Man booted from coffee shop for taunting Muslim woman
Cell phone video recorded inside a California coffee shop captured a white man taunting and belittling a Muslim woman wearing a niqab before the manager tosses him out for “being very racist.”
“Is this Halloween or something?” the unidentified man asks at the beginning of the clip, which has been viewed on Twitter nearly 2 million times.
Standing beside him at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in Riverside Friday, the woman fired back: “What’s wrong with me?”
She adds that she is Muslim and asks the man whether he took issue with that.
“I don’t like it,” he replies. “I don’t like that because I don’t like your religion. It says to kill me and I don’t want to be killed.”
The confrontation from there escalates into yelling and arguments regarding faith and spirituality.
She asks if he’s ever read the Quran to which he responds: “I’ve read enough to know.”
He warns her several times to back off as we attempts to walk away while an employee behind th counter urges them to separate.
Another customer, irked by the confrontation also weighs in.
“Get out of here! Get out of here you f---ing racist!” he shouts from the background.
A woman who identifies herself as the supervisor and asks the man to leave.
“Why are you not serving him?” the woman asks from behind her cell phone camera.
“Because he is disrupting a public place and being very racist,” she replies.
Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in statement to CBS said they have a “zero-tolerance policy when it comes to discrimination of any kind, and have the right to refuse service to any person who makes the customers or team members feel endangered in any way.”
Social media users came in droves to praise the supervisor since the video was first shared on Twitter by journalist CJ Werleman. Many of them urged Starbucks to take notice in light of a recent racially charged incident at one of the coffee megachain’s Philadelphia stores.
A pair of black men awaiting a colleague to discuss a business plan were escorted out of the cafe in handcuffs after the manager phoned the police. Starbucks has since issued an apology and has scheduled company-wide bias training.
