What would happen if Hamas representatives began fundraising on American college campuses? That’s what satirical film-maker Ami Horowitz wanted to know. To satiate his curiosity, Horowitz visited Portland State University (PSU) last week and filmed himself asking students to support Hamas’s cause.
The video of Horowitz making his pitch to dozens of PSU students has been viewed well over 17,000 times on YouTube since it was published on Sunday. Before taking to the streets of PSU, Horowitz told viewers that his goal is to see just how far liberal American students in the Pacific Northwest were willing to take the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement against Israel.
Prior to publishing the video, Horowitz posted on his Twitter page last week asking his audience if they thought he would be successful in raising money for the terrorist group.
Does anybody think I could raise money for Hamas on the campus of an American university? If your answer was no… you would be sadly wrong
— Ami (@AmiHorowitz) May 18, 2016
His post received replies from a number of users, most of whom said they would not be surprised if Horowitz’s experiment were to succeed. Wrote one Twitter user: “My answer is YES! I’ve seen it for too long!” Some followers even suggested money wouldn’t be the only thing university students would offer. “Not only could you raise money, I bet you could also recruit volunteers,” Elizabeth Blumenthal wrote.
In the three minute clip, Horowitz can be seen approaching students walking around campus, claiming he is from “American Friends for Hamas” and that he wants to raise money to “fund operations against Israel” by hitting by hitting “soft targets” such as schools, shopping malls and cafes in the Jewish state.
With no desire to hide his (i.e. Hamas’s) true intentions, Horowitz explicitly stated to one student “We’re looking to wipe Israel off the map…we’re looking to destroy Israel.”
Shockingly, Horowitz’s fake experiment was taken all too seriously: several students made pledges of between $10 to $20, altogether raising hundreds of dollars for the fictitious organization in just under an hour, Fox News reported. One student said, “I’ve actually been learning in this last school year about everything that’s going on over there. I like the sound of what you’re doing; it sounds like a really great thing to do.”
In an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News, Horowitz emphasized that despite what some may think, the students he spoke to were not uninformed; quite the opposite: they were educated. Yet for some reason they wholly embraced the idea of killing innocent Israelis.
“Let’s be clear, it’s not that these kids are stupid, or that they’re uninformed, or their ignorant,” he said. “I could not have spelled it out more specifically that we want to use this money to kill Jews!…This is the poison that we’ve been teaching our children for the past decade and this is the manifestation of it.”
Horowitz is no stranger to testing terrorist sentiment on college campuses. Just last year, he took to University of California at Berkeley armed with both an ISIS flag and Israeli flag to see which would evoke a stronger response. Unsurprisingly, people responded with horrific anti-Israel sentiments while the ISIS flag garnered no negative reactions whatsoever.
