In addition to being an immoderate act, self-immolation is a violent one, indeed one of the most violent, and if you dislike violence, then you should abhor it no matter your view on the war in Gaza.
That war began when Hamas terrorists burned Israelis alive, and the livestreamer showed no appreciation of the irony that it would end, for him, with his own voluntary experience of the same fate.
Cotton candy brain. The Atlantic only lets idiots write this shallow garbage because it’s in support of the West. The few articles in the Atlantic of actual value that challenge dominant Western narratives have to be ironclad in order to be published, whereas if you’re a civility-brained lib you can just mash your head against the keyboard and hit send.
The Palestinian case, in its minimal form, goes something like this: Palestinians have lived in and around the territory of Israel for a long time, and Israel shouldn’t force them to move or mistreat them if they stay. The Israeli case is also simple: Jews have been there a long time too, and have their own right to safety and dignity. I am aware that even these summaries will draw vicious ire. But my point is that a decent person can agree with both, and from that serene starting point negotiation could begin
Israel does not give a fuck about the safety and dignity of Jews, abusing cultural and religious symbols as justification for settler-colonialism, oppressing multiple Middle-Eastern Jewish populations, and opposing Jewish assimilation outside of Israel as they wish to grow their colony by using antisemitism across the world.
I'm not kidding that for a second I wondered if the tweeter was going to follow up with "Thomas Friedman actually wrote that." I read it in my mind in his voice. I was almost disappointed that it wasn't the case.
It's so wild to me how my socialist friends are expected to have something like a PhD in world history and economics in order to justify their positions while the average liberal can cite two NYT columns and a wikipedia page and call it a day.
Protestors self‐immolate because they’re desperate and don’t know what else to try. It is always a last resort, not one of the first. Most of the world is begging for the neocolonists to stop exterminating the innocent and they’re still doing it anyway. If the oppressors simply yielded to our demands the first umpteen thousand g‐ddamn times that we asked, nobody would have tried this. As far as I’m concerned, they can take the blame.
The livestreamer in D.C. said he wished to end his complicity in the Gaza war. That war began when Hamas terrorists burned Israelis alive, and the livestreamer showed no appreciation of the irony that it would end, for him, with his own voluntary experience of the same fate. His willingness to suffer this way certainly demonstrated his “determination and sincerity,” to use Nhat Hanh’s phrase. It also showed his numbness to the suffering of others: His cinders should inspire action, but the much larger piles of cinders of whole families in the Kfar Aza kibbutz somehow should not.
…wow. Have you ever heard of the Nakba? The apartheid? What happened after the Oslo accords? How unpopular the ‘Palestinian Authority’ is? Why the hell do you think that Palestinian militants broke into the neocolony…? Because they had nothing better to do?
Perhaps it's true what they say. It is merely a sparkling and pointless self-immolation and not a true cri de coeur unless it occurs in the Champagne region of Tibet.
If you’re referring to the Vietnamese one, it wasn’t even acceptable to the Americans because it resulted in them couping the puppet president and subsequently losing the war lol
Self-immolation is objectively one of the most badass things you can do. Liberalism is at its core a nihilistic ideology. Liberals believe in nothing. So when they see somebody that has principles and is willing to commit the ultimate sacrifice for those principles, it terrifies them.