A US political satirist staged a social experiment at a prestigious university. Waving an ISIS flag was met with no negative reaction, but with an Israeli flag he got a less-than-warm reception from the students.
Filmmaker Ami Horowitz headed to the University of California, Berkeley, one of the most prestigious and selective universities in the country, to assess students’ reactions to two very different, but powerful symbols.
He took to the university campus waving an infamous black-and-white flag - the emblem of the Islamic State (IS, formerly known as ISIS/ISIL).
“ISIS is misunderstood. We just want our own state. Why does America keep bombing us? America and Western imperialism are to blame, not ISIS,” he was shouting in the video released by Fox news on Wednesday.
However, the students, who Horowitz says in his blog “clearly have a lot of intellect,” didn’t react at all.
“A couple of thousand students walked by me and not saying anything negative. In fact, there were some positive responses. [It] really blew me away,” he said in an interview with RT. “Not a single person has a negative response. It was completely shocking.”
There was no harsh condemnation of the group and no one mentioned the IS’ beheading of three US citizens.
One passerby nodded towards Horowitz and said, “Good luck.”
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“The blood of the Middle East is on the hands of America. American imperialism is responsible for death all around the world,” yelled Horowitz, trying to catch more attention.
“Right?” he asked a passer-by student, who was seemingly nodding in agreement to him. Another student gave him a thumbs-up of approval to his phrase.
Finally one student approached Horowitz, a possible breakthrough moment of IS criticism.
“You can’t smoke on campus,” the student informed the satirist, adding that college police were “going to cite” him.
‘Tolerance has always been an important value of Berkeley’
The IS flag was only the first part of Horowitz experiment. After he met no critical response on the Islamists from the students, he returned with an Israeli flag, trying to show the ‘tolerance’ of Berkeley students.
However, he received less-than-warm reception as the students started assailing him with hatred.
“F*** Israel,” exclaimed one man, “You’re killing kids,” said another.
“All of Israel are killers,” added a woman.
“That flag you wave is the psychological genocide of this planet. This institution is part of the people who enslaved the whole planet,” one of passerby said in a tirade.
In his RT interview, Horowitz said that one student told him that Israel is “the worst country in Europe,” not actually knowing that Israel is located in the Middle East. “It made me wonder about the educational system we have in the US unfortunately,” he added.
“If these are our best and brightest then we should all be afraid. Very afraid,” Horowitz said on his Fox News blog.