A former senior US official who served under President Barack Obama has sparked outrage after he was filmed hurling Islamophobic insults and threats at a halal food vendor in New York.
Stuart Seldowitz, who was the deputy director of the State Department’s Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs, told the vendor that more Palestinian children should die and mocked his religion and language.
“If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, it wasn’t enough,” Seldowitz said calmly in one video posted on the social media platform X.
He also mocked the vendor’s religion, saying derogatory things about Prophet Muhammad “Your prophet is a pedophile” and “Your prophet is a rapist”.
Seldowitz also threatened to use his government connections with the Egyptian secret police, known as the Mukhabarat, and threatened to have the vendor’s parents tortured and deported.
“The Mukhabarat in Egypt will get your parents. Does your father like his fingernails? They’ll take them out one by one,” Seldowitz said with a smile.
The vendor, who appeared to be of Egyptian origin, repeatedly asked him to leave and said he did not speak English.
Seldowitz responded by saying that the vendor was “ignorant” and that he should learn English before he gets deported.
Seldowitz, who also served on the National Security Council’s South Asia Directorate and later became a foreign affairs chair at a lobbying firm, admitted in an interview with The New York Times that he regretted his words.
He claimed that he got angry after the vendor expressed support for Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza, although none of the videos show the vendor mentioning anything about the group nor politcs.
Seldowitz insisted that he was not Islamophobic and that he had many Muslim and Arab colleagues who could vouch for him.
His former employer, Gotham Government Relations, said it had cut all ties with him and removed his profile from their website.
The firm’s CEO, David Schwartz, said he was “personally outraged and offended by” Seldowitz’s “vile” language and offered to legally represent the food vendor pro bono.
The incident comes amid rising tensions over the 47-day war in Gaza, which has killed at least 14,100 Palestinians, more than a third of them children, according to health officials.
