AARON BUSHNELL SELF-IMMOLATES IN PROTEST FOR PALESTINE
On February 25, a man named Aaron Bushnell walked to the front gates of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. and made an announcement. “I am an active duty member of the U.S. Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” he said. “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.” Having said that, Bushnell lit himself on fire, and proceeded to shout “Free Palestine!” at the top of his lungs until he was no longer able to speak. The U.S. Secret Service, meanwhile, decided to point guns at him as he burned, rather than make an immediate attempt to save his life.
(The footage of Bushnell’s death, blurred at the moment he ignites himself, is available through Al Jazeera or Middle East Eye, although it is a disturbing thing to witness.)
Bushnell is actually the second person to self-immolate as a form of protest against the Israeli massacre of Palestinian civilians, and the United States’ role in arming, funding, and endorsing that massacre. The first was an unidentified protestor in Atlanta, who burned themself outside the Israeli consulate on December 1 of last year while holding a Palestinian flag. That story should have made international headlines, but the news media was strangely quiet about it; today, we still don’t even know the protestor’s name. For his part, Aaron Bushnell took no chances that anyone would forget or cover up his final act, livestreaming the entire protest and seemingly setting up a dead man’s switch to distribute the footage. But that didn’t stop the media from dropping the ball. As numerous critics have pointed out, many headlines about Bushnell’s death said something generic like “Active-Duty Airman Sets Himself on Fire Outside D.C.’s Israeli Embassy,” with no mention of his reason for doing so, refusing to use the words “Palestine” or “Gaza.”
Some news outlets, though, were worse than others. NPR claimed for several hours that it was “not able to independently verify the man’s identity or motives,” despite both being clearly stated in Bushnell’s video. (What could a man repeatedly screaming “Free Palestine” possibly want? It’s a mystery.) Timeengaged in a spectacular point-missing exercise, choosing to remind its readers that “partisan political activity” by active-duty military personnel is against regulations. (That’s right, burning yourself alive is against the rules.) And the Guardian seemed intent on smearing Bushnell as some kind of terrorist, writing in its headline that he had “anarchist ties.” (They’ve now revised this to an “anarchist past,” and it does appear he was at least interested in anarchism, having set up the anarchist publication Crimethincas one of the recipients of his footage.)
The vagaries of the U.S. media can’t diminish the significance of what Bushnell did, though. Historically, self-immolation has always been a desperate, last-ditch act of protest, one people resort to when all else has been tried and failed. In the past day, many people—including Current Affairs contributor Keira Havens—have compared Bushnell’s act to that of the Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức, who self-immolated in 1963 to protest an oppressive regime in South Vietnam. With his own final moments, Bushnell reminded us all that we cannot ignore the fate of Palestine and its people. His last post online is a haunting call for everyone to join the pursuit of justice and peace:
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.
THE BIG STORY
BIDEN EXPECTS SIX-WEEK “CEASEFIRE”
The Biden administration has announced that a six-week ceasefire between Israel and Gaza may be achieved as soon as Monday. “My national security adviser tells me that they’re close. They’re close. They’re not done yet,” Biden told reporters between bites of a vanilla ice cream cone as part of a bit on the Seth Meyers show (The fact that he stopped in the middle of an ice cream-related TV appearance to speak with reporters tells you how seriously he is taking the situation). Biden also reiterated, “I'm a Zionist. Where there's no Israel, there's not a Jew in the world to be safe,” which is a wild thing for the president of the country with the second largest number of Jewish people in the world to say. (Maybe we should try to keep Jewish people safe here instead of expecting them to move to Israel?)
At any rate, Biden’s ceasefire statement may have been premature. A spokesman for Qatar, which has been mediating the talks alongside Egypt, said he was “hopeful, not necessarily optimistic” that an agreement could be reached in time for the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Spokespeople for both Hamas and Israel have also said that Biden’s prognosis was too rosy.
A source close to the talks told Reuters that the deal in its current form “would see militants free some but not all of the hostages they are holding, in return for the release of hundreds of Palestinian detainees, a surge in humanitarian aid for Gaza and Israeli troops pulling out of populated areas in the enclave.” It would be the first substantial respite in five months of a relentless bombing campaign launched by Israel that has taken nearly 30,000 Palestinian lives, the vast majority civilians; displaced more than 85 percent of the population from their homes; and created a famine and disease outbreaks exacerbated by Israel’s blocking of humanitarian aid.
