Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), an Army veteran and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, introduced two bills on Thursday morning in the wake of the radical, far-left airman who self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in D.C. to protest Israel’s military response to the Hamas terrorist attack in October, Breitbart News has exclusively learned.
One of Cotton’s bills would ban security clearances for members of the military who sympathize with terrorist groups, and the other would prohibit off-post protests by active duty service members.
“The mission of our service members is to defend America, and anyone who supports Hamas or any other terrorist group should not receive a security clearance. Likewise, no active-duty members of the military should be allowed to participate in demonstrations that aim to undermine the security of America and our allies,” Cotton said in an exclusive statement to Breitbart News.
The airman, Aaron Bushnell, was a senior airman and cyber defense operations specialist with the 531st Intelligence Support Squadron at Joint Base San Antonio Lackland, Texas, who had served on active duty since May 2020.
Aaron Bushnell (Aaron Bushnell/LinkedIn)
Before he lit himself on fire, he said in a live stream:
My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active-duty member of the U.S. 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.
After Bushnell self-immolated, many of his postings on Reddit were discovered and distributed online, including statements where he defended Hamas’s murder of innocent civilians, including young women attending a music festival during the terrorist attack. He posted, “…those people’s fun at the music festival was specifically built on Palestinian suffering. There are no innocent civilians in [settler] colonialism. Being a settler is inherently violent.”
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Joel B. Pollak / Breitbart NewsHe also posted, “Israel is a white supremacist, ethnonationalist, settler-colonial apartheid state. It was created by the UK 75 years ago and is propped up by US support. It has no right to exist.”
On Wednesday, Cotton introduced a bill that would increase the punishment for violence during protests in the wake of a wave of far-left protests against Israel across the nation.
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