A University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill student who defended an American flag on campus Tuesday from an anti-Israel mob said that the protesters would have to yank it from his “dead body” if they wanted it.
Anti-Israel protesters at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill targeted the American flag on the quad, which was flying at half-mast to honor four Charlotte officers killed in the line of duty. They replaced it with a Palestinian flag, sparking anger among students. Members of the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity were inspired to take action in response, Fox News reported.
“I don’t understand how people can act like this,” said Dan Stompel, a junior studying political science at the university.
Stompel was among a few dozen students who bravely stood up to a mob of hundreds attempting to desecrate the American flag. Alongside his classmates, he held the flag for over an hour until police intervened, safely restoring it to the flagpole. Throughout the ordeal, the students faced profanity, gestures, and projectiles hurled at them by the protesters, the outlet reported.
“We’re looking at every direction. If stuff was flying in, we would say, ‘Heads up.’ We would cover each other. We would look out for other people… And it did hurt our arms. It was like an ‘arm day’ [workout] for me that day. There was no gym happening that day afterwards. It was exhausting. It was beautiful moment,” Stopel said in an interview with Fox News Digital the following day.
“It shows that, …based on the people there, nice, normal, strong boys protecting America’s flag. There’s nothing more patriotic, nothing more genuine, nothing more inspiring than that,” he said.
He then made a “joke” about how he would respond to the mob if it attempted to stop him and his smaller group.
“I was like, ‘I’d die for this flag.’ And everybody was like, ‘Yeah.’ If they got any closer that we’re going to start throwing hands. We’re not going anywhere, I don’t care. They’re going to have to tear me off this flag over my dead body,” Stompel said.
A GoFundMe created for Chapel Hill’s Pi Kappa Phi chapter has raised more than $265,000 as of Wednesday evening “to throw this frat the party they deserve.”
“Commie losers across the country have invaded college campuses to make dumb demands of weak University Administrators,” the GoFundMe page said. “But amidst the chaos, the screaming, the anti-semitism, the hatred of faith and flag, stood a platoon of American heroes… [who] protected Old Glory from the unwashed Marxist horde.”
“Don’t bend the knee to these people. They want to take over. They want to just destroy what this country stands for, bring their own twisted ideology into every orifice of this country. And don’t let them do that,” Stompel told the outlet. “If it really took, like, 30 dudes to stop thousands of people because we take a stand, because we don’t let it slide… If you genuinely believe in something, no other person who’s kind of wishy-washy on an issue can question you.”
“So take a stand. Be a man. Take a stand,” he added.
