Woman defends couple from Islamophobic rant on train

An Australian woman defended a Muslim couple from a hateful tirade while aboard a train in Sydney and the video of the exchange has gone viral.

Stacey Eden said the couple, traveling with their 4-month-old son, was minding their own business when the woman in red began accusing them of being ISIS supporters and bad mouthing the woman for wearing a hijab. After about 10 minutes, Eden began recording the conversation and offered the woman a piece of her mind.

"She wears it for herself, OK?" said Eden in the video. "She wears it because she wants to be modest with her body, not because of people like you who are going to sit there and disrespect her."

"Your kids behead people," the woman said of the Muslim couple.

"That's not her doing it. That's a minority of people, not a majority of people," Eden snapped back. "If you've got nothing nice to say, don't say anything, it's simple."

On Facebook, Eden wrote that the woman in red suggested that she join ISIS because she stood up for the couple. After Eden defended them for a short while, the woman stopped with her remarks.

The video went on to be viewed nearly 300,000 times in one day, and has since been shared more than 9,000 times. Many commenters supported Eden for her action, and in a follow-up post she wrote that she was "overwhelmed with appreciation."

The man Eden had defended, Hafeez Ahmed Bhatti thanked Eden for standing up for him and his family, telling The Sydney Morning Herald that his Facebook is often littered with messages accusing him of being an extremist.

Mariam Veiszadeh, founder of the Islamophobia Register Australia, told The Sydney Morning Herald that such incidents had become increasingly more common in Australia, and that the "silence of our political leaders" has created an Islamophobic environment.

"It's about time that authorities and our government acknowledged that Islamophobia is a problem," said Veiszadeh.