Ex-state department official ordered to conduct bias training after anti-Muslim tirade
A former State Department employee who was charged with a hate crime in November after harassing a halal food vendor in Manhattan and calling him a “terrorist” could be fired if he completes a 26-week anti-bias course and meets other requirements. according to prosecutors.
On Wednesday, prosecutors in Manhattan said that if the man, Stuart Seldowitz, completed the program through the organization Queens Counseling for Change, had no new arrests and did not violate a protective order, they would ask that his charges be dropped. Prosecutors say Mr. Seldowitz agreed.
Mr. Seldowitz, 65, has no other criminal history, and prosecutors regularly refer people who have committed nonviolent hate crimes for such training. The Manhattan district attorney's office has sent 10 cases to the Queens organization in recent years, according to a spokeswoman.
Afaf Nasher, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations of New York, said in a statement Thursday that “light sentences are a slap in the face to the victims.”
“Seldowitz's vicious verbal abuse and intimidation against an innocent street vendor was captured on video for all to see,” Ms. Nasher said. “The sweetheart deal he got from the Manhattan District Attorney's office is a shameful affront to our justice system and completely inappropriate for his actions.”
Mr. Seldowitz's attorney, Scott Bookstein, declined to comment Thursday.
Video recordings of the meetings between Mr. Seldowitz and the seller spread online as tensions between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups increased after the start of the war between Israel and Hamas on October 7. In New York, where demonstrations over the conflict have become an almost daily occurrence, these tensions have been particularly high.
The number of hate crimes recorded in the city in October was more than double that of the previous October. Anti-Semitic incidents have more than tripled. Last year through mid-December, the Manhattan district attorney's office initiated 111 hate crime cases, compared with 92 in 2022 and 81 in 2021, a spokeswoman said.
The charges against Mr. Seldowitz were filed after the seller, identified by police as a 24-year-old man, told officers that he had been approached by another man who made Islamophobic statements several times while at the Upper East Side worked. , which made him feel “scared or irritated.”
In several videos, Mr. Seldowitz can be seen taking pictures of the seller, berating him and telling him, “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian children, you know what? It wasn't enough.” Mr. Seldowitz also threatens to send photos of the seller to “friends in immigration.”
In one clip, he calls the seller “ignorant” and admonishes him for not speaking English, before continuing to make mocking comments about Islam's founder, the Prophet Mohammed.
Mr. Seldowitz had a decades-long government career in both Democratic and Republican administrations, including as acting director of the National Security Council's South Asia Directorate and a position in the State Department's Bureau of Israeli and Palestinian Affairs.
Gotham Government Relations, a lobbying firm in Manhattan, announced in 2022 that Mr. Seldowitz was the new chairman of Foreign Affairs. The announcement was later removed from the company's website. David Schwartz, the company's president, said in November that Mr. Seldowitz was never an employee of Gotham Government Relations and — as far as he knew — was not registered as a lobbyist for the company.
Mr. Seldowitz told The New York Times in an interview in November that he “became quite upset” after the seller expressed support for Hamas. No such claims by the seller were captured in the videos that were immediately made public.
“I said things to him that I probably regret in retrospect, that I do regret,” he said. “Instead of focusing on him and what he was saying, I started insulting his religion and so on.”