The Deadly Manipulations of the Anti-Israel Mob

 Seth Mandel – Commentary Magazine 

The claim that Israel is carrying out a genocide of the Palestinians is meritless, but its proponents already know that. This is what is known as Holocaust inversion, whereby some person or persons seek to lessen the historical judgment on Nazi Germany by assigning to its victims an equivalent judgment. It is a rhetorical tactic—one not without consequences, as the death of Aaron Bushnell reminds us.

   "Everyone knows blood libels have consequences for their intended targets, but Aaron Bushnell’s suicide shows how deadly they can be to anyone who believes them.

"Bushnell, a 25-year-old active-duty cyber-defense specialist in the Air Force, self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy on February 25. His reason for doing so—and for broadcasting it as it happened—is important not for the content but for the evidence of how pro-Hamas activists across the country have manipulated Bushnell and so many others.

“I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” Bushnell said, referring to “what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers.”

The claim that Israel is carrying out a genocide of the Palestinians is meritless, but its proponents already know that. This is what is known as Holocaust inversion, whereby some person or persons seek to lessen the historical judgment on Nazi Germany by assigning to its victims an equivalent judgment. It is a rhetorical tactic—one not without consequences, as the death of Aaron Bushnell reminds us.

That Bushnell was in the U.S. military is key to his post-suicide beatification by activists. His friend Levi Pierpont, who served with Bushnell and who left the force last year as a conscientious objector, eulogized Bushnell in the Guardian with this proclamation: “Aaron is by no means the only United States military member who has felt complicit in the military’s violence, powerless to change anything, and stuck waiting until the end of a four- or six-year contract. There are thousands of military members similarly distraught, having thoughts of taking extreme actions to escape something that feels inescapable.”