Beating Up a Moroccan in Europe: What I Learned

GONZO

Beer and miscegenation are more than enough for a stoning

By Tyson James · August 4, 2026 · 8 min read

It happened in Nice on vacation with a French fling of mine named Amira. She was a pretty little thing and knew it. Also a bit of a whore, not in the sense that she slept with many men, but she had a cruel streak, stole things from restaurants, and enjoyed pissing people off. She couldn’t be tickled, but would tickle me in public. When restrained, she would yell out in French, “Please! Don’t hit me again!” and smile at concerned bystanders. These were red flags, but to a young man, pathological traits can come off as charming. Also, she had a boyfriend.

Anyways, everything was going great. We had dinner, drank, smoked, and wandered from bar to bar. Then we walked over to the beach around 1 AM. Almost everything closes down early in Nice; like most cities in Western Europe it’s a nursing home full of childless aunts waiting to die. The young people spend their time at the beach, which is littered with smooth, baseball-sized stones.

She stripped down to a bikini with a small blue scarf tied around her waist. We drank overpriced beers in plastic cups and strolled towards the water.

It was shaping up to be one of those perfect moments where everything comes together: the lapping of the waves, the ambient sound of laughter, topless women in the water, my girl beside me, and, best of all, a cold beer. But then I heard an awful sound.

“Alkool!”

I turned to see this skinny-fat Arab guy teetering back and forth on the rocks.

“Alkool,” he said again, pointing to my plastic cup.

I looked at him. He had crooked teeth, a soccer shirt that was one size too small, and his eyes were black and soulless. He was wasted.

“No, alkool,” I said.

“Halak-balak” he mumbled, under his breath.

And here I made a rather significant error—a “white-guy error,” if you will. I turned around to face the waves, assuming he would just move on. But move on he did not, and I heard him spout off a long series of halak-balak variations, which apparently means something close to “watch yourself.” But these quiet epithets seemed harmless and were drowned out by the gentle crashing of the sea.

Then Amira, who was Moroccan and knew the language, began to halak-balak back at him. He had been calling us motherfuckers, whores, donkeys, or whatever. And she had taken offense.

By the time I turned around, they were pointing and halak-balaking each other like crazy. I tried to step between them to de-escalate, but it was no use, and Amira was fired up. She wanted to give him a piece of her mind and moved around me to keep yelling at him. Then, out of nowhere, he reached for her. It was unclear whether he was trying to grab her ass or the light blue scarf that lay around her waist. She slapped it away and then proceeded to give him her beer: all at once, in his face.

He halak-balaked like crazy and raised his fist. That’s when I hit him.

The halak-balaks had now become a kind of manly half-screech as we traded blows and stumbled down the beach. It didn’t feel like I was defending my woman’s honor, more like grappling with a retarded kangaroo. When we clinched up, he made the crucial error of putting me in a headlock, which is a very bad place to be unless you’re bullying your younger brother (whom you outweigh by 80 pounds). I’d taken a few shots to the face, but I remember maintaining a stone cold resolve.

I felt lucid; focused. Time slowed down. My reactions quickened. My mind, now sharper, effortlessly carved those moments into memory. I remember thinking very clearly, I will pick him up and slam him on the rocks. It was not an instinctive thing; it was a deliberate thought.

I wrapped my hands around his legs, brought my hips in close, and lifted him up in the air. Then I brought him down hard onto the stony beach. He gave a kind of gasp as he hit the ground.

This was so effective that he stopped fighting altogether for a split second, at which point I climbed on top of him and began viciously punching him in the face. At this point, like in the movies, he made little to no effort to defend himself. Perhaps he was stunned after being slammed, perhaps he was simply too slammed with alkool to understand how to block, perhaps he assumed whites just don’t fight back. Whatever the cause, his head swung left and right after each blow, and then he would turn again to face me, silent except for his fiery halak-balak eyes.

I came down hard with an elbow across the right side of his face, which made a hollow knocking sound, like a clicking tongue. Another bizarre return to center, but with eyes now purged of their fire. I almost felt bad for the guy.

A crowd had gathered, which scared me more than the actual fight. The only thing worse than having to fight a drunk Arab in Southern France is having to fight two or three drunk Arabs in Southern France. I stood up. He rolled onto all fours, and I held him down for a bit while watching to see if anyone else might jump in to attack me. They didn’t. I stepped back.

He rose slowly to his feet, and I, glowing with white honor, helped him up, half expecting to shake his hand. It was a good fight, I thought. He was acting like an idiot, the woman was out of line, we hashed it out. All good. To my surprise, he did not humbly accept defeat. Instead, he began again with the halak-balaks. Then he walked away and picked up one of the baseball-sized beach rocks.

Had I known that this would potentially be a fight to the death, I would have kneed him in the teeth or stepped on his nuts. We stood there for what must have been a few seconds, but my racing mind stretched it into minutes. I recall being filled not so much with fear as with frustration: how could someone possibly be so ungrateful? Strange as it is to say, I felt betrayed. We were men with a code, were we not? He’d broken it.

He reverted to his default setting and began trying to stone me. Rock after rock went skidding across the beach as I jumped around like a kid playing dodgeball. His drunkenness and minor head trauma had negatively affected his aim, but I felt like an idiot leaping around and covering my face with my hands. A modern dance performance for the French crowd, complete with plenty of sociopolitical allegory. He finally got tired, and wandered off to sit on a log stage right, consoled by a white bystander.

A few Frenchmen asked me if I was okay, and I thanked them. But there was no time to chat. As soon as I saw he was far enough away, I took Amira by the arm and made for the Airbnb. I kept checking to see if we were being followed, but my enemy was now peacefully bothering other people for “alkool.”

More than anything, I was confused. After refusing his initial request, I had listened to an argument in a language I couldn’t understand, defended the honor of a woman who had none, and danced around the beach dodging rocks. As Amira and I walked hand in hand through a maze of intersecting alleys, she stayed silent. She offered no explanation for what had occurred. Was it because I didn’t give him beer? Was he drunkenly enforcing an Islamic no alcohol policy? Was it her and I together? The touchpoints of Western leisure, alcohol, bikinis, experimental cross-racial premarital sex—are precisely the things that trigger the Muslim the most. Beer and miscegenation are, I supposed, more than enough for a stoning. We passed a McDonald’s where another group of young Arab men were sitting. They catcalled her.

As guys like him pour over the border into Ceuta, each nation believes sincerely that it will transform the other into itself. I still wonder if I should have given him a sip.