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WASHINGTON DC. – People across the world have highlighted the bravery and sacrifice of the US active duty soldier who was protesting the genocide in Gaza

On Sunday, February 25, Aaron Bushnell became the first active duty US soldier to use self-immolation to protest the actions of the military he was a part of. 

“I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” he said in a self-recorded livestream outside of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC. “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 then lit himself on fire. He later succumbed to his injuries in a hospital.

Before his final act of protest, Bushnell, who worked in the IT department in the US Air Force, made a post on Facebook, which read, “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.”

Anti-imperialist and Palestine solidarity organizations within the United States have released several statements in honour of Bushnell.

Brian Becker, the executive director of the ANSWER Coalition, wrote in a statement released on the morning of February 26, “This was an act of martyrdom by a US service member who was outraged by the actions of a government that speaks in his name.”

Becker continues, “Aaron Bushnell’s action is a reflection, an indicator, a marker, of the profound change in consciousness in the United States. The previously dominant narrative that backed the Israeli apartheid government is dramatically giving way to a narrative based on the truth: that the Palestinian people have been the victims of dispossession, ethnic cleansing, violence of all types and now a genocidal killing spree in Gaza. And people in the United States and around the world are horrified and are mobilizing on multiple fronts in support of Palestine.”

The Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) also released a statement highlighting the message sent by Bushnell’s protest. “In making the most extreme sacrifice a human being can in support of a moral cause — his own life — Aaron sent a message on behalf of the masses of the US and of the world, that people of conscience everywhere will refuse complicity in the unfolding genocide against the Palestinian people until our last breath,” the statement read.

It concludes by saying, “Let Aaron’s words and last act burn brightly in our conscience, let it propel us, let it move us to continue struggling for a Free Palestine, now and until the hour of liberation.”

Iraq war veteran Mike Prysner wrote a tribute to Bushnell, commenting on the crisis of conscience that many US service members face for being part of “an institution of killing”. – peoplesdispatch.org