Tahera Ahmad, aged 31, was denied an unopened can of diet coke aboard her United Airlines flight from Chicago to Washington just after an unopened can was handed to another passenger. Ahmad, director of interfaith engagement and associate chaplain at Northwestern University,  was told that the refusal to hand her a coke was so that she wouldn’t “use it as a weapon.”

Support poured in for Tahera soon after the incident, posting under the Twitter hashtag #unitedfortahera