The College Fix

A 9/11 flag memorial at Middlebury College on Wednesday was uprooted to protest “American Imperialism.”

The memorial, which consisted of 2,977 flags to represent all the Americans who lost their lives in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, had been installed by the College Republicans and Democrats at the small, private liberal arts college in Vermont.

Ben Kinney, president of the College Republicans who spent two hours Tuesday night posting the flags, just happened to be passing by the display on Wednesday afternoon when he saw four females and one male “stuffing the miniature flags into black trash bags,” the Middlebury Campus student newspaper reports.

“I got there just as they were taking the very last of them out of the ground and putting them in piles,” he told the newspaper. “At first, I (thought) the group was comprised of College Democrats helping put the flags away before the rain rolled in, but then I realized what they were doing.”

Kinney said the protestors told him they were “confiscating” the flags in protest of “America’s imperialism,” the campus reports.

On the website climate-connections.org, some of the alleged flag-grabbers explained their actions, saying they aimed to protest injustices against Native Americans.

“For over 500 years our people have been under attack,” Amanda Lickers, a member of the Onondowa’ga Nation, told climate-connections.org. “The theft of our territories, the devastation of our waters; the poisoning of our people through the poisoning of our lands; the theft of our people from our families; the rape of our children; the murder of our women; the sterilization of our communities; the abuse of our generations; the uprooting of our ancestors and the occupation of our sacred sites; the silencing of our songs; the erasure of our languages and memories of our traditions. i have had enough.”

Middlebury President Ron Liebowitz denounced the act and plans an investigation, saying some of the vandals were from “our campus community.”

“I was deeply disturbed by the insensitivity of this act,” he said in a statement on the college’s website. “Destruction of property and interfering with the rights of others to express themselves violates the standards of our community. The college has begun a disciplinary investigation of this incident.”

“There is always something to learn from differences of opinion. In this case, the disrespectful methods of the protesters overshadowed anything that might have been learned from the convictions they claimed to promote. We will not tolerate this kind of behavior.”

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