On February 25, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old member of the U.S. Air Force, went to the front gate of the Israel Embassy in Washington, D.C., and set himself on fire. As he was burning, he repeatedly yelled, “Free Palestine!” He was transported to the hospital in critical condition, and later declared dead.
In addition to live streaming his gruesome self-murder, Bushnell left a post on Facebook saying that he would “no longer be complicit in genocide.” His Facebook message further elaborated:
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.
The founders of Seventh-day Adventism were all alive during slavery—the denomination was organized in 1863, and slavery did not end until 1865. None of them set themselves on fire to protest slavery, although they opposed it. That’s because, far from urging us to self-destruction, Christianity forbids self-murder. Christ said, “I am come that you might have life and have it more abundantly.” (John 10:10)
Not only did Bushnell kill himself in an exceptionally painful and horrific manner, he killed himself for a “cause” that has no real validity. Israel is not committing a “genocide” in the Gaza strip. It is trying to defeat an enemy—Hamas—that attacked without warning and went on a terror rampage, raping and killing women, decapitating babies, and filming its atrocities to glorify the perpetrators.
Israel did not respond in kind. It warns Gaza civilians when it is going to bomb a housing unit, leaving time for evacuation. It targets the Hamas fighters, and calls off bombings when it knows that human shields are present. It has allowed trucks carrying food, water, and humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, even as Hamas has refused to release its Israeli civilian hostages.
Some innocent Gazans have died, which is unavoidable in urban combat, but remarkably few. Salo Aizenberg calculated that, even if you accept Hamas’s figures on total deaths, the ratio of civilian deaths to Hamas fighter deaths is about 1.4 to 1, an historically low ratio of civilian deaths in the type of close urban combat happening in Gaza. Yet Bushnell killed himself to protest a “genocide”?
Bushnell’s Reddit activity reveals that he was a full-blown “intersectionalist”—a cultural Marxist. He subscribed to the entire spectrum of woke beliefs—he railed against TERFs (a TERF is a feminist who doesn’t want men in women’s sports or in the women’s locker room), fatphobia, and even speciesism, warning his comrades against “comparing humans we don’t like to animals.” His last Reddit entry was about how “whiteness erases culture.”
Bushnell was a white, “cis-identified,” heterosexual—the scum of the earth, according to the woke “intersectional” ideology he embraced. So he might have felt that killing himself was the only expiation for the sin of his own existence.
I feel sorrow for the death of Aaron Bushnell—"every man’s death diminishes me”— and I feel righteous anger at the cultural Marxists who blighted his life and destroyed him with their sick, twisted ideology. I’m glad that Christianity has a radically different message: Christ died for my sins, and so I’m not required to light myself on fire. In fact, God loves me so much that if I were the only sinner in the world, Christ would have died for me.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. Mat. 11:29-30.