Hamas’s Death Cult Comes to America

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

 

‘We love death like our enemies love life.” That chilling mantra, expressed a decade ago by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, has since become the terrorist outfit’s unofficial motto. “The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves,” Hamas official Ali Baraka told a Russian interviewer less than a week after the October 7 massacre. “The thing any Palestinian desires the most is to be martyred for the sake of Allah.”

 

Neither Haniyeh nor Baraka, who respectively reside in Qatar and Lebanon, were speaking for themselves. Both are sufficiently removed from the war to which they’ve consigned Gaza’s people that they have little reason to anticipate their own glorious martyrdom. They are, however, happy to see their charges massacred in furtherance of the death cult Hamas has erected around itself. That cult extends well beyond the borders of the Gaza Strip, as the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell sadly illustrates.

 

Bushnell announced himself as an active-duty U.S. airman when he approached the gates of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., on Sunday. There, he declared his opposition to “genocide,” dowsed himself in a flammable liquid, and set himself alight. He died of his wounds shortly thereafter. Bushnell seems to have captured the hearts of Americans who are predisposed to share Bushnell’s outlook on Israel’s defensive war against Hamas and the Biden administration’s support for it. Their praise for his act of violence is evidence of both the depravity cultivated by Hamas’s obsessive bloodlust and an unspoken but apparently widespread desire to see more violence follow it.

 

“Let us never forget the extraordinary courage and commitment of brother Aaron Bushnell, who died for truth and justice!” declared Cornel West, a professor emeritus at Princeton University and an independent candidate for the presidency in 2024. Indeed, the outright support (bordering on advocacy) for Bushnell’s suicide seems most common among Ph.Ds. Prolonged exposure to post-colonial agitprop explains a statement attributed to Biden “administration staff.” In an open letter, the fifth column in the White House explained that Bushnell’s “act of protest” represents “a stark warning for our nation” — a “haunting reminder for those who refuse to change course,” namely Joe Biden.

 

What is this sort of advocacy meant to achieve other than to convince other naïve, blinkered radicals to commit similar acts of violence — acts that may not be limited to self-harm? We’re left with no other conclusion, particularly given the strained efforts to maintain that Bushnell was of entirely sound mind when he committed this atrocity.

 

“There is no evidence Aaron Bushnell was suffering from mental illness,” the Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali protested. “He was very clear about his reasoning for self-immolation, the most extreme form of protest against what he believes is an ongoing genocide against Palestinians by Israel.” That may be true insofar as the only proof we have of Bushnell’s mental disturbance — beyond, you know, his decision to set himself on fire — are the calls onlookers made to 911 describing the “mental distress” he was exhibiting before his suicide. But whether Bushnell suffered from a clinical malady is irrelevant to the fact that he was laboring under an obvious delusion.

 

As his social-media posts indicate, the airman was utterly convinced of the lies promulgated by those who entice impressionable minds with visions of martyrdom. He was sure that the aggressive party in this conflict wasn’t the terrorist sect that has transformed Gaza into a labyrinthine fortress and drafted its population into a war for the explicitly stated purpose of eradicating Israeli Jews. He was sure the real bad guy was the party that has achieved what the military historian Sir Andrew Roberts observed was a remarkable ratio of combatant-to-civilian casualties for an urban-warfare campaign — a military that Biden spokesman John Kirby noted is “telegraphing” its punches at the expense of battlefield efficacy so as to preserve civilian life in ways even America would not. There is no “genocide.” Bushnell had been misled.

 

This horror — both the self-immolation of a beguiled Westerner and the fawning praise for his act of “self-sacrifice” — is precisely what Hamas seeks when its fighters shield themselves with civilians and launch attacks on Israel from in and around schools and hospitals. The big idea is to convince Western naifs that the morally righteous party to this conflict is the one that begat it. And too many Westerners are happy to play along, not because they fully comprehend this region and its complexities (they don’t), but because it contributes to their own self-conception as the heirs to a noble culture of dissent in America.

 

Time magazine illustrated this phenomenon when it graced a historically illiterate explainer on the history of self-immolation as an act of protest with an image of Thich Quang Duc, the Buddhist monk who burned himself alive in Saigon in 1963 in defiance of the South Vietnamese government. The piece drew a straight line between that episode and the self-immolations of climate-change activists in 2018 and 2022 — what were described as “deeply fearless” acts “of compassion” by fellow activists.

 

This should all be familiar to anyone who follows those so-called supporters of the Palestinian cause who routinely apply the framework of American racial politics to the conflict in the Middle East. The characterization of the executioners who prosecuted the 10/7 attack as “field hands” attacking their masters, the description of the West Bank as “familiar to those of us familiar with African-American history” by the author Ta-Nehisi Coates, the accusations that Israel is engaged in “apartheid” and the references to BLM’s protests as an “American intifada” — it’s all play-acting. They seek out the moral authority the generation who opposed Jim Crow and the Vietnam War secured for itself. Finding little in the way of truly comparable injustice in America today, they commit themselves to a profound category error and go abroad in search of monsters.

 

Therapy professionals object to the idea that suicide is a selfish act — the province of attention-seekers. They say that this is an unproductive and generally erroneous presumption, and maybe they’re right in most cases. But it seems a fair read on Bushnell’s case. He most certainly did seek attention. He was not attempting to better the circumstances of his survivors if his act was designed to perpetuate Hamas’s ability to export terrorism into Israel and oppress the people of Gaza. His was an act of moral blackmail, and those who have lionized him want to see more such acts. Their ghoulish and cynical advocacy is surely distinct from what we’ve seen from Hamas’s reprobate leaders. Though, from this vantage, it’s hard to see how.