U.S. Air Force member who set himself on fire outside Israeli Embassy in D.C. has died
nbcnews.com
The airman, who filmed the incident and could be heard yelling “Free Palestine,” was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries after collapsing to the ground.
The U.S. Air Force member who set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., in an apparent protest against the Israel-Hamas war has died, according to a U.S. official.
Next of kin notification is continuing, so the Air Force won’t release his name until 24 hours after the final notification is complete.
The District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Medical Service Department responded to a call about a person on fire outside the embassy just before 1 p.m. Sunday, and found the flames extinguished by the Secret Service’s uniformed division.
You are viewing a single comment
I dislike this. I've seen first hand what serious burns do to people, both in the immediate and long term. Imo, this is there should be no speech louder than this, but it just kinda gets an "oh, damn, really? Man. What's on the next channel?" reaction. I dislike that people resort to this when they're going to get ignored, and I dislike that it largely is ignored except for a fleeting moment of sensational headlines.
The problem is, as far as I see it, that this doesn't change minds. Thousands of children are dead now. Unless you're totally ignorant of that, in which case you will be totally ignorant of why he killed himself in this manner, it's not going to make you suddenly care about Palestine when exponentially more dead children who didn't die by their own hand will not.
Or discredit him as a libtard crazy. That is what people on the other side of this argument have been saying. I hate this world.
I wish I could say I was surprised.
The base’s Pavlovian rejection of anything said by an accused outsider has got to be one of the Republican party’s biggest real “achievements.”
Or maybe I’m giving them too much credit. Mixing simple “ill will towards others” with a dash of “confirmation bias” will produce a very similar result.
I see this in every argument on Lemmy.
It's easy for far away things, even horrific things, to just seem like trivia with no real salience to our lives. A statement like this is meant to wake people up that caring about the victims of our foreign policy is something for Americans to do. We as Americans have some small input into the process by which our taxes fund a genocide. And even if we don't, maybe famously "empathic" Joe Biden might spend a second thought on the morality of his actions.
As I told someone else- after Thích Quảng Đức's suicide by setting himself on fire, the Vietnam War raged on for 12 more years.
Based on that, this is, unfortunately, not going to have any effect.
Oh I'm sorry that self-immolation isn't a magic "stop" button and movements and social change take time to play out. Claiming it was inconsequential is just fucking insanely ahistorical. Next up, "Rosa Parks' protest had no effect on the Civil Rights movement because it took 9 years for the Civil Rights Act to be signed".
I would say that's a little different from a president saying it was a turning point and then the guy who followed him massively escalated the war.
If Rosa Parks did her protest, Kennedy never got the Civil Rights Act passed and Nixon went back to encouraging segregation until he had not choice but to promote civil rights, that would be an apt comparison.
Nope, they're both stupidly ahistorical statements to make. Ending the war wasn't even the target of the protest, just an arbitrary end result you say wasn't achieved quickly enough.
So neither of these people set themselves on fire with the goal of ending a war?
It's loud about the strength of this guy's conviction but it provides no actual argument or information. I don't think it's cause to change one's opinion about Biden's foreign policy one way or another. In fact, I'd go further and say that it probably should be ignored as much as possible in order to avoid motivating other people to do the same thing.
I disagree. Fairly certain it got politicians attention. When your own soldiers are standing outside of your house setting themselves on fire it’s probably best to pay attention to the message.
It wasn't "soldiers", it was one guy. One person who wasted their life, instead of lobbying for what they wanted.
Now he'll never get to vote, donate, or campaign for what he believed in. He actually hurt his cause in the long run.
"No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country."
-- General George S. Patton
What if he felt those things were less effective than self-immolation? Because I certainly do.
You change your vote based on people killing themselves? Like if you are pro-choice and a pro-life person killed themselves, you would change your mind? Do you look up stats on the number of people on both sides who kill themselves and compare them? Do you think suicidal people are a good basis for a system of government?
If you do any of those things, you are not a normal voter. Voters do not care about that at all. It grabs attention, but just talking to your friend about who you're voting for is much more persuasive. If you kill yourself people rightfully think you have mental issues.
You’re going out of your way to misunderstand this.
This can sway my vote and yes, things that people are willing to give their lives for are very compelling to me.
I'm not allowed to change who I vote for in this system.
"Imo, this is there should be no speech louder than this"
I really don't know what you were trying to say there, but you managed to fuck it up so badly it makes no sense.
That's an awfully rude response to not being able to extrapolate this from the quoted bit:
"A man felt so deeply that this was wrong, and so powerless to get the attention of anyone who could even consider doing anything to help, that he doused himself in gasoline and burned himself to death in public, leaving behind his family and everything he cared about. Maybe people should pay attention to such a strongly sent message, and consider whether there are valid reasons that someone might feel so strongly about this topic."