“Despicable”: Student removes every American flag from 9/11 memorial in “protest”

ST. LOUIS, Mo. – A student senator at Washington University in St. Louis is in an uncomfortable spotlight after removing every single flag from a 9/11 memorial set up by students of the school.

In a video that’s now gone viral, a sophomore from the university saw the student on the site of the memorial, where a Republican group of students had put 2,977 flags, one for each victim of the terrorist attacks.

Nathanial Hope, one of the students with Young America’s Foundation who helped set up the memorial, saw Fadel Alkinali with the flags in several plastic bags when he decided to start recording.

According to the student newspaper, Alkinali serves as the chairman of the school’s student senate finance committee.

Alkinali, whose social media pages have since been taken down, seemed agitated at being filmed by Hope as he was carrying off the bags.

In a statement provided to the university’s campus newspaper, Alkinali said he planned 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.”

He also maintains that he did nothing criminal, nor violated any policy of the university. Alkinali also says he has been verbally and physically harassed by Washington University students and officers, who he “plans to report”.

Alkinali went on in his statement to say that the full intention of his protest was not made clear in the video that was posted, adding, “Since 9/11, Islamophobic hate crimes have been higher than they ever were before,” and, “over 900,000 people have been killed because of the wars the United States has propagated.”