Video of woman in niqab confronting man for ‘hate speech’ goes viral

A woman in a niqab confronted a man who insulted her Muslim faith as “committing hate speech against me” at a California coffee shop, in a video that has been widely circulated on social media.

The video has been seen nearly 2 million times on Twitter and picked up by several news outlets. It was originally shared on Twitter by CJ Werleman, who identifies as an anti-discrimination advocate. It is not clear who filmed the video, although it appears to be the woman in the niqab who has not been identified.

In the video, the man leans into the woman and says, “I said is this Halloween or something,” apparently in reference to her niqab, a garment that covers most of a person’s face except their eyes.

{mosads}

The man and the woman then get into an argument. When the woman asks him if he knows she is a Muslim, the man tells her, “I don’t like your religion, how’s that?” 

“I don’t want to be killed by you,” the man adds.

The incident, which took place on Friday at a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf shop in Los Angeles, led the barista to refuse to serve the man.

The barista tells the woman filming that she refused to serve him “because he was disrupting a public place and being very racist.”

Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf 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 customers or team members feel endangered in any way,” according to the NBC affiliate in Los Angeles.

During the confrontation, the woman asks the man whether he has read the Quran or the Bible and mentions the teachings of Jesus.

The man responds by saying he doesn’t have “any kind of conversation with idiots.”

She then goes on to accuse the man of “committing hate speech” against her, and another customer is heard off-screen calling the man a racist.

The man leaves the coffee shop after being refused service.