A student senator at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri was filmed tearing out and throwing away nearly 3,000 American flags featured in a 9/11 memorial on campus, as reported by the New York Post.
The student, Fadel Alkilani, was captured on video Saturday as he tore the flags out of the ground and stuffed them into multiple large garbage bags. The student filming the incident, Nathaniel Hope, confronted Alkilani; Hope said that Alkilani falsely claimed that the memorial was “in violation of school rules,” and “was also saying profanity.” In the video posted to Twitter, Alkilani, who is wearing a face mask, stops for a few moments when he realizes that he is being filmed, then quickly walks away with the bags, calling Hope “weird” before leaving the scene.
The 2,977 flags were placed in the grass on the campus’s Mudd Field for the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks in 2001, with each flag representing one of the victims of the attacks in New York City, Arlington, Virginia, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania on that day. This has become a common tradition around the country every year since 2001, often organized by conservative student groups.
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