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.
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.
“The” achievement. It was enabled by humanity’s shitty heuristics and still developing (it will never get to develop, I don’t think) ability for longer term thinking.
It wasn’t hard to do, but they sure kept at it.
If we can’t fix it, if the world continues on a slide to shit, if it’s all doomed to a stupid end then I have but one desire:
That when the echelons at the top tumble alongside the rest of civilization, they try at the end, right at the very 11th hour to recall their rabid masses because they need them to listen…
Only to hear back “Fake news” as the rabid mass of blind hatred they built tumbles down their would-be world too.
There are days your wish seems to be the most likely outcome in the long run.
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?