Aaron Bushnell: “I will no longer be complicit in genocide.” Daniel Berrigan: “Jesus’ death, I think, in a very deep sense can be called a self-immolation.”
https://husseini.substack.com/p/holocaust-immolation-sacrifice-and
FEB 25, 2025
[Aaron Bushnell immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., a year ago today. A slightly edited version of this article appeared in the Nov/Dec 2024 issue of The Capitol Hill Citizen — which is only available in print. Past writing in the Citizen: “The Ostrich Caucus — Why won’t members of Congress just say it: Israel has nukes?” and “Democrats Look the Other Way on Pandemic Origins: Will Hoped-for Republican Inquiry be Limited?”]
On the morning of October 14, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Israel launched an airstrike on a crowded tent encampment for displaced individuals near Al-Aqsa [Jerusalem] hospital in Gaza, engulfing the area in a massive fire. Footage from the scene revealed patients, some bedridden and connected to IVs, being burned alive while others in the camp desperately attempted to put out the flames with small buckets of water.
“I swear to God I saw people burning in front of me. By God, no one could do anything” said Saleh Al-Jafarawi, an independent Palestinian journalist who filmed the massacre said in a video posted on his Instagram account.
Another Palestinian journalist in Gaza, Abubaker Abed, would report that the man immolated by Israel’s bombardment was apparently Sha’ban Al-Dalou, 19, “a software engineering freshman, Sept. 2023, at Al-Azhar [most luminous] University of Gaza. Israel destroyed his home and his university and immolated him yesterday at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital after forcibly displacing him earlier last year.” He was burned alive along with his mother; much of the rest of the family sustained burns but are still alive.
The scene led Juan Cole to recall that “The term ‘holocaust’ is derived from the Greek words holos (whole) and kaustos (burned).”
While some Palestinians, struggling to survive in barely functioning hospitals, are burned alive by Israel’s attacks, a few in the US have immolated themselves over the last year in protest of the US-government-backed slaughter.
The prophet Isaiah proclaimed:
The Lord has spoken: …
I have more than enough of burnt offerings,
of rams and the fat of fattened animals;
I have no pleasure
in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats. …
Take your evil deeds out of my sight;
stop doing wrong.
Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
Still, some are effectively offering the burning not of lambs and goats as a religious tribute, but of their own flesh as a sacrifice for peace.
On Dec. 1, as the Gaza health ministry was reporting 15,000 dead, a “Jane Doe” with a Palestinian flag immolated herself outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta.
According to the Atlanta Fire Rescue Department, the person is alive and in the hospital, but they would provide no other information about their condition. The fire department report referred to the case as an “arson”.
Like most self-immolators in the US, the case got minimal coverage and what coverage there was was skewed. ABC quoted an Israeli official who pretended they were the victims: “It is tragic to see the hate and incitement toward Israel expressed in such a horrific way.”
Police records indicate that they obtained a search warrant and entered an apartment they believed to be associated with “Jane Doe” — initially using a drone:
The drone was able to relay information as to the layout and the belongings inside. After it was deemed “safe” entry was made with bomb technicians. While clearing the apartment no improvised explosive devices were located.
The report also indicated that the person was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital, which has a burn center. Repeated inquiries to Grady, which is a public hospital, went unanswered. The hospital houses the Walter L. Ingram Burn Center.
The police report also noted:
During the search [of the apartment] a Quran was found in the bedroom along with a [sic] Arabic dictionary and a Hebrew dictionary.
When pressed for information in February, the fire department cited an alleged ongoing investigation as the reason for minimal information being provided, but by October, the reason had changed to professed privacy concerns for “Jane Doe.”
On Feb. 25, Aaron Bushnell, as South Africa made an appeal to the International Court of Justice to stop the Israeli attack on Rafah, immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C.
The 25-year-old serviceman of the United States Air Force said: “I will no longer be complicit in genocide.” “I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” he said calmly as he walked to the embassy. “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.”
He shouted “FREE PALESTINE!” over and over as he burned himself alive in his uniform.
As he burned up, “security” personnel screamed at him to get on the ground. As with the case of “Jane Doe,” he was treated as a threat to others. One officer has a gun drawn on Aaron until after he collapses.
Finally another officer says: “I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers!”
Prior to lighting himself ablaze, Aaron poured liquid from a metal bottle over his head and put on his military cap. He then took out a lighter and struggled to light it.
