A former adviser to ex-US President Barack Obama has been arrested after being captured on video spewing Islamophobic language at a halal food vendor in New York City and saying the death of 4,000 Palestinian children in Gaza “wasn’t enough”.
Stuart Seldowitz, 64, who previously served as a deputy director of the US State Department’s Office of Israel and Palestinian affairs, was arrested by the New York Police Department (NYPD) on preliminary charges of hate crime, stalking, and aggravated harassment.
After the video went viral, the man was identified as a high-ranking advisor to the Obama Administration, making the whole situation all the more appalling.
The 24-year-old vendor told the NYPD that Seldowitz had been harassing him for weeks. In fact, other videos surfaced of Seldowitz calling the vendor a “terrorist”, taunting him about his citizenship status, and accusing him of supporting Hamas.
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After the situation became viral, another video was posted to X of a Jewish customer giving one of the workers at the Halal food truck a birthday cake.
This attack comes amid an escalation of tensions in the Israel-Palestine conflict which has further translated into an increase of xenophobia and vicious discriminatory attacks amongst the general public.
It has also been revealed that the vendor was not the only victim of Seldowitz’s verbal attacks. Russia’s UN ambassador reported that Seldowitz viciously harassed him, his staff, and his pet dog for over a year.
These allegations were accompanied by another video of Seldowitz calling Russian UN officials “whores”.
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