A six-week ceasefire, if achieved, would be a major breakthrough. But it’s only a short-term solution. For the third time since October, the US last week vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that would have imposed an indefinite, immediate ceasefire. As Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft writes:
“The question is why Biden has shifted (somewhat) on a ceasefire now, given his third veto only a week ago...Rather than have the UNSC put pressure on the parties (particularly on Israel) to agree to a ceasefire sooner, Biden acted to shield Israel from international pressure while talks were ongoing. Now, when talks are - according to Biden - close to succeeding, a [UN Security Council] resolution will not add any such pressure on Israel on the matter of a ceasefire but will rather only affirm what the talks already have produced.
If this has been Biden's calculation, then if the parties were still far from each other today, Biden would not shift his position on a ceasefire and would not use the UNSC to pressure them to get to an agreement - and end the slaughter - sooner. And if so, thousands of civilians have been killed due to Biden's choice of strategy.
A shift in the right direction is still very welcome, but it is impossible to ignore the obvious question: Given the thousands that have been killed, why wasn't this done sooner?”
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ In an act of protest against President Biden’s support for the war in Gaza, Democrats in Michigan have planned to vote “uncommitted” in the state’s primary today. Late last week, the effort got a major boost from someone unexpected: Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke. O’Rourke said he was moved to support a ceasefire by a New York Times op-ed by Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud (whom we recently interviewed on the Current Affairs podcast) which described the feeling of betrayal Arab Americans are feeling from the administration. In an interview with Michigan Advance this weekend, O'Rourke said:
“I do think it makes sense for those who want to see this administration do more, or do a better job, to exert that political pressure and get the president’s attention and the attention of those on his campaign so that the United States does better.”
For a brief moment, O’Rourke appeared to be the Next Big Thing in Democratic politics after his surprisingly valiant attempt to knock off Senator Ted Cruz, which fell short by just 2.6 percent of the vote. A young, charismatic orator and adequate skateboarder straight from the Obama Cloning Factory, he was considered an early contender for the 2020 Democratic nomination but was bounced early. While O’Rourke is branded as a “progressive,” his actual voting record reveals someone who is often firmly with the Democratic donor class where it counts, refusing to step on the toes of Wall Street or private health insurance companies. This is why it’s so significant that he’s become a vocal proponent of a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza, a third rail that a lot of otherwise very liberal members of the Democratic coalition have hesitated to approach, fearing the wrath of AIPAC. Not only has he come out in opposition to the war, but he’s willing to materially hurt the leader of his own party in an effort to see it through, something that is sure to hurt his stature as a loyal party man. For as much shit as we have given Beto over the years, we have to commend him for putting his political career on the line in this way.
J6 Insurrection pinball (It’s funny that they are just calling it an “insurrection” now). According to independent journalist Ford Fischer on Twitter, “Combining real January 6 footage, an AI-generated Trump voice telling the player ‘extra ball,’ and real Trump quotes, the pinball machine features modes like ‘Stop the Steal’ and ‘Babbitt Murder.’” Its designer, Jonathan Linowes, said the game has generated “a lot of pushback from the virtual pinball community." (Photo: Miranda Nazzaro, The Hill)
We don’t have the space to cover every deranged thing that happened. Here is just a sampling from the smorgasbord of horrors that is the Conservative Political Action Conference:
𐡸 Jack Posobiec, the editor of Human Events Magazine gave a really weird speech promising the “end of democracy.” Holding up a cross, he said, “We will endeavor to replace it with this right here… All glory is not to government. All glory to God.” The crowd loved it. After widespread outrage, Posobiec said he was doing a bit—performing as an over-the-top caricature in response to “troll” those who claim the right is anti-democracy. Quite epic, sir! But the reaction of the crowd (and the numerous other prominent right-wingers who openly want to restrict the franchise) sort of muddies his point.
Mr. Blow was also featured in a video with Benny Johnson (a guy who is square even by conservative pundit standards) who emerges from an oversized van to take us on a tour of the rapper’s “Drip Kingdom,” which includes a $1,000,000 Trump-branded Rolls-Royce. In the most laughable part of an already thoroughly laughable video, Johnson hypes him up with the bald-faced lie that “His MAGA raps have topped the Billboard charts.” In an effort to demonstrate how hip and fly MAGA rap is with the kids, he even called Blow’s song “Boycott Target” (about how the retail chain is “grooming” children with pro-LGBTQ products) the “number one song in the world” because it at one point was number one in iTunes downloads. This, of course, omits the fact that basically nobody has purchased individual songs on iTunes for the better part of a decade, and the people who still do likely have a median age of about 87.
