Quote:Former state department official who made Islamophobic comments to vendor arrested for hate crime
Mohammed Hussein, 24, was back to work at the Q Halal Cart grill on Wednesday on the corner of Second Avenue and East 83rd Street, with lines of customers queuing for food in a sign of support.
Hussein has said he is still shaken by the encounters with Stuart Seldowitz, 64, who repeatedly harassed him with Islamophobic invective. Seldowitz called Hussein a “terrorist”, said 4,000 dead Palestinian children in Gaza “wasn’t enough”, called the Prophet Muhammad a “rapist” and told the vendor he’d be tortured “when they deport you back to Egypt”.
The vendor repeatedly asked Seldowitz to leave him alone in the clips, to which Seldowitz was filmed replying: “Why should I go. Why should I go? Tell me why I should go? I’m standing here. I am an American. It’s a free country.”
Seldowitz was arrested and charged at the 19th precinct on the Upper East Side on Wednesday with one count of aggravated harassment of race or religion and four counts of stalking as a hate crime.
The Guardian
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