This is an American restaurant I visited a lot. Applebee’s customer smashes Muslim woman in the face for speaking Swahili. The survivor of this brazen attack speaks out about how this has changed her. Islamophobia is on the rise in America. This case is sickening. Asma Jama said: “I was sitting turned around like this and all of a sudden I feel something thrown on my face — boom,” “My cousin started screaming and everyone wanted to run away.”
The woman who attacked Jama, Jodie Marie Burchard-Risch, yelled and threw her drink at Jama, who tried to explain to the woman that she had the right of free speech to converse with her friends in a different language. After Burchard-Risch smashed the mug across Jama’s face, she ran away, but one of the managers of the restaurant followed her outside and kept an
eye on her until police arrived to arrest her.
