After a 46-year-old man was charged with assaulting a Muslim teenager on a busy commuter train in Vancouver, Canadians are asking why just one person stepped in to help her.



Noor Fadel, 18, was speaking to a friend on the phone as she headed home from work on Monday. “All of a sudden you just hear some dude start saying these words,” Fadel told CKNW 980. “I wasn’t paying attention to him until he actually got up. He had a very aggressive look on his face.”

The man – whom she described as white – began swearing at her in a mix of Arabic and another language. “And then he called me a slut and said all those kinds of words,” said Fadel, who wears a hijab. “And he told me that he’s going to kill me and kill all Muslims.”

Fadel, who was born in Canada to parents from Iraq, said she regularly fended off comments from people telling her to go back to her country but she was stunned by his behaviour.

The man then tried to grab her and force her head on to his crotch, she said. “And I looked at the passengers,” she said. “And everyone saw that he did it. But they were all just sitting. No one got up, no one said a word.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Noor Fadel and Jake Taylor. Photograph: Courtesy Noor Fidal

She took her eyes off him to steal another glance at the busy train. “And the second I looked at the passengers, he struck me across the face. Hit me,” he said. “And he kept calling me a whore and he called me slut and he was talking about my mom.”

Jake Taylor, a cook who was sitting nearby,

ran over and pushed the man away from her, forcing him off the train at the next stop.

Fadel – who described Taylor as her ‘hero” – manage to snap a photo of her alleged attacker before he got off the train. Taylor stayed with her as she exited at the next stop and called police, still reeling from shock.

Hours later police arrested Pierre Belzan, of no fixed address, and charged him with one count of threatening to cause bodily harm and one count of assault. A charge of sexual assault is also being considered.

Fadel later posted an account of what happened on social media. “It saddens my heart that so many people watched as I was being attacked and assaulted simply because of a man who knew nothing of me but chose to judge me based on the hijab I wear,” she wrote.

Thousands of responses poured in – including from hundreds from other Muslim women across Canada who said they had also suffered Islamophobic violence.

But in Canada, the discussion has now focused on why Taylor was the only person to intervene, with some pointing to the bystander effect – a social phenomenon used to describe why people are less likely to offer help when others are present – or pointing to the fatal stabbing of two men in Portland, Oregon, who tried to shield two women from an anti-Muslim tirade. Transit officials said that nobody on the train pushed the emergency alarm or made use of the emergency intercoms.

The same debate has swirled in south-western Ontario, where on Thursday a man wielding a baseball bat attacked a family – yelling about terrorists and Isis – in the parking lot of a strip mall. The father of the family, who suffered a cracked rib in the attack, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that he was surprised that most in the parking lot pretended nothing was happening. Police later charged a 36-year-old man with aggravated assault and three counts of assault with a weapon.

In Vancouver, Fadel said she held nothing against those who chose not to intervene. “I can only imagine what I would do,” she said. “I would hope that I would stand up as well. But honestly, these days, you just don’t know what people can do if you stand up.”