Lawfare Project representing Israeli student subjected to anti-Semitic attack on NYC subway
By Talia Kaplan
December 18, 2019
Fox News
An Israeli college student says she was subjected to a “disturbing,” foul-mouthed anti-Semitic tirade and was physically attacked on a New York City subway last week by a passenger who got annoyed after she was asked to move her bags.
“It makes me feel very humiliated and sad that anti-Semitism still exists,” Lihi Aharon, who immigrated to the United States from a village outside of Tel Aviv in 2013, told Fox News.
She added: “It’s disturbing and it’s scary to think that our world is going in that direction. We must stop this.”
The New York City Police Department told Fox News the incident happened on the southbound 2 train near Wall Street in New York City on Thursday night around 11:15.
Aharon said she encountered the woman, who police identified as Zarinah Ali, 38, as she got on the subway on her way home to Brooklyn after an induction ceremony at her school, The Borough of Manhattan Community College.
Aharon said she encountered the woman, who police identified as 38-year-old Zarinah Ali (left), as she got on the subway on her way home to Brooklyn after an induction ceremony at her college. (Lihi Aharon)
“I happened to sit next to a visibly Orthodox Jewish man,” Aharon told Fox News. “He had a beard and a yarmulke and he turned out also to be an Israeli.”
“She was yelling at him, shouting at him, ‘Allahu Akbar’ [God is most great] and ‘Allah will kill you,’ ‘nasty Jews,’ she was citing clauses from the Koran and ‘when you see a Jew you got to kill him’ and she used a lot of profanity.”
She added, “I was talking Hebrew so she knew I was Jewish.”
Aharon said she immediately took out her phone and some of the comments were captured on video.
In the video, Ali can be heard spouting phrases including, “You f---in nasty a-- Jews” and “You stinking a— Jew.”
“After a few minutes she stood up and smacked my phone, she came over and smacked my phone down, and I told my friend, ‘Record this,’ I’m telling her in Hebrew ,‘Record this’ and my friend started recording and then she smacked my friend’s phone out of her hands twice,” Aharon told Fox News.
“Then she came to me, she ran to me and pointed on my face and then she was grabbing my face, like she was trying to pull my face off and she scratched me so hard and my face started bleeding.”