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Brett Wilkins: ‘We Are All Culpable’: Matt Nelson Self-Immolates to Protest Israel’s Gaza Onslaught
In a video, Nelson said he would set himself ablaze “to stop supplying Israel with the money and weapons it uses to imprison and murder innocent Palestinians” and “to pressure Israel to end the genocide in Gaza.”
For the third time since Israel launched a war on Gaza for which it is currently on trial for genocide at the World Court, a person in the United States has set themself on fire to protest Israel’s killing of more than 41,000 Palestinians and U.S. complicity in the slaughter.
In an incident all but completely ignored by the U.S. corporate media, a man identified as Matt Nelson set himself alight near the Israeli Consulate in Boston at around 8:15 pm local time on Wednesday, September 11.
“My name is Matt Nelson and I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” he said in a video first uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday. “We are all culpable in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
“We are slaves to capitalism and the military-industrial complex. Most of us are too apathetic to care,” Nelson continued. “The protest I’m about to engage in is a call to our government to stop supplying Israel with the money and weapons it uses to imprison and murder innocent Palestinians, to pressure Israel to end the genocide in Gaza, and to support the [International Criminal Court] indictment of [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of the Israeli government.”
“A democracy is supposed to serve the will of the people, not the interests of the wealthy,” he added. “Take the power back. Free Palestine.”
According to NBC Boston, first responders confirmed a man suffered serious burn injuries. Nelson’s current condition has not been reported.
NBC Boston and other local media took flak from critics on social media, who noted that the outlets chose to report the incident’s location as “outside the Four Seasons Hotel” instead of by the Israeli Consulate.
Nelson is the third person known to have self-immolated in Gaza-related protests in the United States since October.
On December 1, a woman—whose identity remains unknown—carrying a Palestinian flag was hospitalized in critical condition after setting herself alight outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta. Police called it an “act of extreme political protest.” Israeli Consul-General Anat Sultan-Dadon called it an act of “hate and incitement toward Israel.”
Then, in an incident that gained worldwide attention, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old active-duty U.S. airman, doused himself in an unknown accelerant, donned his service cap, and set himself ablaze in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. on February 25.
Bushnell repeatedly screamed “Free Palestine” as he burned. Secret Service officers quickly rushed to the scene, with at least one of them drawing his pistol and pointing it at the burning man while ordering him to “get on the ground, you fucker.”
As he screamed and writhed in agony, Bushnell managed one final, garbled, yet unmistakable “free Palestine” as his body was engulfed in flames. He died later that day.
Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
First published in Common Dreams. Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
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RE “Aaron Bushnell”
What Bushnell’s and Nelson’s desperate acts expose is that some 95-99% of people anywhere DO NOTHING when confronted with grave injustices such as the current US-Israeli Holocaust of the Palestinians, just like all the “bad German people” during the Nazi Holocaust, whom they are happily pointing the finger to as examples of OTHER PEOPLE who are bad and evil in their deep dishonesty, self-delusion, and madness.
Aaron pointed exactly this reality out in one of his last statements:
“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.”
Now WHY is it that 95-99% of people anywhere DO NOTHING when confronted with grave injustices? Because “advanced” humans have a malignant disease called a “Soullessness Spectrum Disorder” …. https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html
Because of this big truth Bushnell is pointing to lots of truth-hating cowardly soulless people resort to slandering Bushnell as mentally disturbed or fanatical, having been suicidal (he was not), etc. or try to misrepresent him negatively in some other form –anything in order to NOT see the real truth about themselves.
“America is the greatest exporter of violence the world has ever known. So wear your patriotism on your sleeve and be proud. You are a depraved citizen of the world’s worst killer nation.” — Paul Craig Roberts, Ph.D., economist & former US regime official, in 2015
“The US empire is quantifiably the most destructive and tyrannical force on this planet, by an extremely massive margin. No other power has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions and displacing them by the tens of millions. No other power is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, starving people around the world with blockades and economic sanctions, staging proxy wars, color revolutions and coups all over the earth, and working to destabilize and destroy any nation anywhere on this planet who dares to defy its dictates. Only the US empire is doing this. No other power comes anywhere remotely close.” — Caitlin Johnstone, Independent Journalist, in 2024
“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 (=the genocidal US regime and its genocidal Israeli colony), it’s not extreme at all.” — Aaron Bushnell, shortly before he set himself on fire
If you have been injected with Covid jabs/bioweapons and are concerned verify what batch number you were injected with at https://howbadismybatch.com
“We can have the world of our dreams tomorrow, but we have to be willing to fight today.” — Aaron Bushnell, in 2023
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The corporate media are complicit. Also in a possible Trump win (they don’t report on his dementia, his mental decline). And the police are becoming more brutal, more racist, and more ignorant by the day. And the only way to stop the genocide AND the escalation of the war (Yemen, Lebanona, Iran) is to stop giving Netanyahu the support he needs. It’s Netanyahu and his extreme and Orthodox cronies = Zionism, not ‘the Jews’, not Israel. You don’t fight a terror organisation like Hamas through bombing. It never worked. Unless you have another plan.
–Rosmarie Epaminondas (Rose Mary Boehm)
http://rosemaryboehm.weebly.com/https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/ https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/* https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR9fygcz_kL4LGuYcvmC8lQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR9fygcz_kL4LGuYcvmC8lQ
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This is just another inconvenient truth our nation is trying to hide. We are complicit in committing genocide and thank you, Brett and Michael, for bringing this brave act of resistance to light.
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Thanks, Mandy. Our corporate media conspires with the US government to hide the truth.
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