Art by Nick Sirotich from Issue 44 of Current Affairs Magazine, Sept/Oct 2023
𐡸 Trump was also at CPAC, and he gave a deranged 90-minute speech. A lot of it was the usual Trump bluster—his indictments are a “Stalinist show trial,” America is being “invaded” by immigrants, he could stop crime “in one day, in one hour, in one minute” — but a few moments stand out. At one point, when describing a trip to Iraq, Trump turned to his favorite subject: the beautiful, strong, very handsome, powerful soldiers. “I sat with the pilots, the most handsome human beings I’ve ever seen. Not my thing, but they are handsome,” he said. “Better looking than Tom Cruise and taller.”
It wasn’t all that funny, though. Trump did hammer home his disturbing new talking point that this election was all about “ultimate and absolute revenge” against his enemies if he wins. Immigrants will likely get the worst of it. One of the things Trump said was that migrants (whom he compared to Hannibal Lecter) were “killing our people” and that “they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing.” The speech was made even scarier by the others from Trump lackeys. Trump immigration czar Stephen Miller described in detail the plan to “grab illegal immigrants” and move them to “large-scale staging grounds for removal.” (A sort of camp meant for concentration purposes, you might say.) Trump ICE director Tom Homan talked about how Trump will “send a Hellfire rocket down there [to Mexico], and he’ll take the cartels out.”
It’s fun to laugh at the carnival of goofuses on display at CPAC, from Forgiato Blow to Trump himself. But we can’t lose sight of the obvious truth that Trumpism as a larger project is veering into open, undisguised fascism that will prove to be deadly serious for millions of people if he does reassume office.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ Last week, Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are legally the same as children, imperiling the practice of in-vitro fertilization, under which eggs are artificially fertilized in a laboratory. Using the justification of “fetal personhood,”the court ruled that a cancer patient who accidentally dropped and destroyed a couple’s frozen embryos could be sued under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. Anywhere from 1 to 2 percent of all births in America annually are the result of IVF and more than a million children have been born between 1987 and 2015 as a result of IVF according to Penn Medicine. IVF is often the only option for those struggling with infertility and is often relied on by gay couples to have children. Following Alabama’s ruling, at least two of the state’s IVF clinics paused services and canceled treatment with patients. Alabamans who have undergone the first step of IVF procedures, of which there were more than 1,200 in 2021 alone, are suddenly at risk of legal liability if one of their embryos is destroyed, with many now scrambling to move them to different states.
It’s also worth pointing out that Chief Justice Tom Parker’s concurring opinion is almost entirely based on religious justifications. The Nation’s Elie Mystal counted 41 uses of the word “God” in the text, including that “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.” He writes:
“It would be entirely appropriate to focus solely on the nonsensical legal argument put forward by the Alabama Supreme Court, but it’s important to point out that this argument is not actually a legal one. It is a religious argument: The court is saying the law cannot be interpreted absent the justices’ exclusive interpretation of God’s will. This is clearly unconstitutional… If these judges and justices were establishing any religion other than fundamentalist Christianity, people would lose their minds. If an Alabama court ruled that Trump had to be kicked off the ballot because he lies so much he lacks satya, and rested their opinion in quotes from the Vedas, there would be riots. The ruling would be overturned and the judges, probably, impeached.”
⚜ LONG READ: The Supreme Court is about to hear a major anti-trust case that could determine whether the government has the power to regulate Google. Its proponents are not who you’d expect: Texas and Florida, two very conservative red states. In The New Republic, Sandeep Vaheesan and Tara Pincock explain why you should nevertheless root for them to win this case:
On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in NetChoice v. Paxton and its companion case, Moody v. NetChoice. NetChoice is a trade association that represents internet platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter—some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. With a party like this, the case is bound to be pivotal for the many millions of users of digital services. Sure enough, while the debate at the center of the suit may seem abstruse at first, it could determine whether Big Tech platforms operate fairly for all who use them.
NetChoice sued Texas and Florida to block state laws that were enacted to restrict social media networks’ ability to suspend or otherwise marginalize users. According to NetChoice, the laws violate these companies’ First Amendment rights and, therefore, should be struck down as unconstitutional.
The Open Markets Institute, where we work, filed an amicus brief in support of the states. Those who are familiar with the organization may be surprised by our siding with two conservative state governments. We, however, believe that the underlying question of whether states and the federal government have the authority to regulate social media and other internet platforms as common carriers is critical. If the Supreme Court decides in favor of Big Tech platforms by ruling that they cannot be designated and managed as common carriers, it will take essential regulatory tools away from the government.
