A Lost Generation’s Deification of Aaron Bushnell

I saw it on social media first. There he was, a man wearing a U.S. Air Force uniform, dousing himself in flammable liquid and setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. “Free Palestine!” he yelled through the flames, as secret service agents rushed to douse them. My first thought was that regardless of his ideology, this was an incredible waste of a life. Undoubtedly he thought he was doing something honorable, that sacrificing his life in this way would save the life of someone else, and that people would respect him for what he had done. How tragically misguided, I thought. It’s indisputably clear that there are mental health struggles at play here, I thought. No one, I concluded, will praise such an act.

I could not have been more wrong.

Within hours, praise of Aaron Bushnell began to appear all over social media in progressive and anti-Israel circles. The man ablaze had been deified, had become a god to be worshipped, elevated to the highest level of selflessness and moral clarity. “We should all aspire to such selflessness” was the whisper that grew louder and louder in the passing hours.

Cornel West’s praise of Bushnell on X, receiving more than six million views, was perhaps the most shocking: “Let us never forget the extraordinary courage and commitment of brother Aaron Bushnell who died for truth and justice! I pray for his precious loved ones! Let us rededicate ourselves to genuine solidarity with Palestinians undergoing genocidal attacks in real time!” West, a consistently provocative academic, political activist and presidential candidate, has been outspoken about his support of Palestinian “resistance.” He has regularly accused Israel of genocide and apartheid, so he wasted no time in hijacking Bushnell’s self-immolation for his own platform by essentially deifying him.

It’s a reckless statement to make, especially given that, as Eylon Levy reminds us, suicide is “scientifically proven to be contagious.” But the higher the body count, the better. It turns out that Hamas’s strategy is also the strategy of many on the progressive left. The more bodies we can add to the pile, the more damning it is for Israel. Never mind the reality of how those bodies got there. And, come to think of it, never mind reality itself.

But West wasn’t the only one—not by a long shot. Predictably, Jewish Voice for Peace posted a thread honoring Bushnell’s act of “giving his life for justice,” calling self-immolation “a highly spiritual embodiment of one’s most deeply held values,” and stopping just short of naming Bushnell the next messiah. How such a statement figures into Jewish values is anyone’s guess. (Hint: it doesn’t.)

“Rest in power,” said Dr. Jill Stein, a presidential candidate with the Green Party and a medical doctor, using the words typically reserved for victims of racism. And in an episode of “Democracy Now!” Ann Wright, a retired U.S. Army colonel and former diplomat, called the self-immolation an “act of courage, an act of bravery, to call attention to U.S. policies.”

Using particularly disturbing rhetoric, Mohammed El-Kurd, The Nation’s Palestine Correspondent, posted on X in response to criticism of Bushnell: “You can’t protest peacefully. You can’t boycott. You can’t hunger strike. You can’t hijack planes. You can’t block traffic. You can’t throw Molotovs. You can’t self-immolate. You can’t heckle politicians. You can’t march. You can’t riot. You can’t dissent. You just can’t be.” In one post, suicide is transformed into the ultimate expression of being. Apparently there is no quicker ascendency to god-like status than via suicide.

The list of supporters, nearly breathless in their adulation of the man in flames, goes on and on. And these voices are joined by the ones who started this war in the first place.

Hamas put out a statement blaming President Biden for Bushnell’s self-immolation and saying that he had given his life “to shed light on the Zionist massacres and ethnic cleansing against our people in the Gaza Strip.” It’s no secret that Hamas values death, so this comes as no surprise. Martyrdom is valued above all else for the terrorist group, who also stated that Bushnell would “remain immortal in the memory of our Palestinian people and the free people of the world.” The gaslighting—no pun intended—is heavy here, given that Hamas’s control over the people of Gaza makes them anything but free.

