The United States is in the throes of a grim suicide epidemic. More than 50,000 Americans died by their own hand last year, the highest number ever recorded and the most grievous aspect of a mental health collapse that the surgeon general calls “the defining public health crisis of our time.” In the face of so much despair, only a ghoul would lavish praise on someone who violently takes his own life, let alone suggest that he was gallant or courageous for doing so.

But there was no shortage of such ghoulishness after Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old US airman, doused himself with a combustible liquid and set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy on Feb. 25. As he recorded himself on a video livestream, Bushnell proclaimed his self-immolation “an extreme act of protest” against Israel’s war to uproot Hamas from Gaza and declared: “I will no longer be complicit in genocide.” He repeatedly shouted “Free Palestine!” until he collapsed. He was rushed to a hospital but couldn’t be saved.

Bushnell’s suicide was a horror in every respect. He died because he believed in an evil blood libel. Israel is committing no “genocide” in Gaza. It is fighting to defeat a fanatical terrorist regime whose declared purpose is the genocidal destruction of Israel’s Jews. The war was started by Hamas, which on Oct. 7 carried out the most horrific slaughter of Jews since the end of the Holocaust — and which has vowed to do so “again and again” until Israel is annihilated.

The terrorists were quick to lionize Bushnell. Hamas issued a statement declaring that the “heroic” Bushnell would “remain immortal in the memory of our Palestinian people and the free people of the world.” Another notorious terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, put out its own panegyric, directing its followers to revere Bushnell “as an example and role model.”

That Hamas and the PFLP would glorify Bushnell and his suicide isn’t surprising — they have boasted proudly for years that they “love death more than the Jews love life.”

But numerous American leftists, their minds addled by hatred of Jews or the Jewish state, joined in extolling Bushnell as a great moral exemplar.

“Let us never forget the extraordinary courage and commitment of brother Aaron Bushnell who died for truth and justice!” tweeted Cornel West, an emeritus professor at Princeton and noted public intellectual.

Jill Stein, a medical doctor and prominent Green Party activist, posted an image of Bushnell in flames. “Rest in power Aaron Bushnell… . May his sacrifice deepen our commitment to stop genocide now,” she wrote.

Similar tributes poured forth from musician Roger Waters, former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges, and the progressive journal Current Affairs. In the days following his ghastly suicide, Bushnell was honored and eulogized at public vigils in numerous cities, including Washington, New York, Phoenix, Dearborn, Mich., Birmingham, Ala., Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles. And even in lengthy mainstream news accounts, he was credited with having “got[ten] people talking” and described as “admirable” and having “instantly won … praise among some antiwar and pro-Palestinian activists.”

But Bushnell did not destroy himself “for truth and justice,” and those lauding his deadly act of violence certainly have no intention of emulating him. In that sense they resemble the Hamas officials living in extreme luxury in Qatar, who regularly wax rhapsodic about the glories of “martyrdom” but do not seek it for themselves. Bushnell’s is just one more death to be exploited for its propaganda value in the campaign of vilification against Israel and its supporters.

Of all the forms death by suicide can take, self-immolation is perhaps the most horrifying to witness. The psychological impact of seeing another human engulfed in flames can be emotionally overpowering.

Recalling the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức on a busy Saigon street in 1963, reporter David Halberstam said the sight left him “too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered even to think.” When 20-year-old Jan Palach burned himself alive in Prague’s Wenceslaus Square in 1969, he hoped to shock Czechoslovaks into resisting the Soviet-led occupation of their country. Their deaths became legendary, but they accomplished little. South Vietnam was eventually conquered and occupied by the Communist North, which rules it to this day. Czechoslovakian resistance to Moscow crumbled, and the country remained a Communist tyranny for another 20 years.

At least it can be said of Quảng Đức and Palach that they were powerless individuals trapped in a dictatorship; they chose to kill themselves from a conviction that they had no other way to make their protest known. That was not remotely true of Bushnell. He lived in a free society, had the right to vote, and was active on social media (where he blasted Israel and defended Hamas). If the purpose of his self-immolation was to gain 15 minutes of posthumous fame, he succeeded. But to what end? His suicide will not change US policy, it will not “free” Palestinians, and it will not persuade Israel that the mass murderers of Oct. 7 ought to keep ruling Gaza after all.

Suicide is tragic. No one should be venerated for taking their own life, regardless of the reason. Mental illness, the ravages of addiction, financial loss, devastating personal setback, emotional heartbreak, or even deep political conviction — none of them makes suicide a good thing. There is nothing noble about self-murder. Bushnell’s death should have been mourned and his loved ones comforted. And then there should have been only respectful silence.