Nadine Osman
A hotel employee in Madrid was arrested for secretly taking pictures of Moroccan football players and uploading them on Instagram with Islamophobic slurs.
Morocco’s national team arrived at the Madrid Tower Hotel on March 19 ahead of their friendly match against Peru. The perpetrator took several pictures of members of the Moroccan team without their knowledge and posted them on his Instagram account while making fun of the Moroccan players and mocking Ramadan, the holiest month for Muslims.
“Damn f*** Moros. I s*** on Ramadan, and its f*** dead,” reads one of the screenshots of the insulting posts from the hotel employee.
“The Moroccan team is in the Towers, you are a f***ing pain,” another screenshot read. He also published a photo in which he appeared together with the rest of the hotel workers, expressing his anger at having to provide attention to the African team: “We losers, giving service to the month of Ramadan and their f***ing beliefs of m…”, he pointed out in another post.
The incident caused an uproar in Moroccan media and among Moroccan social media users. The magnitude of the event was such that the waiter deleted his posts and sent an apology message, in which he pointed out that these posts were the product of his annoyance for staying late at work since he had to serve them the suhur [pre-dawn] meal that Muslims consume at dawn before starting the fast in the month of Ramadan.
“I apologise to the Moroccans; I used bad words against you. I didn’t mean any of that. All that happened was that I was sick and wanted to go home. But because of the Moroccan team, I had to stay very late because of a Suhur Ramadan meal,” he noted.
The hotel’s rating plummeted going from 4.5 to 2.9 stars. “Unprofessional staff who do not respect their customers and not only complain about servicing them but also take pictures of them inside the hotel without their knowledge,” one reviewer wrote, adding, “Avoid at all costs.”
“Unprofessional staff, don’t spend your money in places like these, they don’t even respect their clients and violate their privacy,” another one said.
In the wake of the incident, the hotel management released a statement apologising to the team and Muslims and saying that they had taken legal action against the culprits. “We wish to offer our most sincere apologies for the unfortunate, reprehensible, and unacceptable comments of a racist and xenophobic nature,” Hotusa, the group that owns the hotel, said in a statement.
The waiter was an external worker hired on an occasional basis and not part of the hotel’s regular staff, the group said. Asked about the incident, Morocco coach Walid Regragui referred to the ongoing holy period of Ramadan, known in the Islamic world as the month of forgiveness and tolerance.
“The players have been affected a lot, and the people of Morocco as well. I think we shouldn’t do more of that; he’s a young boy, and he’s going to learn from this. Now, with social media, some kids are lost. There is racism in life, but I think it is something more social than that of a kid. He’s a kid who has a life after that, and I don’t want to kill him. We are Muslims, and in our religion, we learn to forgive,” he declared.
“Let’s forgive him; let him learn from this incident. Maybe it will set an example for other people to be cautious when writing something on social media.
The best example that we can show is to forgive him, to make him see that he has committed a mistake and to learn from it, to see that what he thinks of Muslims is not good”, he continued.
