I’m a generation and a half removed from New York City — my father left Brooklyn in 1932 to go off to college and never moved back — but I couldn’t be prouder of the way New Yorkers reacted Thanksgiving week to an Islamophobic hate crime on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
The story had both international and intensely local angles. The Upper East Side is an upscale, WASPy neighborhood with “a large and affluent Jewish population estimated at 56,000.” (The Jewish Telegraph Agency once rated it “the most affluent Jewish community in the world.”) And it was picked up worldwide, since the incident was a reaction to the ongoing Israeli war in Gaza. But I especially liked the local coverage by community news outlets I’d never heard of before, most of them online.
In fact, the local coverage was more insightful — as so often happens — than the national media. And that’s reassuring. The industry is changing, but local news isn’t. And, I believe, can’t.
As a lifelong Democrat, I also have to say I’m ashamed to admit that it involved a former national security adviser to President Obama who should have known better. Instead, he was charged with repeatedly harassing a halal street food vendor, an angle that made headlines all over the world.
Stuart Seldowitz, 64, who served as deputy director of the US State Department’s Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs under President Bush Jr. and as Obama’s acting director for the National Security Council South Asia Directorate, was charged with aggravated harassment, hate crime stalking, stalking causing fear, and stalking at a place of employment, police said. He is free on his own recognizance pending trial.
Seldowitz was videoed harassing employees of the food cart with personal insults (“ignorant” and “terrorist,” among others); slurs on the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran; and invective including, “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, you know what? It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough.” He later told selected New York media he “became upset after [a food cart employee] expressed sympathies for the Palestinian group Hamas,” according to a summary in Al Jazeera. The employee denied Seldowitz’ allegation, and no video has emerged to support it.
But the incident and the attendant publicity “only brought people together,” as a reporter for local CBS News New York put it, in spite of tension over the ongoing war in Israel and the Gaza strip. That local angle didn’t make the national and international press, although The Guardian picked up on a local TV station’s coverage in a story headlined “Outpouring of support for street vendor targeted in Islamophobic encounter.” The London newspaper reported:
The street vendor in Manhattan who was racially harangued about the Gaza conflict woke to huge lines of well-wishing customers on Wednesday as the former state department official who was filmed berating him was arrested and charged with racial harassment and stalking as a 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 queueing for food in a sign of support. [Link in the original.]
Customers brought cakes and flowers, and filled out 3×5 cards with messages like “NYC DOESN’T SUPPORT HATE (but we do love a great falafel).” An organization called the Street Vendor Project, that supports vendors with training and advocacy, said it was a “moving scene as New Yorkers from all walks of life [came] together to support Mohamed, Sam and their coworkers on 83rd [Street] & 2nd Ave., taking a stand against anti-Muslim hate.” A neighbor brought a folding table, which turned the food cart into a gathering place.
“We have mostly Jewish customers in this building, and this building,” employee Bahaa Hassan told the CBS News New York reporter, pointing down 2nd Avenue. Gesturing in the direction of a young woman next to the folding table, he said, “and this lady made cupcakes for us last night.” Added Upper East Side resident Stephanie Merabet, who was also interviewed on camera, “They’re really wonderful people, and they care about the community they’re in, and they certainly don’t deserve this.”
The Gothamist, an online local news outlet affiliated with WNYC public radio, interviewed the neighbor who supplied the folding table:
Pamela Wyznitzer, 38, who lives in the building right in front of the cart, set up a table with chairs for people to “break bread” and come together in solidarity with Hussein, Nawar, and the other men behind the cart.
“These men are our friends. They look out for me, I look out for them, especially in the heightened times in the past few months,” Wyznitzer said. “I’m a very proud Jewish woman. They are wonderful Egyptian men … hate has no place on our street corners.”
LLN NYC (Loudlabs News NYC), an online media company that features “Breaking News of Crimes Fires & Crashes” in the city, reported the story like this:
Residents in the Upper East Side are supporting a Halal Cart Vendor on East 83rd St and 2nd Ave with flowers, letters of support and cakes after a viral video showing ex Obama Aide Stuart Seldowitz this week was released in which the irate man was using anti Muslim and anti Arab slurs against one of the workers at the cart. Seldowitz was taken into custody Wednesday night as per an hate crime investigation. Residents were positive upon hearing news of his arrest.
Nour Halit, who shares an Egyptian heritage with the vendors, was interviewed at length by a LLY NYC reporter. She said she drove from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side (nearly the length of Manhattan) “just to show my homeboys some love and support.” She said the climate of opinion has been difficult for Muslims and Arabs since the current war began in October:
So we are here to show them that they’re not alone in this and that they have support. New York City should be safer for Arabs and Muslims and everything after October 7th has been feeling like 9/11 or maybe even worse. It’s becoming so dangerous to exist as an Arab or Muslim person, and the most vulnerable are being attacked and targeted right now. So, yeah, we don’t want them to feel alone. We’re here to show solidarity.
She added that Seldowitz obviously wanted to provoke an incident and “knew what kind of things he was poking,” especially with his slurs on Islam and threatening to have the vendor deported; she said he deserves credit for not responding:
All of our friends were wondering why he didn’t just hold up the bottle of ketchup and squeeze it out in [Seldowitz’] face. That’s how we all wanted to react. [But] they’re strong people.
One eyewitness spoke to a reporter for WABC-TV. “He had a lot of hatred,” said Zak Ettamymy, a construction manager working nearby. “He was saying a lot of mean things and I said, ‘Listen, this is not a place or time for this. You probably need to walk away from this gentleman and let him work.'”
Hell Gate, a website that identifies itself as a “new outlet owned and run by journalists covering New York City, with a mixture of blog posts, features, columns, and investigations,” ran an article that embedded the videos, which were shared to X (formerly Twitter) by a grad student at Columbia School of Social Work. The unsigned article left no doubt where Hell Gate stood:
Based on his comments, it appears that Seldowitz thinks of himself as a man engaging in a reasonable debate. He claimed in an interview that he was merely reacting to the vendor allegedly telling him that he supported Hamas. Seldowitz also insisted that he isn’t Islamophobic and chalked the venomous, hateful nature of his comments up to mere circumstance: “I regret the whole thing happened and I’m sorry. But you know, in the heat of the moment, I said things that probably I shouldn’t have said.”
But Seldowitz isn’t a man participating in a spirited round of discourse. He is the ugly thing that crawls out into the sun when it gets the idea—maybe from a president who spent weeks resisting calls for a ceasefire in the face of 11,000 Palestinian deaths, or a mayor who says migrants “will destroy New York City,” or a police force notorious for baselessly surveilling Muslims, or neighbors [at 2nd and 78th Street] hanging signs that say “flat Gaza NOW! Kill them all!“—that it’s finally safe to do so. [Links in the original.]
Even more unequivocal was a podcast by Jesse Dollemore and Brittany Page, posted to YouTube under the headline “CRAZED BIGOT Stuart Seldowitz Attacks Food Cart Vendor in NYC – NOW HE REGRETS IT!!!”
Gotham Government Relations, a lobbying firm based in Manhattan that named Seldowitz its foreign affairs chair last year, had a more measured reaction. City & State New York, a trade magazine that covers politics and government, reported:
“Gotham Government Relations has ended all affiliation with Stuart Seldowitz,” the lobbying firm announced in a statement. “The video of his actions is vile, racist and beneath the dignity of the standards we practice at our firm.”
David Schwartz, the founder and president of Gotham Government Relations, told City & State that Seldowitz was never an employee of Gotham Government Relations, just an affiliate. “By the way, I’ll represent the food vendor pro bono if he wants to bring a lawsuit against Stuart Seldowitz,” Schwartz said. “I’m absolutely outraged by this video.” [Links in the original.]
A fine mixture of international and local journalism appeared a few days later in The Guardian.
Moustafa Bayoumi, a columnist for the London newspaper’s online US edition, made the connection — common in the Middle East — between US foreign policy and Seldowitz’ “smug and self-satisfied stereotyping that too often stands in for knowledge of other people and societies.” (He noted that in the videos Seldowitz “tries several times but can’t even pronounce the word “hadith” correctly.
Hadith is the term for oral tradition preserving sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, roughly equivalent to the Christian gospels and desert fathers and mothers, something a former diplomat in charge of Israeli-Palestinian relations might be expected to be more familiar with. That he isn’t, and harbors an obvious bias againt Muslims, raises obvious questions about American policy toward the Middle East.
But to Bayoumi, an English professor at CUNY’s Brooklyn College who knows the city, that wasn’t the main point:
Nothing says New York City like its street food vendors. Known the world over for offering delicious and carb-heavy food at affordable prices, these vendors often throw in a dash of charming conversation, free with purchase. It’s a winning combination, which explains why everyone in New York City loves their local halal food cart guy. Everyone, that is, except the racists.
And in the juxtaposition of the ex-diplomat and the street vendors, Bayoumi finds hope:
Seldowitz’s behavior shows us less about who works in American foreign policy and more about what an individual and more naked manifestation of American foreign policy would look like – and it looks like a bully, a warmonger and a racist, delivered with a slightly menacing and self-satisfied smile.
On the other hand, the work ethic, the need to survive, the depths of humility and the basic human dignity shown by these vendors in the videos reminds me also of the nurses, doctors, journalists and everyday citizens of Gaza and their uncommon grace in the face of slaughter. It’s self-evident who the heroes are. Nothing could be clearer.