Why is this such an important issue? At heart, common carriage requires certain entities to generally serve all paying customers on the same terms. While most people—well, at least those of us who are lawyers—probably think of railroads and telecommunications companies when they hear “common carrier,” the principle stretches back several hundred years to a time long before these industries even existed. Its origins, in fact, were comparatively humbler than its modern application: Courts in England and the United States historically placed special duties on certain businesses such as inns and ferries, hence a distinct body of law called “the common law of innkeepers and common carriers.”
Notably, in many states, this meant that a hotel in the early nineteenth century could not deny service to customers based on race or ethnicity. And so the common carrier norm played a vital role in the modern world, informing multiple civil rights laws.
R.I.P. FLACO THE OWL
Over the weekend, New York City lost one of its most beloved citizens: Flaco the Eurasian Eagle-Owl, who escaped from the Central Park Zoo last February and become a local celebrity. According to the Associated Press, Flaco “appears to have collided with an Upper West Side building” and suffered fatal injuries. New York zoologists are currently conducting tests to see if he may have eaten poisoned rats, and his many fans are mourning him, both in person and online.
Flaco’s death is a tragedy, but it’s also a reminder of how damaging human cities and their infrastructure can be to animals of all kinds. As Tracey Tulley writes for the New York Times, it’s estimated that a billion birds die in the United States each year from collisions with buildings alone. There are legislative efforts in some cities to make developers use more “bird-friendly” building materials, and one piece of legislation has just been renamed the FLACO Act, for “Feathered Lives Also Count”—but progress has been slow.
Meanwhile, as Jeff Vandermeer wrote for Current Affairs in 2022, tortoises are killed in the tens of thousands to build new developments in Florida. Armadillos, too, frequently end up dead as they try to cross human highways, and there aren’t nearly enough wildlife crossings built to save them. This is unacceptable. Every animal deserves to live, even if they’re not as famous or photogenic as Flaco, and humans need to do a better job of protecting them.
Graffiti artist Calicho Arevalo’s tribute to Flaco. (Image: Calicho Arevalo via Twitter)
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ TheUnited States has been exporting rice with high levels of arsenic to Haiti. In a new study by the University of Michigan, researchers analyzed the levels of arsenic, cadmium, and other dangerous substances in samples of rice exported from the U.S. to Haiti, and compared them against the locally-grown rice that originates on the island. What they found was alarming: both the arsenic and cadmium levels were “nearly twice as high in imported rice compared to local rice.” In some cases, the U.S. rice exceeded the toxicity levels recommended for safe consumption, if an adult ate “three or more cups of imported rice per day,” or if a child ate one. In other words, the United States is literally poisoning Haitians with each bag of grain it sends over. To make matters worse, Reuters notes that “Haiti imports nearly 90% of its rice, almost exclusively from the U.S.,” the result of a Clinton-era program that heavily subsidized the exports and devastated local production by flooding the market. A lot has been written about the United States’ mistreatment of Haiti and its people over the years, from the crippling embargo the U.S. and France placed on the newly-independent state in 1804 to the Clintons’ own efforts to suppress the minimum wage there. Now, we can add poisonous rice to the long list of U.S. crimes against Haitians. When will it end?
❧ George Galloway, the founder of the Workers’ Party of Britain, is poised to win a seat in the U.K. Parliament. The election in question is scheduled for February 29 in the town of Rochdale, which is part of Greater Manchester. Until recently, Rochdale was represented by Tony Lloyd, the long-time MP who British socialist magazine Tribune calls “Labour’s Conscience” for his opposition to the invasion of Iraq and Israeli aggression against Palestinians. Lloyd died on January 17, leaving his seat open for a special “by-election”—but events in Palestine are still shaping politics in Rochdale. The town’s population is 36 percent Muslim, and ever since October 2023 it’s been the site of multiple protests against the bombardment of Gaza, including one where protestors graffitied the words “Free Palestine” on a war memorial. Now, Galloway and the Workers’ Party of Britain are pitching themselves directly to the town’s pro-Palestinian constituency, promising to “send a message to the Labour Party that they cannot continue to support the ongoing genocide.”
