British police said Saturday they arrested a man suspected of hurling anti-Semitic abuse at a Jewish man and his children on the London Underground, after a clip of the incident went viral.
The suspect was nabbed in Birmingham, British Transport Police said. He is suspected of a racially aggravated public order offense.
The exchange was filmed Friday and prompted widespread condemnation, but also praise for a Muslim woman who persistently tried to get the man to stop, even as he threatened to assault other passengers.
The woman, identified as Asma Shuweikh, said she “wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.”
In the video, the man can be seen pointing to passages in what appears to be a Bible and shouting at a father and several small children who are wearing kippas, talking about the “synagogue of Satan.”
“It was the children that really got me and everyone else, he was just screaming at these children. It was horrific in every sense,” Chris Atkins, who filmed the incident, was quoted saying by BBC.
“He… said in the Bible [that] Jews killed Jesus and they are all slave masters. I’ve lived in London for 20 years and you’re used to people ranting on the Tube – it was only after a minute I realized, ‘hang on this is really, really anti-Semitic.’”
When one passenger tried to stop him, the man threatened him: “You need to get out of my face or I will smack you right in your nose, man. Back up from me. I’m not no Christian pastor. Back the fuck up from me.”
It was then that Shuweikh intervened. “Come on man, there are children,” she says, and continued to try and calm him down.
“It’s not my opinion, it’s God’s word,” he shouted.
Atkins said the family had given him permission to share the video.
“In this day and age we are told how intolerant everyone is and all religions hate each other and there you had a Muslim woman sticking up for some Jewish children,” he said.
