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?