Did Aaron Bushnell comment on Reddit that "Palestine will be free when all the jews are dead"? No, that's not true: Bushnell, the 25-year-old U.S. Air Force member who set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not make the comment on the Reddit website. While his account was deleted after his death, searches using archives of his account do not return any matches to the message purported to be from Bushnell.
The claim appeared as a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, on February 27, 2024, titled "This is who leftists are praising" (archived here). It showed a screenshot of a message that read:
Palestine will be free when all the jews are dead
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu Feb 29 20:03:42 2024 UTC)
The message purports to be a screenshot of a Reddit post attributed to the account acebush1. This account has been identified as belonging to Bushnell by The Intercept (archived here).
Bushnell yelled "Free Palestine!" as he set himself on fire and burned to death on February 26, 2024, as a protest against the Hamas-Israel war, as The Associated Press reported (archived here). He livestreamed his act on Twitch and reportedly said, "I am 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 is not extreme at all."
Bushnell's Reddit account has been deleted, as the archive on the website Wayback Machine shows as of February 29, 2024. An archive of the account on the Wayback Machine website does not show a match for the phrase "Palestine will be free when all the jews are dead."
A search (archived here) on the website Ghost Archive for the account "acebush1" returned 14 pages, none of which contain the message, "Palestine will be free when all the jews are dead."
The website Push Pull shows deleted comments for Reddit users; a search (archived here) for the account "acebush1" and the word "Palestine" did not return a match for the phrase.
Other Lead Stories fact checks about the Hamas-Israel war can be found here.
