Chanting “Death to America” and trampling upon and burning U.S. flags have been part of state-sponsored, anti-American acts in Iran for the past 40 years.
Yet people’s opposition to that mantra and disrespecting the flag of the United States and others has increased in the Islamic republic in recent years — with some daring to publicly question the rationale behind such acts.
Amid the fury in Iran in recent days over the establishment’s mishandling of the downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), killing 176 people, students at two universities were seen walking around U.S. flags painted on the ground by officials in public acts of defiance against the clerical establishment and the state propaganda that portrays the United States and Israel as Tehran’s biggest enemies.
Videos of the incident at Tehran’s Shahid Beheshti University — which has been blacklisted by the United States for its nuclear-research activities — showed a majority of students moving to avoid treading upon painted American and Israeli flags.
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