The student who defended the Stars and Stripes from an anti-Israel mob on a North Carolina campus Tuesday said protesters would have had to tear it down over his “corpse.”
Anti-Israel demonstrators targeted the American flag at the University of North Carolina on Chapel Hill’s Quad. 4 Charlotte police officers killed On the job. At some point, they replaced it with the Palestinian flag. This infuriated students and prompted members of the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity to take action.
“I don’t understand why people would act like this,” said Dan Stompel, a third-year political science student at the university. He was one of more than a dozen students who stood up to a mob of hundreds who tried to desecrate the American flag. Stompel and his classmates held up the flag for more than an hour until police cleared the protesters and safely raised the flag on the flagpole. All the while, students experienced profanity, middle finger pointing, and bottles, rocks, and water being thrown at them by protesters.
“We look in all directions. If something comes flying at us, we say, ‘Look out!'” We don’t cover for each other or look out for others. Did…and it hurt our arms, it was like “arm day”. [workout] For me that day. After that, the gym was not held that day. very tired. It was a beautiful moment,” Stoppel said in an interview on FOX News Digital on Wednesday.
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Dan Stompel, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, reacts to being assaulted by an anti-Israel mob while defending the American flag.
“It shows that when you look at the people there, there are kind, normal, strong boys protecting the American flag. There’s nothing more patriotic, nothing more authentic, nothing more moving. ” he said.
At one point, Junior made a “joke” about how they would react if the mob tried to stop them.
“I thought, ‘I’ll die for this flag.’ And everyone was like, ‘Yeah.’ If they come close to starting throwing their hands at us, we’re not going anywhere, I don’t care, they have to tear this flag off over my corpse.” Stompel said.
A GoFundMe set up for the Chapel Hill Pi Kappa Pi chapter had raised more than $265,000 as of Wednesday night “to give this flat the party they deserve.”
“Communist losers across the country are infiltrating college campuses and making stupid demands of weak college administrators,” the GoFundMe page says. “But in the midst of the chaos, the screaming, the anti-Semitism, the hatred of our faith and our flag, there stood a platoon of American heroes… [who] Defended Old Glory from hordes of unwashed Marxists. ”
Anti-Israel demonstrators replaced the American flag with the Palestinian flag during a demonstration on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus on Tuesday, April 30, 2024. (Heather Deal/Daily Tar Heel)
“Don’t bend the knee to these people. They want to take over. They just want to destroy what this country stands for and bring their twisted ideology into every hole in this country. And we can’t let them do that,” Stompel told Fox News Digital. “If it really took, let’s say, 30 guys to stop thousands of people because we took a stand and we didn’t let it get away with…If you really believe in something, that problem… Others who are kind of wishy-washy about you can’t have any doubts.
“So be firm. Be a man. Be firm,” he added.
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The American flag is surrounded by a temporary fence at Polk Place at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on May 1, 2024. ((Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images))
The protests in Chapel Hill come amid ongoing wars in the Middle East, as activists set up encampments on campuses, occupied buildings, clashed with law enforcement and resisted arrest.Students at elite schools across the U.S. The incident occurred amid protests against aid to Israel and Gaza. The protests began at Columbia University and then spread to schools across the country, from Massachusetts to Tennessee to Texas. To California.
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“All UNC University Republicans were disgusted and appalled to see the American flag removed and replaced with the Palestinian flag,” the Republican Club, which also attended the event, said in a statement.
“These brave students acted quickly when they saw their country’s flag being disrespected,” the club said.
