An Egyptian, hijab-wearing woman brought a judicial complaint against her German neighbor who had harassed her for calling her a terrorist. Why? Because of her hijab. She won her case, and the defendant appealed. As she was preparing to testify in the appeal, the German attacked her with a knife in the court, stabbing her 18 times and killing her. Her husband, who is doing a post-doc at the Max Planck Institute, attempted to intervene, and was stabbed by the attacker and shot by the security guard (who of course assumed that he was the aggressor). The husband is in the hospital in critical condition. The victim herself was a highly-educated professional (a pharmacist with post-graduate training, I believe, but was having trouble obtaining employment in Germany at least in part because she refused to take off her hijab). While it has been a non-event in Germany, it has provoked an emotional response in Egypt, where she has been adopted as a national hero – a street has now been named after her in Alexandria.
