Free to Express Your View

For John, BLUF:  Different people see 9/11 through different lenses.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Student government official caught red-handed yanking flags from 9/11 memorial

From The College Fix, by the Staff, 11 September 2021.

Here is the lede plus four:

A student senator at Washington University in St. Louis was nabbed red-handed removing American flags from a 9/11 memorial on this day of tribute.

According to The New Guard, a member of the WashU College Republicans recorded Fadel Alkilani carrying trash bags full of the flags he had just yanked.

Alkilani told the person filming that the memorial was “in violation of school rules” and he “expressed no remorse” for his actions.

When the Young America’s Foundation contacted Alkilani about the incident, he told the group “I did not violate any university or legal policy.  Now go away.”

The senator said in a now-protected tweet that he plucked the flags as a “protest against American imperialism and the 900,000 lives lost as a result of post 9/11 war.”

I am sure that Washington University Student Senator Fadel Alkilani is one American who is a celebrant of the First Amendment.  And he is right to be so.  On the other hand, pulling up someone else's tribute to the dead on 9/11 seems a little narrow.

All that said, I wonder from where he gets the "900,000 lives lost".  Yes, lives lost, but that seems like a miscount.  And I wonder where on the ledger he puts the Yazidis.  And other minority groups?  And what he thinks of the ravanchism within Islam, and how much space should be allow for it?  And what he thinks of Charlie Hebdo?

I do think yanking up US Flags at a memorial for 9/11 victims does seem tacky.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff