UPenn library assistant filmed tearing down missing posters of Hamas hostages
The library assistant tore down posters even after a woman told him that they portrayed innocent people who were kidnapped.
The posters showed Israeli men, women, and children kidnapped by Hamas.
A man seen tearing down posters of those kidnapped by Hamas in a video circulating on social media has been reportedly identified as a library assistant at the University of Pennsylvania.
Libs of TikTok posted the video to X on Tuesday with the caption “Library Assistant at @Penn was filmed walking around campus ripping down posters with images of the missing women and children who Hamas terrorists took hostage.” As of today, the video has 3.5 million views.
Library Assistant at @Penn was filmed walking around campus ripping down posters with images of the missing women and children who Hamas terrorists took hostage pic.twitter.com/esKCOrezwb
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 17, 2023
The video shows the man, who has been reportedly identified as library assistant Matthew Wranovics, walking down the street and tearing the posters from a fence. “Why are you tearing them down?” a female voice from behind the camera asks. Wranovics responds with “get the f**k out of my face.”
“Innocent people were kidnapped,” the woman explains, to which Wranovics responds, “there were innocent people killed in the hospital bombings.”
The Kidnapped from Israel poster campaign, which describes itself as completely unfunded, was started by a group of New York City-based Israeli artists in order to “create a widespread targeted effort to maximize awareness among the global community.”
It “has now become one of the most widespread guerilla public artworks in history,” with posters found in “streets, stations, universities, protests, and more.”
The campaign has made 104 posters portraying victims kidnapped by Hamas. Among them are three-year-old Israeli twins Emma and Yuli Cunio, a four-year-old Israeli boy known only as Ariel, a nine-month-old Israeli baby boy known only as Kfir, and a family consisting of a 34-year-old Israeli mother, Doron, and her daughters, four-year-old Raz and two-year-old Aviv.
“On October 7th, nearly 200 innocent civilians were abducted from Israel into the Gaza strip. Their whereabouts remain unknown,” the posters read. “More than 3,000 women, men, and children, ranging in age from 3 months to 85 years old, were wounded, murdered, beaten, raped, and brutally separated from loved ones by Hamas.”
The University of Pennsylvania has now scrubbed Wranovics’ information from its website.
