Grrr…

Uber Driver Says Passenger Mistook Him For A Muslim, Threatened To Kill Him

Samson Woldemichael is a Christian. But the 40-year-old Ethiopian immigrant and father of two, who works as an Uber driver in North Carolina, says he was the victim of Islamophobia this weekend when a passenger threatened his life before violently attacking him during a late-night fare.

Woldemichael says he picked up his assailant, a white man in his 30s, a little before 2 a.m. Sunday outside an Irish pub in Charlotte. The ride started out normally enough, with the two men making small talk. But Woldemichael says when he arrived at what the passenger gave as his home address, the man started to threaten him.

“He told me he was going to shoot me right in face or strangle me,” Woldemichael told The Huffington Post. “He used a lot of bad words… really dirty words, and said I was a Muslim.”

Woldemichael says that even after he told the man he wasn’t a Muslim, the man continued to threaten him. “He was telling me he was going to kill me right there, next to his residence.”

At that point, Woldemichael says, he asked the passenger to get out of the car. The passenger, in turn, asked Woldemichael to get out. Woldemichael says the two stared into each other’s eyes for a few tense seconds, and then he decided to start driving again.

“I started driving because I didn’t feel safe anymore to park there,” he told WBTV this week.

Woldemichael says he drove halfway around the block before the passenger “hit me so hard on the forehead with his bare hand.”

“He then choked me with one arm,” Woldemichael added, “and started hitting me with the other one. I couldn’t move. The only thing I could do was step on the brake, and then I was honking on the horn continuously.”

Woldemichael told WBTV the man then got out of the car, ran a short distance away and then turned around and launched into another tirade, this time keeping his hand behind his back as though he were armed.

That’s when Woldemichael says he drove away and called 911. The cops, he said, arrived within a few minutes, but by that point his assailant had disappeared into the night.

[…]

Woldemichael’s assault is one among a rash of reported anti-Islam incidents across the United States since the Paris terror attacks last week by Islamic State operatives that killed at least 129 people and injured another 350.

On Saturday, there were reports of gunshots fired at a mosque in Meriden, Connecticut. Nearby, at the University of Connecticut, the words “killed Paris” were found scrawled on the door of an Egyptian student’s dorm room.

In Nebraska, someone spray-painted an image of the Eiffel Tower on the side of the Omaha Islamic Center.

In Texas, someone threw feces and torn pages of the Quran outside the Islamic Center of Pflugerville. Also in Texas, a man was arrested for making a terroristic threat after writing on social media that he was going to “shoot up a mosque.”

In Florida, a man was arrested after calling in bomb threats to two mosques.

And in Oklahoma, cops shot a man after he threatened to fire at “anything that looks like a Muslim.”

That list doesn’t include the idiots who threatened the Muslim guy at the Town Hall in Virginia the other day.

These incidents are limited to the United States either. North of the border in my homeland, there have been several xenophobic attacks on Muslims in Toronto including verbal abuse on Subway trains and the intimidation of a Muslim woman outside a school while she was waiting to pick up her kids.

There have not been any deaths yet but I fear they are coming before long. This shit is starting to get out of hand.

It’s so bizarre, I seem to remember Western society being much LESS xenophobic in the 90s. I guess perhaps 9/11 did more lasting damage to us than we thought.