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.

“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.”

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.

  • TammyTobacco@lemmy.ml
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    5 days ago

    People should realize nobody cares about self-immolation. It’s not going to accomplish anything.

    • AWistfulNihilist@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      The dude who self immolated over the bitcoin conspiracy really took the wind out of the sails of the modern self immolation movement. The willingness to do this says more about the mental state of the immolated than it does about the issue.

      • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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        5 days ago

        The willingness to do this says more about the mental state of the immolated than it does about the issue.

        I tried to suggest this when the last American self-immolated over the Palestinian genocide, and it was not a very popular viewpoint on Lemmy.

  • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
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    5 days ago

    Very sad. I have to think that the good people can accomplish over their whole lives will be much greater than a small blip of media coverage.

  • TokenBoomer@lemmy.worldM
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    5 days ago

    I haven’t seen anything reported in the corporate media about this. It’s sad 😞 It incentivizes activism to act in more extreme ways to gain wider attention.