NEW YORK - At a court appearance on Wednesday,
Stuart Seldowitz, 65, a
former State Department employee charged with a hate crime in
November after he harassed a halal food vendor in Manhattan, was granted a
deal to drop his charges.
اضافة اعلان
Manhattan prosecutors said that if Seldowitz completed a 26-week anti-bias
course through the organization
Queens Counseling for Change (QCFC), had no new
arrests, and did not violate a protective order, they would drop his charges.
Seldowitz agreed, the New York Times (NYT) reported.
Seldowitz was arrested and charged with a hate crime after harassing a halal
food vendor, calling him a “terrorist.” Multiple videos that went viral on
social media documented him doing so on more than one occasion, returning to
harass the same street vendor numerous times.
In the videos, Seldowitz can be seen taking pictures of the vendor, berating
him, and telling him, “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, you know what? It
was not enough.” Seldowitz also threatened to send pictures of the vendor to
“friends in immigration.”
In one clip, he calls the vendor “ignorant” and scolds him for not speaking
English before continuing to make insulting and blasphemous comments about
Prophet Muhammad.
Seldowitz had a decades-long government career in both Democratic and
Republican administrations, including as acting director for the National
Security Council’s South Asia Directorate and a post in the State Department’s
Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs.
Afaf Nasher, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic
Relations of New York (CAIR-NY), said in a statement on Thursday that “light
punishments are a slap in the face to the victims.”
“Seldowitz’s vile verbal abuse and harassment targeting an innocent street
vendor were caught on video for all to see,” said Nasher. “The sweetheart deal
he received from the Manhattan D.A.’s office is a shameful affront to our
justice system and wholly unfitting of his actions.”
The US saw a sharp increase in Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in the past
few months after October 7, 2023. The state government has recorded over 2,000
anti-Semitic incidents nationwide, according to CBS News, stating that
anti-Semitic incidents have more than tripled. And while the US government
claims to see a spike in Islamophobia, it has not logged statistics and data
similar to that of anti-Semitism.
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