply kill all the locals and bring your own people in. Israel wasn’t going to allow itself to be governed by an Arab majority. They might have been OK in 1948, when it looked like there was going to be an Arab plurality, but a majority? In 67?
This is the entire reason that I think the problem has persisted to now: Israel wants the land, but not the people. With good reason, but now they need to accept that if they aren’t going to accept the people, they’re going to have to forgo the land. The occupation of the West Bank in particular, and Gaza more recently (and I suspect, going forward) seems to be playacting as a one-state solution where there’s a second class of voter… Which is legitimately concerning, particularly to the governed.
You don’t have a bunch of ‘refugee’ Germans living on UN stipends in Gdansk protesting the Polish ‘occupation’ do you?
The people who live in Gdansk vote in Polish elections.
What do you do with them? They can accept the situation or leave. What did the people who lived in the Philippines, Guam, California, New Mexico and other territories the U.S. took as spoils after winning wars do? (And the Mexican and Spanish-American wars were not even legitimately defensive wars.) You mentioned the War of 1812, but you know the U.S. would have nabbed a chunk of Canada and fully intended to if its military leaders hadn’t proved to be completely inept. (If Jackson had been commanding in the north, or maybe a couple of Jacksons, the map would be very different today.) As it was, the U.S. was lucky it didn’t lose its own territory.
I see nothing wrong with the principle that if a nation starts a war and loses, losing territory and power is one of the consequences. That is a reasonable deterrent.
What did the people who lived in the Philippines, Guam, California, New Mexico and other territories the U.S. took as spoils after winning wars do?
Vote. Usually within a decade, which Israel will never allow the Palestinians to do as things stand. There’s levels to this, and your position is extremely shallow.
Progressives label Israel as being apartheid. They define apartheid as having two separate sets of laws for citizens based on immutable characteristics.
Put aside for a second that there are Arabs in the Knesset, the reason that the accusation is wrong is that the Palestinians aren’t Israeli citizens.
But they would be if Israel legitimately annexed The West Bank and Gaza, because, again: Gone are the days where you can straight up exterminate the local population and move your people in. So Israel would have a duty to also take in the people of the West Bank and Gaza, and if they did that, they’d be obligated to provide rights equal to that of any other citizen, because what’s the alternative in a modern Democracy? A caste system? Collective punishment?
And they desperately don’t want to do that, because they can read a poll just as well as the next guy, and the Palestinians are fucking insane.
So what they’ve done instead of legitimately annexing the West Bank and Gaza is that they’ve functionally annexed the West Bank and Gaza through occupation, and slowly squeezed the Palestinians into smaller and smaller enclaves.
But that opens its own can of worms: If you’ve already decided that you’re never going to offer the people who’s land you’re “conquering”, then what does this mean in context:
What do you do with them? They can accept the situation or leave.
They aren’t citizens of any nation, and no other nation will take them in, probably because they don’t want to get coup’d like Jordan. So… Once Israel takes the land they live on… They, what? Get pushed into the ocean?
Please tell me, very clearly, what your plan looks like in practice.
No plan! It’s hopeless. Multiple generations of Palestinians have grown up being taught that Jews are evil and must be exterminated, that terrorism is justified, and that Israel shouldn’t be allowed to exist. The Palestinians threw a half century long tantrum, and at this point there is no solution other than containment. If the Palestinians could be trusted to officially forgo their “push the Jews into the sea” mission and admit the nation’s right to exist where it is, then maybe the two-state chimaera could be revived—but they won’t. You know hey won’t, and the longer this goes on, the more impossible a solution becomes. They won’t assimilate into Israel, and they can’t even keep a cease-fire agreement, as they proved in October. Some problems can’t be solved. This didn’t have to be one, but it is one now.
(I have long thought the world would be a safer place if the US had just offered the Jews Montana…)
I understand your first point, I was using that more as an example for the military doctrine of the IDF. Israel is sort of like the Roman Empire; they can’t defend their precarious borders against all of their neighbors at once. So they have to commit excessive punitive expeditions when attacked, to convince everyone what a bad idea it is to mess with them.
Of course you’re right that the settler issue is a huge problem of Israel’s own making. That doesn’t change the current reality. There are hundreds of thousands of Israelis living outside of Israel. They aren’t going anywhere and the IDF has a duty to defend them. The settlements also make a two-state solution politically impossible. Even if the Palestinians genuinely desired peaceful coexistence, Israel would have to abandon the settlements. That would amount to a strategic defeat. I’m not making a case about the ethics of the settlements, rather the political calculus.
As for the endgame, I don’t expect it will be pretty. What is the best course of action when two groups of people can’t live together? Even if Hamas was totally destroyed, Israel would then be stuck occupying and policing Gaza. I don’t think either side wants to end up in that mess. Maybe the Palestinians will be exiled across the Sinai, not that any of their Arab buddies want anything to do with them. Again, no good options here.
Of course you’re right that the settler issue is a huge problem of Israel’s own making. That doesn’t change the current reality. There are hundreds of thousands of Israelis living outside of Israel. They aren’t going anywhere and the IDF has a duty to defend them. The settlements also make a two-state solution politically impossible. Even if the Palestinians genuinely desired peaceful coexistence, Israel would have to abandon the settlements. That would amount to a strategic defeat. I’m not making a case about the ethics of the settlements, rather the political calculus.
