A Calgary woman is sharing her experience after a trip out for snacks with her family ended with frightening verbal abuse.
Lubna Akl went to Peters' Drive-In, an iconic Calgary fast food joint, on Wednesday evening with her three young children. She was wearing a hijab.
While she waited in line in her car to order, she heard blaring music. It was so loud she couldn't place her order over the speaker.
Confronted by a stranger
When she looked toward the source of the noise, she saw a woman waving both middle fingers at her.
The woman was singing "go back to your f**king country you f**king c*nt," Akl wrote in a Facebook post about the incident.
Akl thought she might try to make the woman stop by pretending to take her photo with her phone, but it only aggravated her further.
"I put my phone up like I was snapping pictures only for her to rush out of her truck like a maniac, run to my car, again putting both middle fingers against my passenger window ... keeping in mind my six-year-old, three-year-old and two-year-old are in the back seat."
It's unfortunate, and it's unfair."
She got out of her car to confront the woman, who got nose-to-nose with her and told her to take off her "jabib" (hijab) and "go back to [her] country."
Akl called police, who declined to lay any charges against the woman as there were no threats of violence, the Calgary Herald reported.
Nobody stepped in to help
She said the most frustrating part of the entire ordeal was that nobody stepped in to intervene.
"It's unfortunate, and it's unfair. We teach our children on a daily basis to stand up for themselves and stand up to bullying. Yet we can't even lead by example," Akl wrote, adding that people instead gathered around to document the incident on their phones.
βI really could have used some back-up in that situation," she told Metro News.
Read Lubna Akl's story below:
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