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Chicago: Man Asks Cabbie If He Is Muslim Before Attacking Him

John_Alletto_Cab_Driver_Hate_Crime

A cab driver was attacked in Chicago by a pedestrian in what has been deemed a hate crime. The lawyer is using the mental health defense and the fact that his client was intoxicated as an excuse to say his behavior was an “anomaly.”

via. DNA Info

A suburban man is charged with a hate crime after he walked up to a Chicago cab driver, asked him if he was Muslim and then beat him when he responded “yes,” prosecutors said.

The driver was stopped at a red light near Division and Larrabee streets about 3 a.m. Feb. 21 when 37-year-old John Alletto walked up, opened the driver’s door “and asked if he was Muslim,” prosecutors said.

The 42-year-old driver replied, “yes,” and Alletto began to punch the man in his head, neck and body, Assistant State’s Attorney Lorraine Scaduto said during a bond hearing Wednesday.

At that point, the driver’s passenger got out of the cab, prosecutors said.

When a witness approached, Alletto yelled out that the driver was Muslim, according to Scaduto. The witness said it was racist to attack a Muslim and called Alletto “a racist,” Scaduto said.

Alletto then turned toward the witness, and the two began to fight, according to prosecutors.

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    • Reynardine

      As half a Bulgarian and half a linguist, I can say that standard Bulgarian and standard Macedonian are distinct languages, but — as with Russian and Ukrainian — there is a dialect continuum between them, as there is between Serb, Croat, and Bosnian. Slovene is one of the more ancient languages in this group, and probably has more features in common with the ancestral South Slav. Certain archaic dialects in Slovenia shared some features in common with similarly archaic dialects in Slovakia, which indicates that there was once a language continuum that was broken by the intrusion of the Magyars and the expansion of Romanian dialects. It must have been long ago, as Polish tradition speaks of eponymous brothers Lech, Czech, and Rus, but the fourth, South Slavic, brother is missing.

    • Friend of Bosnia

      I wonder too. As far as I know, Slovene, Macedonian and Bulgarian are distinct languages (Bulgarians wouldn’t agree on the two latter) and they are distinct from Serb/Bosnian/Croat. Now Serb (as spoken in Serbia proper), Bosnian and Croat languagess are different dialects of the same language. Bosnian and Croat have a similar pronunciation, but it’s different from Serb. In Bosnia-Herzegovina the language is the same for all three groups, but Serbs try to introduce the Serbian dialect, and Croats the Croation dialect (not with much succeess). Of the Bosniaks they say they use more loan-words introduced from Arabic and Turkish. Yet, when I use such Turkish loan-words, they ask me “why do you talk like a Serb?” It’s really such a mess…

      .

    • Reynardine

      I understood South Slav to be a language group that included Slovene, Macedonian, and Bulgarian. What do they call us now?

    • Reynardine

      He has the same clock-round face with big, fat jowls you find in Dominionist ministers and guys who swagger open-carry through Kroger’s.

    • Friend of Bosnia

      At least I can promise you that if I overhear someone talking in Southern Slav (they used to call it Serbo-Croat but you can’t call it that any longer) I will not ask him if he’s a Serb (a Bosnian Serb that is, because in BiH they all talk the same; not so in Serbia proper, there they have their own dialect, and it is easy to distinguish). And I will not punch him in the nose. As long as they behave respectfully to me, I will behave respectfully to them. I will not seek a confrontation. Should however someone seek a confrontation with me, I will defend myself with all I have at my disposal.

    • mindy1

      FFS, what is wrong with people?!?!?!?!

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