Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old active duty member of the U.S. Air Force set himself on fire outside of the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC on Sunday night in protest of the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip. Bushnell later died from his injuries.
Bushnell’s death urged impact and has successfully drawn the world’s attention to the Western superpowers’ complacency in the mass murder of the Palestinian People.
Not a new phenomenon: during the Vietnam war a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, lit himself on fire in Saigon to protest the destruction that they were facing at the hands of U.S policy.
“No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one,” John F Kennedy famously remarked in recognition of the Monk’s cause.
Hoping for a similar response from President Biden, Bushnell traveled from San Antonio, Texas to the Israeli Embassy in DC. He released his final words to the public in a Facebook post before his protest:
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide? ’” Questioned Bushnell. He went on to say, “The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Attached to this post was a link to his Twitch feed where he live broadcasted himself dumping fuel onto himself from a metal water bottle. He then promptly lit himself on fire and chanted the following:
“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.”
Chants followed, “Free Palestine,” “Free Palestine,” “Free Palestine,” from Aaron Bushnell until slowly his speech turned into screams of agony.
There was an officer heard in the background of Bushnell’s livestream repeatedly telling Bushnell to “get on the ground” and was captured pointing a gun at the scene. The man in question was later identified as a U.S. Secret Service Uniformed Division personnel.
