Video Of The Student Who Put 2,977 US Flags In Trash Bags As A “Protest”

A student body senator from Washington University has sparked controversy after commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In an effort to honor the people who were killed during the attack on its twentieth anniversary, Fadel Alkilani collected American flags from across the community – 2,977 of them to be exact – as a way to honor the people who were killed during the attack but then outraged people when he tossed them all out in garbage bags when he was done.

Alkilani serves as a chairman of the student senate finance committee at Washington University, which is located in St. Louis, Missouri. In a video, Alkilani was shown filling trash bags with small American flags in an effort to commemorate the thousands of lives lost during the terrorist attacks led by Osama bin Laden twenty years ago this weekend. The student’s 9/11: Never Forget Project was filmed, in part, and shared to Twitter by the Young Americans for Freedom, in which the person behind the camera confronts the Washington University student regarding the American flags.

The person behind the camera is Nathaniel Hope, who is a member of Washington University’s College Republicans group. He was outraged to see the other student collecting the flags and putting them in bags.

Hope was shocked to see that Alkilani was displaying “no remorse” while he went around the campus picking up the American flags. He said that the flags were a “violation of the school rules” and needed to be removed despite being put there in honor of the people who died during the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington DC, and rural Pennsylvania.

“I did not violate any university or legal policy. Now go away,” Alkilani told YAF.

Nevertheless, the college senator posted to Twitter about how he was removing the memorial flags as a “protest against American imperialism and the 900,000 lives lost as a result of post 9/11 war.”

Since the controversy, Alkilani posted a “formal statement on the flag relocation incident.” He wrote:

“Currently, there is a massive harassment campaign propagated primarily by Washington University College Republicans, as well as the national Young Americans’ Foundation (YAF) regarding an incident that occurred at approximately 6 am on Saturday, September 11, 2021. There is a large amount of misinformation circulating, and I seek to explain both what occurred and why it happened.”

He continued, “The misinformation that is currently circulating on YAF’s page states that I was ‘stealing’ the flags. This is due to a WashU College Republican member taking a video of me collecting flags in plastic gags. However, I had no intention of removing the flags from the Mudd Field area, and my full protest did not have the chance to be actualized. My planned protest was to place the bags of flags on Mudd Field, along with various statistics explaining the human cost of 9/11 in the past 20 years. On the sides of the bags, some writing may be visible, but the full statement was not outlined at the time of the video.”

  

What do you think about this student’s protest?