Abdelaziz, 24, who is the legislative and government affairs director at the Florida chapter of the Council for American-Islamic Relations, says she was already feeling defeated when she stepped into an elevator inside the Florida House of Representatives building.
She described what happened next in a post on Facebook.
"A Representative that should damn well know better walked into the elevator and jokingly hesitated while looking at me, 'Oh, is it safe to ride the elevator with you,'" Abdelaziz wrote. "Everyone laughed. Every single one of them laughed (Democrat, Republican, white, black, old, young) as I was belittled with a wildly inappropriate remark that because I'm a Muslim this Representative should be afraid to ride in an elevator with me. It's not funny. It hurts."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/florida-representative-anti-muslim-comment_us_56cf8540e4b0871f60eacdf2
"I'm a really tough person," Abdelaziz told HuffPost. "I'm a tough girl, but I started crying. I felt like I had no power at all. I felt like I had no dignity."
"They all literally know me," she said of the legislators in the elevator. "They know why he made that remark. I'm not a stranger. They know who I am. I was literally just in a meeting with them."