A recent Galloway campaign mailer invokes the colors of the Palestinian flag. (Image: Jordan Tyldesley via Twitter)
Galloway is a divisive figure, and for good reason. As James Bloodworth writes for the New Statesman, he has a long record of ugly controversies, including a 1994 incident where he praised Saddam Hussein for his “strength” and “indefatigability.” (He would later claim he was talking about the Iraqi people, not their leader.) He also has some bizarrely regressive social views, describing himself as “strongly against abortion” in 2004. Yet on Israel and Palestine, he’s always been consistent, organizing aid convoys to Gaza as far back as 2009. And right now, he’s the U.K. bookmakers’ odds-on favorite to win in Rochdale—largely because the Labour Party withdrew its support for its own candidate, Azhar Ali, after he appeared to endorse the conspiracy theory that Israel allowed the October 7th attacks to happen. It’s all a bit of a mess, but if Galloway wins, he’d be the first-ever MP for the Workers’ Party—and if nothing else, it would indeed be a clear message to Keir Starmer’s Labour that their Palestine policy needs to change.
❧ LONG READ: Over six months of icy isolation from the rest of humanity, English-speaking researchers at the Rothera base in Antarctica began to develop their own accent unique to anywhere else in the world. In a BBC feature, Richard Gray writes:
Antarctica is a bleak, remote and dark place during the winter, but a handful of people each year brave the conditions to live in almost totally cut off from the rest of the world. The experience can change how they speak…
They say it is quicker to get to someone on the International Space Station than it is to medically evacuate someone from Antarctica in the winter," says Marlon Clark, one of those 26 international researchers and support staff left behind at the British Antarctic Survey's Rothera Research Station on Adelaide Island, just to the west of the Antarctic Peninsula in March 2018. Antarctica is the least-inhabited continent on the planet – it has no permanent human population – with just a handful of research stations and bases scattered across the 5.4 million sq mile (14 million sq km) frozen landscape. "So, you're isolated," says Clark.
Over the following 26 weeks of near perpetual darkness and harsh weather, Clark and his fellow inhabitants at Rothera would work, eat and socialise together with barely any contact with home. Satellite phone calls are expensive and so used sparingly. With just each other for company and limited entertainment on the base, the "winterers", as they are known, would chat to each other – a lot…
Clark and his colleagues did not notice this at the time. All they knew was that they were taking part in an unusual experiment, which involved tracking their own voices over time. This was done by making 10-minute recordings every few weeks. They would sit in front of a microphone and repeat the same 29 words as they appeared on a computer screen. Food. Coffee. Hid. Airflow. Most were words they used regularly during their day and contained vowel sounds known to differ in English accents. When the recordings finally got back to a team of phonetics researchers at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich in Germany for analysis, they discovered that the pronunciation of some of the words had changed ever so slightly. What they were seeing was the beginning of a new accent emerging…
“One of those changes was the "ou" sound in words such as "flow" and "sew" that shifted towards the front of the vocal tract. They also saw some of the winterers beginning to converge in the way they pronounced three other vowels. The reason for this shift reveals a possible basic mechanism for how we pick up accents throughout our lives. "When we speak to each other, we memorise that speech and then that has an influence on our own speech production," says [Jonathan Harrington, professor of phonetics and speech processing at Ludwig-Maximillians-University of Munich]. In effect, we transmit and infect one another with pronunciations every time we interact with others. Over time, if we have regular and prolonged contact with someone, we can start to pick up their sounds.
SAY IT AIN’T SO, BOBI!
Back in October, we introduced you to Bobi the Dog, a Portuguese Rafeiro do Alentejo who died at the age of 31, making him the oldest dog who ever lived…at least that’s what his owners wanted you to think. Bobi’s claim immediately came under suspicion from veterinarians, who doubted that any dog could do the equivalent of a human living to age 220.
Sure enough, this week, Bobi’s title as the oldest living dog was formally revoked by Guinness World Records. “We take tremendous pride in ensuring as best we can the accuracy and integrity of all our record titles," a spokesman for Guinness said. “Following concerns raised by vets and other experts, both privately as well as within public commentary, and the findings of investigations conducted by some media outlets, we felt it important to open a review into Bobi's record.” They added that Bobi’s microchip data proved inconclusive. “Without any conclusive evidence available to us right now, we simply can't retain Bobi as the record holder and honestly claim to maintain the high standards we set ourselves.”
It’s a shame to say that, like Lance Armstrong or the 1919 Chicago White Sox, the name “Bobi the Dog” may forever be tainted with the mark of scandal.
The title for oldest living dog is once again held by an Australian dog named Bluey (no relation to the colorful Australian children’s cartoon of the same name) who died in 1939 at the age of 29. (Hopefully, the rumors of Bluey cheating by drinking from the Holy Grail turn out to be just that.)
Bluey the Dog in the 1920s when he was just a kind of old dog rather than a world-historically old dog (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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