Armed Protestors Picket Gas Station After Anti-Arab Facebook Hoax
If your husband is seemingly refused service for being a member of the armed forces, should you: ( A) Call that business' corporate office; (B) Contact the local news; or (C) Start an ill-informed, racially-charged shitstorm?
For Michigan's Samantha Loudenslager, the answer to that question was apparently pretty obvious, because on August 29th she shared the following message:
Jason had to report to the army reserves yesterday, on his way home he stopped to get gas, a drink and some jerky. When he went into the gas station and got to the counter the Arabic man looked at Jason, then his uniform and told him "we dont serve gas here"
Mobil gas station off I-75 exit 98 address: 8435 E Holly RD, Holly MI
We will never be a customer of a place like that!
Naturally, the whole thing was the most basic kind of misunderstanding. Nick Ghalib, the Yemen-born manager of the gas station, explained to Michigan Live "he wasn't telling the man he wouldn't sell him any gas, he was informing him that the premium gas he asked for had run out."
The premium gas gets refilled on Fridays, Ghalib said. Being that it was a Thursday, the pumps had unfortunately already run out of premium, he added.
Realizing her complete dumbassery, Loudenslager quickly recanted, apologizing before deleting both her post and her Facebook page, but by then the damage was done. Her story had already been shared thousands of times and its removal was presumed to be the work of shadowy "Arabic man"-sympathizers at Facebook.
As the classic "serviceman refused" legend spread, anti-Arab Internet racists seized the story and turned it into a national social media campaign. By the following week, the Mobil station had received hundreds of angry and threatening calls in addition to online comments like "Burn the place down!!!" and "Bring rifle back, inform Achmed in the US we have anti-discrimination Laws."
The situation finally came to a head last Monday, when demonstrators with guns and American flags protested outside the gas station. Police visited the scene and within 20 minutes the crowd left "without incident," Michigan Live reports.
For his part, Ghalib was shocked by the rumor he discriminated against a customer. "I would never do that to anybody," he told the Grand Blanc View.
