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UCLA Medical School Talk Titled “Depathologizing Resistance” Glorifies “Self-Immolation” as a Form of “Revolutionary Suicide”

April 13, 2024
Margaret Flavin

UCLA Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry hosted a talk on April 2 titled “Depathologizing Resistance,” which glorified self-immolation as a form of “revolutionary suicide.”

The talk was delivered by two UCLA psychiatry residents, Drs. Ragda Izar and Afaf Moustafa who seemed to encourage and even celebrate suicidal ideation.

According to The Free Beacon, which obtained slides and video from the talk, the disturbing remarks were “centered on the suicide of Aaron Bushnell, the U.S. serviceman who set himself on fire in February to protest U.S. support for Israel—or, as Izar put it,’”indigenous Palestine.’”

The Gateway Pundit previously reported that Bushnell, an active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force, carried out the shocking act of self-immolation outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, according to officials from the Air Force and local law enforcement.

In the video, Bushnell, dressed in military uniform, said, “I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force, and 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.”

He then set himself on fire, shouting “Free Palestine.”

“Depathologizing Resistance” implied that a break from sane and normal behavior is less a sign of mental illness and more that an individual could be considered a “martyr who responded rationally.”

Via The Free Beacon:

Bushnell had shown signs of mental distress before he died,according to a police report, and was widely seen as a casualty of mental illness. The presentation argued he could also be considered a “martyr,” a man in full control of his mental faculties who had responded rationally to a “genocide” unfolding thousands of miles away.

“Yes, he carried a lot of distress,” Izar said, according to audio of the talk reviewed by the Free Beacon. “But does that mean the actions he engaged in are any less valid?”

Isn’t it normal, she continued, “to be distressed when you’re seeing this level of carnage” in Gaza?

At UCLA, Izar and Moustafa, who are practicing psychiatrists, argued that self-immolation is a reasonable response to geopolitical events and that the taboo against it serves “the interests of power.” By “perpetuating the stigma of self-immolation,” they said, psychiatrists “discredit” resistance to “power structures” like “colonization,” “homophobia,” and “white supremacy,” framing legitimate acts of protest as signs of psychiatric dysfunction.

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