Remembering Aaron Bushnell

A Column in Thee Acts

Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force, set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. on February 25, 2024, as an act of protest against Israel’s war on Gaza.

Later that evening, he died of his injuries.

Content Warning: Please note that photos of Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation appear included at the close of this article, just before the sources section. I’ll give you a content warning there, just before they appear.

Weeks have passed since Aaron’s act of protest. And yet, my attention keeps returning to several elements that haven’t received the focus they deserve. As it happens, these elements are intertwined.

Act I: An Independent Journalist Enters the Story

To begin, mainstream media sought to cover up the incident.

The cover up would likely have succeeded were it not for independent journalist Talia Jane.

Before dousing himself with an accelerant and lighting the match, Aaron sent emails to many major as well as independent news outlets and journalists. He shared the announcement that he planned to take part in an “extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people.” He included a link to his Twitch channel, where he would livestream the incident.

Some members of the press read Aaron’s email before the incident; many collaborated ceaselessly with researchers to identify and locate Aaron in order to save his life. Some did not read the email until after Aaron’s protest.

Whether prepared or not, many reporters who watched the livestream were understandably too distraught to cover the story.

Talia Jane received a message from an editor at the Atlanta Community Press Collective, one of the independent outlets Aaron emailed. The message contained a link to Aaron’s Twitch channel, where he had livestreamed his self-immolation and where the video remained for several hours.

Talia took on the responsibility of sharing Aaron’s story in the most sensitive way possible. She consulted with Aaron’s loved ones, who expressed their preference that she share as much of the details as she felt she could ethically do; they gave their consent for her to do so.  

The time, energy, and care Talia expended and the thoughtfulness of her collaboration with Aaron’s family created a strong therapeutic container for Aaron’s story.

As a psychologist who teaches and supervises people in the areas of emotional health, embodiment, and social justice, I appreciate the care she put into that container.

Here’s what Talia wrote in Rolling Stone about her process:

“There are plenty of media guides and examinations about best practices for reporting graphic content. There is nothing about how to navigate the scrambled fog your brain becomes after witnessing a man burn himself alive. To watch him choke on the smoke of his own flesh to scream “Free Palestine” until he no longer can, to watch him stand at attention, silent, before finally collapsing, only his charred leg visible onscreen—and then to try to ethically and comprehensively report what is clearly a major breaking story, absent institutional support to help gather, process, and publish information. As my brain spun, I operated on reflex, a mechanical series of choices. Screen record the video. Screenshot the channel. Archive the LinkedIn. Find a way to communicate a massive action in the fewest possible words. Select a photo, not too graphic, verifying it all.”

After she posted a blurred version of the video, Talia fielded a barrage of online harassment from people demanding that she post the unedited version. One person called her a “Deep State piece of shit.” Another, a homophobic slur. Some threatened violence. Needless to say, she remained steadfast in her decision not to post the full, unblurred video of Aaron’s self-immolation.

In the days that followed Aaron’s death, Talia attended a vigil for him in New York. She called it “a totem of the pain that comes from truth denied, and the responsibility of reporters to fight against that denial by any means necessary.”

Photo: Probal Rashid/Zuma Press

Act II: Aaron’s Last Moments

And now to the video, which lasts a touch longer than three minutes.

Aaron is dressed in military fatigues and an officer’s cap.

He begins filming, his voice preternaturally calm.

“I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” he says. “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.”

Aaron is holding an open thermos filled with accelerant. He arrives at his spot in front of the embassy’s iron gates.

He takes off his cap. Douses himself with the accelerant.

Facing the camera, Aaron puts his military cap back on his head, adjusting the fit.

Taking a match, he tries several times to light it using the inside seam of his pants, first on his right leg, and then his left.

Off camera, a police officer approaches. He asks, “Can I help you, sir?” His tone is formal, removed.

Aaron bends down and swipes the match against the dry pavement.

The officer asks again, this time more urgently, “Sir? Can I help you?”

The match ignites. Aaron quickly touches it to his uniform. The flames ignite. He yells, “Free Palestine!”

The flames engulf him. Soon, he begins to scream with pain.

The image etched on the inside of my eyelids whenever I close my eyes is this one:

Enter an Israeli Embassy police officer, stage left. The officer does not move in to help, but trains his gun on Aaron for the entirety of the incident. He watches mutely as Aaron burns, as he screams and suffocates on the smoke from his burning body.

