One New Yorker recently learned the hard way that waving the American flag on a college campus is the quickest way to make enemies.
Ami Horowitz, a self-described “guerrilla journalist,” said she was punched, headbutted and punched by a crowd of angry anti-Israel protesters on Friday at the Uptown campus of the City University of New York.
The aggressive response came after Horowitz claimed to have shown up at a pro-Palestinian camp carrying only an American flag.
His cameraman captured video of the violent four-minute scuffle, but the footage does not show what led up to the brawl.
“I was assaulted by more than a dozen people for holding the flag,” he exclusively told the Post.
“There were no comments, no questions. I didn’t say anything, but they just fell on me.”
The filmmaker’s videos exposing “indoctrination” in higher education often go viral, including one at San Francisco State University that reportedly exposed college students pledging money to kill Jews. It also includes a shocking video from December at the university.
Horowitz said his goal at the City University of New York was to expose the level of hatred that had worsened within the encampment, but he got more than he bargained for after he was allegedly assaulted by a rival “mob” group. said.
“I didn’t expect violence to break out so quickly,” he said.
Horowitz never said a word about Israel or identified himself as Jewish, but he admitted he was “scared” after being repeatedly told to “get out of here.” “I had a huge adrenaline rush,” he added.
He was heard on video saying, “I’m an American. I want to go to campus,” as he was told, “I might go to hell.”
It would be naive to dismiss the protests solely as anti-Israel ideology, he said, noting that the connection between anti-Israel and anti-American sentiment has never been clearer.
“If you put people who hate America and Israel into a Venn diagram, they’re exactly the same circle. It’s two sides of the same coin, so the relationship is clear,” he said.
Horowitz said many of the people around him were novice students, but there were also older participants, including the person seen in the video who appeared to be punched in the throat by the white-clad imam. It pointed out.
There were also Arabs who could not speak English.
The video showed Mr. Horowitz forcibly removed from the scene in a “tight armlock” by campus police and the NYPD, but Mr. Horowitz accused them of simply following orders from higher-ups.
“These violent people are protected by city authorities. The bigger problem is that they are tolerated,” he said.
The recent Michigan rally, which evoked chants of “Death to Israel, Death to America,” and President Biden’s recent “pathological Horowitz condemned the “moral equality” comment and said an immediate crackdown was needed to restore order.
“They are anti-Israel, anti-American, and tolerated and coddled by the current administration and president,” he said.
“As we’ve seen in real time, they’re not just verbally supporting violence and Hamas, they’re actually committing violence. It all needs to be removed now.”
Horowitz immediately sought medical attention and said he suffered bruises to his torso.
“They knew exactly where to hit,” he said, noting that they punched them in the spleen and kidney, “the two most dangerous places you can hit a person.”
The danger of protests that “bring Karl Marx to a tee” and re-discuss the capitalism of the last century is a canary in the coal mine, he added.
“These people want the destruction of our way of life, not Israel, which is just a MacGuffin,” Horowitz says, bringing up the Hitchcockian device of using something as a pretext for real motives.
“America and the West are the real problem,” he added.
After leaving the police station without incident, Horowitz ended his video by criticizing the “system” that fuels this hatred.
“I went to this protest with an American flag at City College, which I and all American taxpayers pay tuition for. And I got my ass kicked. I got punched, I got choked, I got choked. I was thrown down the stairs,” he said on camera, calling the rioters “thugs, animals, outside agitators… who attack people who walk with them.” American flag. Nothing about Israel, nothing about Jews.
“They hate America. They hate this country. That’s what we’re dealing with in this country.”
The newspaper has contacted protest organizers and New York City for comment.
