Do you know who Aaron Bushnell was? Perhaps the name is familiar, but most people would be forgiven if they didn’t remember who he was or why they had heard his name. Senior Airman Bushnell, an enlisted man in the United States Air Force, poured an inflammable liquid on himself and committed suicide via self-immolation outside of the gates of the Israeli embassy in Washington to protest American support for Israel in their war against Hamas. SrA Bushnell was famous for a couple of days, but, let’s be honest here, while people do remember the event, the late Mr Bushnell personally wasn’t famous for long.

As we previously reported, Khader Adnan was a long-time Palestinian Arab activist, and at one point a spokesman for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Arrested many times, Mr Adnan’s weapon of choice in detention was the hunger strike. His first hunger strike, ten days long, occurred in 2000, when he was locked up not by the Israelis, but the Palestinian National Authority. In 2011, he began another hunger strike, one which lasted 66 days. In 2015, he undertook a 56-day hunger strike, which resulted in Israel releasing him. He kept getting himself arrested, and finally, after another, much longer 87-day hunger strike, died in prison on May 2, 2023.

We also reported, in February, how several Brown University students went on an eight-day-long hunger strike, and then mocked the quaint story that 30 Harvard students went on a 12 hour hunger strike in solidarity with their fellow Ivy Leaguers.

And now? Roughly 15 pro-Hamas students have gone on a hunger strike at Princeton, and hunger strikes are serious things, but they’ve opened themselves up to justifiable mockery.

Princeton anti-Israel protestors are mercilessly mocked after claiming they are STARVING amid self-imposed hunger strike: ‘I’m literally shaking’

By Sophie Mann | Thursday, May 9, 2024 | 12:20 PM EDT | Updated: 12:48 PM EDT

Anti-Israel protestors at Princeton University are being teased online after screaming about the pains of the hunger strike they’ve embarked upon as part of their ongoing solidarity movement with the people of Gaza.

One young woman, in a clip circulating online, yells into a megaphone that she and her peers are ‘starving.’

‘I am quite literally shaking right now, as you can see,’ the masked protestor on the Ivy League campus says, adding that based on her assessment of recent meetings with the university, administrators are not in any rush to give the protestors what they’re after.

The clip was mocked online by countless social media users who pointed out the absurdity of the students complaining about their condition on a self-imposed hunger strike.

‘Are we SURE that this isn’t a fantastic SNL skit?’ one user wrote.

The strike, which is nearing its seven-day mark, began last Friday as part of an effort to coerce the school into meeting with them to discuss Princeton’s divestment from Israel, as well as dropping the criminal and disciplinary charges against two students who were arrested last month.

There is a lot more, including many photos, at the Daily Mail original, and if the Daily Mail is famous for its mockery, as is the New York Post, what my Google search for Princeton hunger strike turned up was a whole lot of nothing from the (purportedly) more serious credentialed media. The only story listed as being in The Philadelphia Inquirer was four days earlier, and there was nothing showing on the first page of my search from The New York Times or The Washington Post. It seems that serious people are mostly ignoring unserious ones.

Would it be wrong to suggest that most people just don’t care about fifteen or so privileges students at an elite and effete Ivy League college. Princeton’s estimated costs of attendance for the 2024-25 academic year are $86,700. The college does tell us that they have a “rigorous academic environment,” and that they bring in “a varied mix of high-achieving, intellectually gifted students,” but somehow, some way, these intellectually gifted students never figured out that a hunger strike would leave them actually, you know, hungry.

You can see the video of the Princeton whiner here. The masked little girl, in her expensive-looking clothes and the obligatory Palestinian keffiyeh — something I regard as qualitatively identical to a Nazi swastika armband — didn’t really generate much sympathy for her cause.

The Princeton princess lamented that the school’s administration wanted to see them weakened, not something she can prove, but, in the end, the authorities don’t have to do anything, and the hunger strike will eventually end. Either they’ll give up, one by one or as a group, or they’ll starve to death. And the mockery that I am seeing, coupled with the more serious credentialed media turning a blind eye to it, tells me that a whole lot of people won’t really care if any of them deliberately starve themselves to death. If the princess hunger strikes her way to her eternal reward, we might remember the action, but, like Aaron Bushnell, few will remember her name.
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Update: I had written that the major media had been ignoring the hunger strike, but New York Times columnist Ginia Bellafante wrote about it this morning.