Another officer can be heard yelling, “I don’t need guns! I need fire extinguishers!” He dances frantically around Aaron, dousing him with a fire extinguisher.

A third officer rushes in with another extinguisher. Smoke from the extinguishers billows around the area where Aaron burns.

It takes the police and Secret Service officers just over one minute to extinguish the fire.

A paramedic enters with a medical pack. Soon, several paramedics rush Aaron to the hospital with life-threatening injuries.

The image of the police officer, gun trained on a man burning to death, embodies the carceral nature of both the U.S. and Israeli governments, and their practice of collective punishment against Black, Brown, and Indigenous people.

A young man burning to death quickly morphs into the “Other.” To the Israeli Embassy police officer, Aaron becomes someone dangerous to the establishment. The officer sees Aaron as not fully human, as undeserving of life-saving assistance.

This speaks volumes about the nature of U.S. policing, the Israeli Defense Forces, and the long-established connection between the two. About the way both are undergirded by a devotion to both individual and collective punishment. (More about the similarities in a future column.)

In the text box below, I’ve included some of my favorite resources on the notion of punishment and the ideology and practice of prison abolition.

What is prison abolition? https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-is-prison-abolition/ 

https://theintercept.com/2021/03/17/intercepted-mariame-kaba-abolitionist-organizing/ Intercepted. (2021, March 17). Hope Is a Discipline: Mariame Kaba on Dismantling the Carceral State. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2021/03/17/intercepted-mariame-kaba-abolitionist-organizing/

https://abolitionist.tools/Against-Punishment

https://www.jstor.org/stable/29767244

Davis, A. Y., & Rodriguez, D. (2000). The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation. Social Justice, 27(3 (81)), 212–218.

Al Jazeera English (Director). (2021, December 17). Angela Davis on the argument for police and prison abolition | UpFront.

Act III: Legacy Media as a Catalyst for Aaron’s Protest

The third element of Aaron’s protest that remains top of mind for me: the response from legacy media and a cross-section of the public.

Aaron’s death sparked a passionate debate. Unsurprisingly, those who support Israel’s war on Gaza attributed his act to mental illness.

The New York Times penned a piece that emphasized Aaron’s alleged “anarchic values,” difficulty socializing, and a resurfacing of trauma from his past.

Newsweek obtained and discussed a police report stating that Aaron exhibited “signs of mental distress” before Secret Service officers engaged with him.

Michael Starr of the Jerusalem Post called Aaron’s protest an “act of violence” glorified by “the American radical left.”

Journalist Mark Joseph Stern assumed mental illness in the absence of evidence. Stern said on his social media platform that “people suffering mental illness deserve empathy and respect, but it is wildly irresponsible to praise them for using a political justification to take their own life.”

When I put on my psychologist hat, I don’t see an indication that Aaron Bushnell suffered from mental illness in the time leading up to his act of extreme protest.

Like many of us, Aaron Bushnell felt a growing despair over the role of the United States in a war that has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, most of them women, children, and civilian men.

An investigation by the Washington Post determined that Israel’s war against Gaza ranks as one of the most—and soon to be the most—destructive wars of the 21^st century. The paper concluded that Israel has destroyed more buildings in less time than the Syrian regime did in its battle for Aleppo from 2013 to 2016, and more than the U.S.-led campaign to defeat the Islamic State did in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria, in 2017.

Legacy media like The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN, and BBC shoulder a great portion of the responsibility for Aaron’s self-immolation. They have steadfastly force-fed longtime loyal readers and viewers a diet of articles that reflect deep bias against Palestinians.

As a long-time reader of The New York Times, I’ve experienced their bias firsthand. I’ve long maintained a practice of participating in the comments section of their articles; my comments have always been approved. Yet since October, their comment moderators have consistently declined to publish any comment of mine that has expressed dismay about the violent nature of Israel’s invasion or, strikingly, that has expressed dissent about the way that President Biden has handled this humanitarian crisis.

Their articles have masked the atrocities committed by the state of Israel.

They have published without verification propaganda fed to them directly by the Israeli state—remember the “40 beheaded babies” lie that President Biden disseminated and, further, said he’d seen in photographs?

And more recently, the NYT has landed in hot water over their release, in late December, of the graphic front-page piece, entitled Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7^th.”

Ali Abuminah of The Electronic Intifada was the first to do an in-depth piece on the questionable reporting behind the NYT feature.

