Many University of California students saw red over a US flag being displayed on campus, the man behind the stunt, political activist and provocateur Ami Horowitz, told RT. Almost no-one minded an ISIS flag, though, he says.
In the first part of a 2 1/2-minute video filmed at UC Berkeley early November, Horowitz is seen parading the Stars and Stripes, chanting loudly: “The greatest country on the Planet Earth that protects our freedom!” and similar praise. His sentiment did not seem to strike a chord with the crowd: those who chose to pay attention had some pretty unpatriotic comments.
“The complete opposite,”“Canada’s pretty great,” and “Your flag sucks, fool!” were some of the reactions seen in the video, along with quite a few examples of “F**k America!”
“I was out there for about an hour, and in that hour we had about 20-25 people making negative comments about the flag and maybe three or four had positive comments to say of the flag,” Horowitz told RT.
The liberal university was the scene of large-scale anti-nationalist protests this year that repeatedly spiraled into violence.
In the second part of his video experiment, Horowitz went on campus again, this time brandishing a custom-made flag of the terrorist group Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), calling on the Berkeley crowd to join the jihadists while denouncing “US imperialism.”
“ISIS protects Islam… I denounce western imperialism. I denounce American imperialism,” Horowitz can be seen shouting.
The video shows no negative reactions to the apparent display of ISIS propaganda, with two young men even seen thanking Horowitz for taking a stand.
“Good for you, man. Good for you,” a young man is filmed saying.
“I love that you’re saying that,” another said.
“I was yelling ‘ISIS, come fight for ISIS,’ I said ‘ISIS’ every third word,” Horowitz told RT, arguing that while the ISIS flag might have escaped onlookers, the words left no denying who he appeared to be representing.
Horowitz said that while he was waving the ISIS flag for two hours, double the time he stood with the US one, he only “got one person who thought it was obnoxious.”
“For the most part, people were not simply saying a word, they were ignoring it, that were looking at me and looking away,” the activist said, adding, “No matter what you expect, it’s still shocking.”
Horowitz rejects any notion that he edited the video to include only those reactions that favor his agenda.
“The way I do my business is I will only show the majority opinion. For example, there were a couple of people who supported the US flag, I did not show that, because the majority of people's response to me was overly negative. I’ve never cherry-picked in the sense, I never do the reverse. I never show the minority and express it as the majority,” Horowitz said.
It is not the first time the activist has tested UC Berkeley students’ tolerance to various kinds of propaganda. In 2014, he tried a similar stunt, then with ISIS and Israeli flags. The attitude of the students has not changed much since then, as it appears from the video.