The Lesser of Two Evils: The Burning of Children Instead of Paper
Israel Has Wiped Out Over 1,000 Entire Families
International Middle East Media Center, 27 May 2025
Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.
For we are sick at heart, our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children. And for thinking of that other Child, of whom the poet Luke speaks. The infant was taken up in the arms of an old man, whose tongue grew resonant and vatic at the touch of that beauty.
And the old man spoke; this child is set for the fall and rise of many in Israel, a sign that is spoken against. Small consolation; a child born to make trouble, and to die for it, the First Jew (not the last) to be subject of a “definitive solution.” He sets up the cross and dies on it; in the Rose Garden of the executive mansion, on the D.C. Mall, in the courtyard of the Pentagon.
That was Father Daniel Berrigan’s statement read in court in October 1968 during the trial of The Catonsville Nine. On May 17th, 1968, with Democratic President Lyndon Johnson presiding over 500,000 + American troops waging war against Vietnam, nine people, including Father Daniel Berrigan and his brother Father Phillip Berrigan, entered a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland and removed draft files of those who were about to be sent to Vietnam. They took these files outside and burned them with home-made napalm, a weapon commonly used on civilians by the U.S. forces. They were sentenced to federal prison.
Less than a month after their sentencing, the Republican Richard Nixon was elected U.S. president on a campaign promise that he had a “secret peace plan” to end the U.S. war against Vietnam. He did the opposite, intensified the war, spreading it to Laos and Cambodia, killing millions. He was reelected in 1972 while committing this carnage. He won 49 out of 50 states. The war ended in 1975 with a U.S. defeat.
My name is Aaron Bushnell, and I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m 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. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
That is the statement of Senior Airman (SRA) Aaron Bushnell, 25 years-old, who martyred himself when he immolated himself outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 25, 2024, to protest the Israel/U.S genocide of Palestinians. Aaron had previously said: “What would I do if my country was committing genocide? The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now”
Right now is still now, 16 months later and ongoing.
I am writing this on a piece of paper but you will most probably read it on a screen, the same screens that have provided ample news and views of the burning of Palestinian children in Gaza, another new Land of Burning Children. If you have not seen such pictures, it is because you have turned away in what Jean Paul Sartre called “bad faith,” knowing what they contain and demand of your conscience, but hiding that radicalizing truth from yourself.
Those pictures demand, at the very least, that you condemn and never support those who carry out these atrocities – in the U.S.A. that means Joseph Biden and Donald Trump, first and foremost, neither of whom you can you ever again support by saying he is or was “the lesser of two evils” – just as Martin Luther King, Jr. did when he was jolted by photographs of dead and napalmed Vietnamese children in early 1967 in William Pep
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