The long list of supportive statements continues to grow. But words of support are eclipsed by actions. Several anti-Israel activist groups in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, New York City, Cleveland, Houston and Atlanta among others have organized vigils in Bushnell’s honor in front of federal offices and Israeli consulates. Young people in particular have whipped themselves into a frenzy as they seek to lift up Bushnell’s spectacle of violence as the antidote to the violence they claim to abhor.

The irony is profound. Bushnell used fire and violence to protest the violence of a war that was started when Israeli families were burned alive by Hamas. But who remembers that inconvenient truth?

The irony is profound. Bushnell used fire and violence to protest the violence of a war that was started when Israeli families were burned alive by Hamas. But who remembers that inconvenient truth?

And speaking of remembering, it’s not that self-immolation is new. There have been others in recent history. But while some have been largely ignored, Bushnell’s self-immolation seems to have struck a different chord, especially among the generation that has been consumed with finding opportunities to express outrage and with rooting out so-called oppressors from society—an impulse for which we can thank DEI programs pushing Marxism rather than true tolerance. From the BLM marches and protests to the hysterics surrounding gender identity politics to the violent shouting down of campus speakers whose viewpoints they don’t agree with, an entire generation of young people has found its religion. 

That they need to find this new “religion” is exactly the problem. 

Over the past couple of decades religion in America has experienced a rapid decline. Christianity in general has taken a massive hit, given that approximately 31% of people raised Christian became unaffiliated between the ages of 15 and 29 (over a two-decade period ending in 2019), the “tumultuous period in which religious switching is concentrated.” An additional 7% of people raised Christian became unaffiliated later in life, after the age of 30.

And it’s not just Christians who are leaving the faith, though given that most religious people in America identify as Christian, a mass exodus from the Christian community matters. But a quick Google search reveals countless articles heralding the decline of religion in general in the lives of Americans. In 2023, only 16% of Americans surveyed said religion is the most important component of their lives, down from 20% a decade ago. Predictions are that this decline will continue. In America, those who belong to a church, synagogue or mosque are now in the minority. In their book “The Great Dechurching,” Jim Davis and Michael Graham write: “We are currently experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country.” In the last quarter century, around 40 million adults who used to attend church have stopped going.

So why does this matter? The issue isn’t that people have stopped believing in God or in the importance of religious ritual. The issue is that when people leave churches and synagogues and other houses of worship, they are leaving behind a community. And when you leave behind a community, you are opening up a whole chasm of unhappiness that needs to be filled by something else.

Last year when I interviewed Arthur C. Brooks, the happiness expert, the biggest take-away was that if you want to be happy, there are four aspects of life that need to be cultivated: faith, family, friendship, and work that serves others. What he means by faith is not necessarily religion or a belief in God, but rather the faith community—a community where people support each other, but also where the shared belief is that there is something larger than us. Those who belong to religious communities are often involved in volunteering and other projects that serve others. The focus is on others rather than on the self, and in focusing on others, the self is enriched. We become happier and more fulfilled. 

But when we leave all that behind, the human impulse is to substitute something else in its place. There’s a void, a vacuum, that needs to be filled by something else. The rhetoric of social justice that now dominates the curriculum of elementary schools, high schools and universities is like a call to prayer for a generation that is increasingly lost. Social justice is important, but what masquerades as social justice in schools and on university campuses is often something more sinister and politically-driven. But when the need is there—the need to belong, the need to feel that we are doing something that matters, the need to feel that we are part of something larger than us—it’s difficult to parse out these nuances and see agenda-driven programs for what they are. The result is a lost generation falling into step behind an ideology that is ultimately violent and intolerant, an ideology that makes messiahs out of the Aaron Bushnells.

I can’t help but wonder how different things would be if there was a collective push for young people—and older people—to return to faith communities, to communities that work to serve others. Instead of praising the man who self-immolates, we should mourn him, and we should use his death as an occasion to ask ourselves how we got here.

Monica Osborne is a former professor of literature, critical theory, and Jewish studies. She is Editor at Large at The Jewish Journal and is author of “The Midrashic Impulse.” X @DrMonicaOsborne