WASHINGTON – A Stanford football game advertisement has put a hijabi Muslim student in hot water, after featuring her cheering with her colleagues in the stands and displaying the school colors.

“We all thought it was pretty cool that they had used the picture of us for the ad and didn’t make much of it otherwise,” Tesay Yusuf, the Muslim student in the ad and a junior at the university, wrote in an email to The Washington Post.

However, the ad for a Stanford “VIP Football Experience” has got a lot of attention on social media, with many posting hateful comments about Yusuf’s hijab.

“That Hijab Or whatever is being shoved right done [sic] my throat!” one user wrote on Facebook.

“What a ridiculous advertisement. You had to throw a Muslim in there, didn’t you,” another commented, adding, “Disgusting. Not one white person in that ad. Screw Stanford.”

One Facebook user left a comment saying, “Hey Stanford take the Muslim bull—- elsewhere, we don’t wanna see it…” to which another replied, “Take the Islamophobia elsewhere, we really don’t wanna hear it.”

Discovering the comments, the self-described first-generation American and first-generation college student made the decision to reveal a few of the more vitriolic responses on her Twitter account Saturday morning.

“When @Stanford Athletics posts ONE diverse ad of me and my friends at a football game, all hell breaks loose. pic.twitter.com/ZbOZc313Cp,” she wrote on twitter.

At the time of writing the story, Yusuf’s post has been retweeted more than 8,000 times and liked over 6,000 times.

“I became more frustrated, which led me to share the tweet,” wrote Yusuf, who was born in Maryland and grew up in the Washington, DC, area.

“I wasn’t expecting the tweet to get so much attention.”

Support

The response on twitter was enormous, with many users offering words of support, calling Yusuf “gorgeous,” and imploring her to “keep spreading your light.”

“Thankfully almost every single response I’ve gotten has been extremely positive,” Yusuf, an international relations major who is minoring in African and African American studies, wrote in her email.

“I also know that the people who made those hateful comments are random people who probably have no connection to Stanford whatsoever.”

Yusuf tweeted that Stanford Athletics was “being really great with the whole situation” and added that she had been told that the comments were being deleted.

Yusuf considered the experience enlightening.

“Unfortunately, as a Black Muslim woman I see people who look like me attacked on the internet all the time. Our current political climate has made it acceptable for people to be openly bigoted in lieu of what they’d call ‘political correctness.’ A few Stanford students enjoying themselves and cheering on their football team did not warrant such a negative response,” she wrote to The Post.

“As women of color, we deserve to be treated just as any Stanford students would. But the fact that this image was atypical and did not show white students seems to have angered some folks. I appreciate the ad, and I’d urge people to question what it is in our society that makes people think it’s okay to spew vitriol towards people they don’t know.”