From Metro.us
A Moroccan immigrant to Philadelphia was brutally attacked over the weekend in Center City just for speaking his native tongue, he claims.
Amine Aouam, 34, who is Muslim, said Tuesday while still shaky from the attack that he believes he was the victim of an anti-Arab or anti-Mulism hate crime.
“You think that would happen if I was speaking French or German? I don’t,” he said. “It was obviously a hate crime.”
Aouam works as a valet at the Bellevue Hotel, and is also a full-time student at Temple studying finance. Now he’s missing work and school as he goes to follow-up CAT scans and MRIs while his pain slowly recedes — but the worst pain is psychological, he said.
Around midnight, turning from Broad Street onto Sansom, they encountered a group of five or six white people. One woman in the group would not stop staring at them as they spoke in the Moroccan dialect of Arabic, which in and of itself is not entirely unusual, so Aouam greeted her.
“I said to her in Arabic, ‘Good evening,’ which is ‘Masaa al-Khair.’ She said ‘What?’ and I said, ‘I just said ‘Good evening.’ Then I walked. And the guy next to her was like ‘Stop this s—!’”
Aouam’s friend, Youssef Amarouch, remembers it a bit more clearly. “Take that s— you said and shove it up in your a–,” he recalled the man saying.
The last thing Aouam remembers is trying to explain that he had only said a greeting — then he was waking up hours later at Jefferson University Hospital.