A somewhat personal footnote: I’ve always liked New York City, ever since I visited relatives there as a little boy. It was there that I first saw very much of people who weren’t just like me, and I was endlessly fascinated by what I would come to understand in later years as diversity. Our visit to the United Nations building stands out in my memory to this day — I grew u in the 1950s when people remembered the lessons of World War II and still believed in collective security — but I think most of all I was blown away by little things like deli food (still unavailable down South in the 50s), ethnic restaurants and hearing occasional snatches of foreign languages on the subway.
We’d take the Jamaica Avenue El back to my cousins’ home in Queens, and I was fascinated by the variety of storefronts. People’s last names, too; back home, it seemed like everybody in the county was named Sharp, Wallace or Stooksbury. Visiting family up north, I learned to distinguish between German, Italian, Polish and, or course, Norwegian names. It was all endlessly fascinating.
Dad’s family started out in Brooklyn, where my grandfather, or bestefar, had been a pastor in the old Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran synod. He had a church in Bay Ridge, at 63rd Street and Fourth Avenue. That part of Brooklyn was heavily Norwegian in his day, the 1920s and 30s. A few blocks over, Eighth Avenue was nicknamed Lapskaus Boulevard, after a Norwegian beef (often, in the old country, mutton) stew. So I think of Brooklyn as my ancestral home.
Like so many other inner-city neighborhoods, Bay Ridge has changed over the years. Now it’s multiethnic, with Arab, Irish, Italian and Greek residents predominating. Bestefar’s church at 63rd and Fourth is now occupied by a Chinese congregation. There were still a few Norwegian storefronts on Fourth Ave., but I loved the variety, the mix of cultures, the last time I visited.
Bottom line: It’s been several years now since I’ve been in New York City, but I’ve always, always had a soft spot in my heart for it, especially the outer boroughs. And I love the diversity. (I feel the same way about Chicago, especially the North Side, which reminds me so much of Brooklyn and Queens.) That’s where I first learned to be fascinated with people who were different from me, and that’s why I liked that story about the ugliness at that halal food court on the Upper East Side so much.
Links and Citations
Moustafa Bayoumi, “Stuart Seldowitz’s hateful behavior is US foreign policy unmasked,” The Guardian, Nov. 28, 2023 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/28/stuart-seldowitz-islamophobia-us-diplomat.
Jesse Dollemore and Brittany Page, “CRAZED BIGOT Stuart Seldowitz Attacks Food Cart Vendor in NYC – NOW HE REGRETS IT!!!,” I Doubt It [podcast], Nov. 23, 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM1yLQeN97I&t=315s.
“Former State Department Official Terrorizes Food Truck Vendor,” Hell Gate, Nov. 22, 2023 https://hellgatenyc.com/stuart-seldowitz-food-truck-islamophobia.
Biranit Goren, “Neighborhood: Upper East Side,” Jewish Telegraph Agency, Oct. 23, 2012 https://www.jta.org/2012/10/23/ny/neighborhood-upper-east-side
Edward Helmore, “Outpouring of support for street vendor targeted in Islamophobic encounter,” The Guardian, Nov. 23, 2023 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/23/new-york-islamophobic-comments-street-vendor-hate-crime
Jose Pagliery, “Islamophobic Ex-Obama Adviser Freed by Judge on Thanksgiving,” Daily Beast, Nov. 23, 2023 https://www.thedailybeast.com/islamophobic-ex-obama-adviser-stuart-seldowitz-freed-by-judge-on-thanksgiving.
Julian Roberts-Grmela, “Gotham Government Relations cuts ties with former Obama administration official caught harassing halal cart vendor,” City & State New York, Nov. 21, 2023 https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2023/11/gotham-government-relations-cuts-ties-former-obama-administration-official-caught-harassing-halal-cart-vendor/392235/.
Justin Rorlich, “Food Vendor Harassed by Former Obama Adviser Becomes NYC Celebrity,” Daily Beast, Nov. 22, 2023 https://www.thedailybeast.com/halal-food-vendor-harassed-by-former-obama-official-stuart-seldowitz-turns-nyc-celebrity.
Joe Torres, “Former Obama adviser in custody, faces hate crime charges after halal cart confrontation,” Eyewitness News WABC-TV, Nov. 22, 2023 https://abc7ny.com/halal-cart-confrontation-former-obama-adviser-harassment/14092785/.
Wikipedia articles on Bay Ridge Brooklyn; BMT Jamaica Line; Eighth Avenue (Brooklyn), hadith, halal and Upper East Side.
[Published Nov. 29, 2023]
Ordinary Time 