As it turned out, one of the main NYT reporters for the feature, Israeli freelancer Anat Schwartz, is now under investigation by the NYT for her social media activity, which has included dehumanizing language and endorsements of violence against Palestinians in Gaza.

The Intercept followed with a scathing piece of its own.

Democracy Now! interviewed Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim, who co-authored the piece, about their findings.

Israel, we must note, used its original piece to depict pro-Palestinian supporters worldwide as uncaring (or caring selectively) about sexual violence, and to further justify the scale of violence in their ongoing war on Gaza—indeed, to cite the sexual violence as a primary justification for Israel’s “right to defend itself.”

The extreme censorship of information that supports the Palestinian cause or even, that is mildly critical of Israel’s invasion and the history that preceded it, has clearly illuminated the fault lines that characterize free press in the U.S. In January, the pro-Palestinian march in Washington, D.C. that attracted 400,000 people, was not covered by any of these legacy media outlets.

These outlets have made people like you, me, and Aaron Bushnell feel isolated; in fact, that is their raison d’etre at this moment in history. It is this suppression of information and of the power of solidarity that acted as a catalyst for Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation.  

And that’s not all.

There is a long history of people who have used self-immolation as a radical act of protest when the voices of a considerable number of people have been silenced.

In 1963, Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, set himself on fire to protest the government of South Vietnam’s persecution of Buddhists.

This photograph won the World Press Photo of the Year for 1963. U.S. President John F. Kennedy said, "No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one."

Two years later, the renowned Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote a letter to Martin Luther King discussing this self-immolation, and that of many other monks and nuns who had done the same. The act was neither “protest” nor “suicide,” he said. In his words,

“To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance. There is nothing more painful than burning oneself. To say something while experiencing this kind of pain is to say it with the utmost of courage, frankness, determination and sincerity. The Vietnamese monk, by burning himself, say with all his strength [sic] and determination that he can endure the greatest of sufferings to protect his people. But why does he have to burn himself to death? The difference between burning oneself and burning oneself to death is only a difference in degree, not in nature. A man who burns himself too much must die. The importance is not to take one’s life, but to burn. What he really aims at is the expression of his will and determination, not death.”

The act of self-immolation has also had a lasting impact on American politics.

On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, a Quaker and anti-war activist, doused himself in kerosene and set himself on fire to protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Morrison self-immolated at the Pentagon, directly below the office of Robert McNamara, at the time the U.S. Secretary of Defense.

Morrison’s death so horrified Robert McNamara that historians such as Paul Hendrickson deemed the protests a tipping point for McNamara; after Morrison’s death, McNamara turned against his former actions in Vietnam.

And on April 14, 2018, climate activist and LGBTQ rights lawyer David Buckel self-immolated in a circle of earth near his home in Brooklyn to protest the global climate crisis.

Aaron Bushnell is not the only person to self-immolate in response to the U.S. role in Israel’s war on Gaza. In December, an unidentified person with a Palestinian flag was left in critical condition after they lit themself on fire outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta.

The Palestinian town of Jericho has named a street after Aaron Bushnell, the US air force member who set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington to protest against the war in Gaza.

The 25-year-old  “sacrificed everything” for Palestinians, said the mayor of Jericho, Abdul Karim Sidr, as the street sign was unveiled on Sunday.

Aaron Bushnell Street is in the south of the city in a popular area of villas and parks, where people go for horse-riding and go-carting. It branches off from Mahmoud Darwish Street, named after the unofficial national poet of Palestine. Rayan said: “Here Aaron Bushnell and Mahmoud Darwish meet. Both are powerful names in the Palestinian story.”

“To burn oneself by fire,” said Buddhist monk Thich Thich Nhat Hanh, “is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance.”

It is also the act of someone who feels that their government cares little for what its people believe, particularly with respect to unjust wars.

Recently, U.S. active duty members have penned an open letter protesting Israel’s war crimes:

About half of all U.S. adults now say that Israel has gone too far in its war against Gaza. (Hear what protestors had to say about Aaon’s self-immolation.)

It’s high time our government listened.

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Content Warning: The following photos of Aaron Bushnell are sensitive in nature and include images of self-immolation. Please take care when viewing.

Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc Photo: Malcolm Browne

Aaron’s self-immolation Photo: Unknown

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Sources:

Here’s what Talia Jane had to say about her process: Jane, T. (2024, February 29). Aaron Bushnell’s Self-Immolation Protest Needed to Be Seen. But That Didn’t Make It Easy to Report. Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/aaron-bushnell-self-immolation-protest-hard-important-story-journalist-1234978325/

I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” he says: U.S. Airman Sets Self on Fire Outside Israeli Embassy: Everything We Know So Far. (2024, February 26). TIME. https://time.com/6821425/israel-embassy-air-force-protest-fire-self-immolation-aaron-bushnell-latest-updates/

The New York Times penned a piece that emphasized Aaron’s alleged: Bogel-Burroughs, N., & Edmonds, C. (2024, February 28). U.S. Airman’s Winding Path Ended in Self-Immolation to Protest Israel. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/us/aaron-bushnell-israel-embassy-fire.html

Newsweek obtained and discussed a police report stating that Aaron exhibited “signs of mental distress: Aaron Bushnell death report reveals police call about “mental distress.” (2024, February 26). Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/aaron-bushnell-death-report-reveals-police-call-about-mental-distress-1873386

Michael Starr of the Jerusalem Post called Aaron’s protest an “act of violence”: Praise of Bushnell’s self-immolation puts US closer to suicide bombings—Comment. (2024, February 27). The Jerusalem Post | JPost.Com. https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-789166

An investigation by the Washington Post determined that Israel’s war against Gaza: Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars in Gaza. (n.d.). Washington Post. Retrieved March 12, 2024, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2023/israel-war-destruction-gaza-record-pace/

Ali Abuminah of The Electronic Intifada was the first to do an in-depth piece: Abunimah, A. (2024, February 6). NY Times tries to cover up its 7 October “mass rapes” fraud [Text]. The Electronic Intifada. https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/ny-times-tries-cover-its-7-october-mass-rapes-fraud

The Intercept followed with a scathing piece of its own: Boguslaw, J. S., Ryan Grim, Daniel. (2024, February 29). The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7/

Democracy Now! interviewed Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim, who co-authored the piece: The Intercept: New York Times Exposé Lacks Evidence to Claim Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence Oct. 7. (n.d.). Democracy Now! Retrieved March 13, 2024, from https://www.democracynow.org/2024/3/1/nyt_anat_schwartz

Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, self-immolated on December 17, 2010: Fisher, M. (2023, May 20). In Tunisia, act of one fruit vendor sparks wave of revolution through Arab world. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-tunisia-act-of-one-fruit-vendor-sparks-wave-of-revolution-through-arab-world/2011/03/16/AFjfsueB_story.html. See also: Hamid, S. (2024, March 7). Opinion. How can one suicide protest be heroic and another crazy? Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/29/aaron-bushnell-suicide-protest/

The image of the self-immolation, taken by photographer Malcolm Browne: 50 of the World’s Most Remarkable Photographs. (2016, March 28). Esquire. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/g2689/most-powerful-photos/

Two years later, the renowned Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote a letter to Martin Luther King discussing this self-immolation: In Search of the Enemy of Man. (1965, June 1). Plum Village. https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/in-search-of-the-enemy-of-man

On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, a Quaker and anti-war activist, doused himself: Flintoff, J.-P. (2010, October 15). I told them to be brave. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/16/norman-morrison-vietnam-war-protest

Morrison’s death so horrified Robert McNamara that: Scrimer, V. (2021, June 18). The Self-Immolation of David Buckel: Towards a Postdramatic Activism. Critical Stages/Scènes Critiques. https://www.critical-stages.org/23/the-self-immolation-of-david-buckel-towards-a-postdramatic-activism/

And on April 14, 2018, climate activist and LGBTQ rights lawyer David Buckel self-immolated: Conroy, J. O. (2019, April 15). A lawyer set himself on fire to protest climate change. Did anyone care? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/15/david-buckel-lawyer-climate-change-protest

The Palestinian town of Jericho has named a street after Aaron Bushnell: Palestinian town of Jericho names street after US soldier who set himself on fire | Palestinian territories | The Guardian. (n.d.). Retrieved March 13, 2024, from https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/10/palestinian-town-of-jericho-names-street-after-us-airman-who-set-himself-on-fire

Meanwhile, about half of all U.S. adults now say that Israel has gone too far: Israel-Hamas war: Half of US adults say Israel has gone too far, poll shows | AP News. (n.d.). Retrieved March 13, 2024, from https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-poll-biden-war-gaza-4159b28d313c6c37abdb7f14162bcdd1