In advance of his self-sacrifice, Bushnell posted a message on his Facebook page: “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?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Bushnell’s case is unique in that it got substantially more media attention than any other case in the US in decades. This is at least partly due to the fact that he livestreamed it.
For a time, the Israeli embassy was the site of daily protests, with activists placing floral wreaths where Bushnell had immolated himself. [Note: Protests there are apparently starting up again.]
Still, Talia Jane, who first popularized the video of his immolation blurred out the image.
In contrast, the extremely graphic self immolation of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc in Vietnam in 1963 was awarded World Press Photo of the Year.
It has in fact become a staple of “coverage” of the slaughter in Gaza that carnage is often blurred out. Part of the reason for blurring out photos showing Israel’s carnage may be concerns about Big Tech platforms using that as a pretext to target accounts. In Feb 2024, I was suspended for a time from X for posting the award winning photo of Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation. But whatever the motivation for the censorship, it effectively anesthetizes the horror of what Israel is doing — and may effectively make the killing more palatable, thus prolonging it. Whatever one might image the “privacy” wishes of people being slaughtered in Palestine to be, Bushnell clearly meant for people to see the horror of his agony.
The immolations in Vietnam inspired Alice Herz, a Quaker feminist pacifist immigrant from Nazi Germany, to immolate herself in Detroit in March of 1965, apparently the first US person to immolate themselves, to little media coverage.
Another Quaker, Norman Morrison, immolated himself in November of the same year while holding his infant daughter, within view of Robert McNamara’s Pentagon office. This was amid the burning of draft cards, often organized by the Catholic Worker movement.
A week later, on November 9, 1965 at 5 a.m., Catholic Worker Roger Allen LaPorte assumed the lotus position and set himself alight outside the United Nations. These acts were reportedly celebrated in North Vietnam; a stamp was issued in Morrison’s honor. LaPorte’s death led to somber comments from U Thant, the secretary general of the UN, and the US representative in a front page New York Times story. LaPorte would tell a police offer he did it because he was “against war, all war.”
Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day would avoid media interviews just after the immolation but would write “Suicide or Sacrifice?” calling LaPorte a “victim soul”: “It is not only that many youths and students throughout the country are deeply sensitive to the sufferings of the world. They have a keen sense that they must be responsible and make a profession of their faith that things do not have to go on as they always have — that men are capable of laying down their lives for others, taking a stand, even when the all-encroaching State and indeed all the world are against them.”
Several people immolated themselves in protest of the prolonged war against Iraq over the years, but were almost completely ignored, showing that the clichés that the media seek sensationalism and “if it bleeds it leads” are not true when they challenge the establishment’s agenda.
One — Gregory Levey — was the stepson of the columnist Ellen Goodman. After the February 1991 bombing of the Amariyah Shelter, which killed hundreds of Iraqi civilians, he walked to the Amherst, Massachusetts, town common with newspapers stuffed under his clothing. He doused himself with paint thinner. The first match went out. With the second, he lit himself afire.
At least two others immolated themselves trying to stop the 1991 bombing of Iraq, Raymond Moules and Timothy T. Brown, who said: “I, Tim Brown, Vietnam veteran, declare that my act of self-immolation is a direct protest of American war policy in the Middle East.” I found no coverage of them at all, only learning of their names years later from Brian Willson, author of Blood on the Tracks, who lost his legs being run over by a train in 1987 which he tried to stop from sending weapons to Nicaragua. He wrote to me: “One could argue that immolations are like distressed canaries … We live in a pathological culture operating as a criminal psychopath, way out of control headed for annihilation.”
Similarly, in November 2006 musician Malachi Ritscher immolated himself in Chicago. “Maybe some will be scared enough to wake from their walking dream state” he wrote. “When I hear about our young men and women who are sent off to war in the name of God and Country, and who give up their lives for no rational cause at all, my heart is crushed. … Half the population is taking medication … The violent turmoil initiated by the United States military invasion of Iraq will beget future centuries of slaughter, if the human race lasts that long.” I recall being appalled by the lack of media coverage of Ritscher’s death. Even programs like Democracy Now wouldn’t mention it.
In contrast, the 2011 Arab uprisings were sparked by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit seller, who immolated himself in front of a government building in Tunisia. While Bouaziz lay in the hospital, he lived for some time before finally dying, people in Tunisia could hear their neighbors shouting from their windows “Dignity! Dignity!” at 2:00 a.m.
Many others in Tunisia and other Arab countries followed, hoping their sacrifice would create a better life for others around them.
