It's a courageous act for anymore, let alone a single teenage Muslim boy.
But as a camera rolled, 16-year-old Hadi Hijazi stood on Sydney's Circular Quay, blindfolded and holding a sign, determined to raise awareness of the misconceptions surrounding Muslims and Islam.
"I'm a Muslim and I'm labelled as a terrorist," his sign read.
"I trust you. Do you trust me enough for a hug?"
There he stood, waiting to see what would happen.
And slowly but surely people walking by began to take notice. And they began to hug him.
“I was actually really nervous because I didn’t know what the response was going to be," Hadi told SBS News.
"I didn’t know if people were just going to walk past or if people were going to make some comments or anything. So I was just hoping for the best."
The whole experiment was filmed and posted to Hadi's YouTube account.
Hadi said once people started to approach him they kept on coming.
"Twenty minutes later a lot of people started approaching me, like I wouldn’t have gone for one minute without a hug," he said.
"They constantly started approaching, which was really relieving because I didn’t expect that.
"I probably only got like 30 or 20 people in my video but in the time and place there was probably at least 200 people that came up to me."
One woman in particular was touched by Hadi's experiment.
"I had a French lady come up to me and she told me about her story with the Paris attacks and all that stuff that’s happened and she told me how she still loves and adores Muslims and she understands that the minority doesn’t represent all of Islam," he said.
When asked why he did it, in the face of rising Islamophobia and fears of terror attacks, Hadi's answer was simple.
"The three values of any true Muslim, those three values are love, peace and trust," he said.
"I was trying to put those values out there to show people that true Muslims have good intentions and they shouldn’t be represented by the minority doing those dangerous and heartbreaking acts."
His YouTube fans reacted warmly to his video, and they weren't the only ones.
"My mum was really shocked," Hadi said.
"She didn’t understand how I would come up the idea or why I would go do that. She was proud of me I guess."