Everything you said here is exactly right, and also goes directly to my point:
Everything described is something Israel did. To itself. Unless someone wants to make the argument that something someone else did forced Israel’s hand into engaging in the settlement of The West Bank.
Which means that this is something Israelis did that is objectively bad, and hampering the process for peace going forward.
And my original point was that “Israel isn’t blameless in this.”, not that they’re solely to blame, not that they share equal blame, not that they don’t have justifications or reasons: Merely that they aren’t perfect, and that they have and are, to some extent, also contributing to the problem. Which is not only obvious, but you have just conceded.
In a last ditch futile effort to save lives in Gaza, this foolish narcissist Bushnell sets himself on fire with the cult of climate control activists devil fuel and the end result will likely be that he is murdering ten’s of thousands of human beings with yet another permanent addition to the atmospheric carbon content. What a genuinely selfish human being this Bushnell was and his entire family should be blamed for him helping to destroy the climate. Climate activist should smear his entire family because of his lack of forethought to future of humanity, after all, his family who obviously knew he was a danger to the climate could have at the very least stabbed him to death to prevent him from contributing to the further destruction of the climate.
Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself.
I’ll be glad to underwrite the funding of a gallon of gasoline each for the next 1,000 Biden voters who decide to make this excellent commitment.
I would contend that Bushnell didn’t even have the courage of his convictions. One who did would want to be an instrument of the change he sought. A “Bushnell with convictions” would have stood on a street corner and proclaimed Palestine’s innocence. He would have written letters to newspaper editors, to his Senators, and to his Representative. He would have seen pro-Israel people around him and sought to engage them in actual debate, hoping to help them see the genocide that was occurring and Israel’s complicity in it. He would have sought to show how Palestine’s actions in October were a necessary and justifiable response while showing Israel’s moral, ethical, and political corruption in the matter. He would have explained – using some historical context – how the Western powers have been duplicitous in the suppression of Palestinian rights in the region. He would have joined protests, holding signs and letting his voice be heard.
But instead of all those options, he chose the option the Left ALWAYS chooses: cancellation. Fool that he was, his was the ultimate act of stupid: he silenced himself. He toppled his own statue. What a moronic waste. I wonder if his idiocy occurred to him fifteen seconds after the torch was lit. I doubt it.
My newsfeed used a rather unfortunate thumbnail image of a long plume of smoke for this story while the airman was still in critical condition.
The smoke plume was reportedly of a SAM site Israel had explosively unlocated from Lebanon in return for it having shot down a drone.
The military has taken on a holy war against ’right-wing extremism’ in the military. They have significantly reduced the number of Republican voting members of the military in the process. Social media was scoured to weed out people with ‘extremist’ views. So, why were these posts not flagged? Apparently, left-wing extremism is allowed.
I watched the entire incident almost as soon as it was over, and I never heard Bushnell saying free palestine. In fact, what I heard out of his mouth were the words Oh God several times when the flames began cooking him. I took that to mean as the flames began he instantly regretted his decision.
Interestingly, there was a cop present for the entire process who has his gun out and trained on Bushnell, and I’m not certain why.
All Bushnell seems to have accomplished is to provide the anti Semites with a few days of propaganda.
Re a “genocide” in Gaza: If Israel wanted to commit genocide, it would unleash its air force on Gaza. They could reduce the entire region to rubble in a few days. Instead, the IDF is going door to door in the cities, taking every practical precaution to minimize civilian casualties, and in the process increasing their own dead and wounded. Palestinians put Hamas in power, and actions have consequences.
Of course. Why is that so hard to grasp?
I think that’s what they OUGHT to do now, pull a Curtis LeMay and tell Hamas they have 72 hours to surrender what’s left, or they’re going to bomb them back into the stone age. Enough is enough is enough and this is too much. We’ve been over this a hundred times. There is no nation of Palestine and there never was a nation of Palestine. The so-called Palestinians have been nothing but trouble no matter where they go or what they do, and now they are nothing but an open running sore in the region that can never heal.
If an open running sore won’t heal, then you don’t keep bandaging it, you have to cauterize it. It’s going to involve some pain and destruction of tissue, but the sore will finally be seared shut. I know this goes against every ideal of mercy, compassion, and so on, and this sounds disturbingly like something Hitler or Cromwell or de Montfort would say, but at this point the Palestinians, at least the ones in this region. have become the human equivalent of pests or vermin. They’ve simply got to go, and it really doesn’t matter where. A good 9 million more of them live elsewhere in the world, maybe those who have family elsewhere can go to them, at their own expense and never to return. The rest of them can be parceled out between the majority-Muslim nations (there are 49 in the world), a few here and a few there, in small enough numbers that they do not represent a threat, again at their own expense and with the proviso they can never return. Those that have no family to go to and will not accept a placement elsewhere will have to be eliminated. After the last Palestinians who can or will leave have left, the bitter-enders have three days to change their minds. If they do not change their minds, at noon on the third day the IDF will show up, and when they leave at sunset Gaza will be empty.
Jon Stewart says the Israel-Gaza solution could be a DMZ governed by an Arab NATO. Some experts say it’s a pipe dream. (msn.com)
P.S. Jon Stewart is a moron.