This year, a man immolated himself in front of a palace in Jordan, apparently in protest of Jordan’s complicity in the slaughter in Gaza, but his name has not been revealed.
There were reports of self immolations in Gaza in 2018, but again, no names.
The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says of self-immolation: “I think we must try to understand those who have sacrificed themselves. We do not intend to say that self-immolation is good, or that it is bad. … When you say something is good, you say that you should do that. But nobody can urge another to do such a thing. … It is done to wake us up.” He relates the story of a young Vietnamese woman, Nhat Chi Mai, who immolated herself — and was so joyous the month before that people thought she was planning on getting married. He also argues that others are burning themselves but [quoting another monk] “in a slower way. I am burning myself with austerity, with active resistance against the war.” In some ways, self-immolation is an attempt at a life of service all at once. We are all oxidizing slowly, they chose it all at once.
On Sept. 11, Matt Nelson, a few days after the Israeli military shot US citizen Ayşenur Eygi in the head as she observed a protest on the West Bank, immolated himself across from the Israeli consulate in Boston.
He used some of the same language as Bushnell in a video he posted shortly before immolating himself: “My name is Matt Nelson and I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest. We are all culpable in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. We call ourselves the greatest nation in history yet we spend more on weapons of war than we do on educating our children, helping the homeless, ensuring all Americans have equal rights, and protecting the environment combined. We are slaves to capitalism and the military-industrial complex. Most of us are too apathetic to care.
“The protest I’m about to engage in is a call to our government to stop supplying Israel with the money and weapons it uses to imprison and murder innocent Palestinians, to pressure Israel to end the genocide in Gaza, and to support the ICC indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of the Israeli government. I urge any of you who are of the same mind to call your senators and representatives and demand that they introduce and advanced legislation to achieve these goals. If sitting lawmakers won’t, vote for those who will the democracy is supposed to serve the will of the people, not the interest of the wealthy take the power back. Free Palestine.”
The media attention to his immolation was trivial. And the Boston police effectively hindered any reporting on it, falsely telling me on Sept. 18 that he was still alive when he had died on Sept. 15.
An accidental witness to Nelson’s self-immolation posted on X: “It was awful to see him on fire, not fighting against the flames or screaming for help. He was just enduring the pain!”
The Cape Cod Times would eventually report: “Nelson, 45, lived in Centerville and Hyannis for much of his life, and attended Centerville Elementary School and Barnstable High School, according to a long-time friend Owen Flood.”
Fatema Ahmad, executive director of the local group the Muslim Justice League organized a vigil at the Boston Public Garden to raise awareness surrounding why Nelson self-immolated.
On Oct. 6, at a rally near the White House as part of the protests against a year of genocide by Israel, Samuel Mena Jr immolated his arm.
With a press ID draping from his neck, Mena, who went to Walter Cronkite School in Phoenix and worked at TV stations in Arizona shouted, “Free Palestine!”, and “I’m a journalist and I’m ashamed! We spread the misinformation!”
He wrote in a piece posted the day before: “The Biden-Harris administration said it wanted to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza in February AND YET, as of August, Israel has received 50.5 Billion dollars in Military aid and sales since October 7th, which is an outdated figure by this point. AND YET, when votes were held at the UN for a resolution to call for a ceasefire to war-torn Gaza, the US used its veto power on three separate occasions. …
“Democracy is dead. America looked in the dead eyes of the British Colonialism that we once opposed in an effort to create this nation, and instead decided to revive it. …
“To the 10 thousand children in Gaza that have lost a limb in this conflict, I give my left arm to you. I pray my voice was able to raise up yours, and that your smiles never disappear.”
The notion of martyrdom seems at odds with a modern age to some even though Christianity and the U.S. were arguably built on it.
Patrick Henry declared “Give me liberty or give me death.”
But many immolators seem to view immolation as a form of protest when normal forms of democratic process seem futile. A refusal to live in permanent subjugation — a liberty though death — and a hope that by exiting that subjugation though death, a dignified life might be achieved for others who one loves.
Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan would comment “I think in Christianity that something very great has been lost. … Jesus’ death, I think, in a very deep sense can be called a self-immolation.”
Indeed, the origin of the word “immolation” are apparently of sacrifice, in the writing of martyr Thomas More, the patron saint of statesmen and politicians.
Sam Husseini is an independent journalist writing at husseini.substack.com. He is also founder of VotePact.org, which encourages cooperation between the anti-establishment left and right.