Silke Jasso
“If you don’t like this country, leave,” an unidentified man told five Muslim teenage girls as they were leaving a local restaurant after a night out, effectively ruining their evening and making them feel unsafe.
Videos by Rare
Sawin Osman, a high school student born and raised in Chicago, told Yahoo News that she and her friends were verbally attacked in an anti-Muslim rant Monday night while at Pepe’s Mexican Restaurant in Hickory Hills. The girls were on their way out of the restaurant when the middle-aged man took note of their headscarves and made a rude comment about the weight of one of the girls.
After the man began to insult them, one girl took out her smartphone and recorded the whole incident. Osman agreed to be identified so that she and her friends could speak out about the insulting comments and the fear they faced, according to Yahoo.
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“We were walking past him on our way out of the restaurant [when] he yelled, ‘That girl could break a camel’s back,’” Osman told Yahoo. “We stopped and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, what did you just say?’”
“You can go and beat it. If you don’t like this country, leave,” the man said.
“It’s our home too. What do you mean leave?” Osman said.
The girls told CBS Chicago they immediately left after the man aggressively stood up because they feared things may get physical. As the girls were leaving the restaurant, the man continued to yell obscene comments calling them “camel-jacking mother f***ing c***s,” among other things.
The girls persist that the attack was anti-Muslim and told CBS that is simply the kind of world they live in now.
“We wake up every day and we know that our world is like this,” one of the girls told CBS through tears.
Management at Pepe’s told CBS they are very upset by what happened, but were unaware of the incident at the time or would have contacted police immediately. Police have confirmed that there is an open investigation for the man in the video.
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“We live in a very charged climate,” Catherine Bronson, Osman’s mother and a professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame, told Yahoo. “I think the furor at the presidential level has sort of exacerbated this feeling and given a platform for those who might not have spoken out so aggressively.”
Osman herself was most upset by the comment the man made about leaving the country. She said she was born in Chicago and would not know where else to go because this is her home.
“Just because we have the headscarf on doesn’t mean we’re not from here,” Osman told Yahoo.
