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.
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 would 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.
Islam Moustafa, the cart’s co-owner, told ABC News: “I don’t sleep well hearing those kinds of harsh comments regarding the Prophet Muhammad and asking the young kid if he raped his daughter and all that.”
Construction manager Zak Ettamymy told ABC he had witnessed a confrontation he described as “harassment”. Seldowitz, he said, “had a lot of hatred. 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.’”
After the videos were shared online and Seldowitz was publicly identified, the political lobbying firm he had consulted with said it had cut ties with him, and offered to represent Hussein. “I’ll represent the food vendor pro bono if he wants to bring a lawsuit,” Gotham Government Relations’ president, David Schwartz, said.
Seldowitz’s comments have been widely denounced by city and state political leaders. The mayor, Eric Adams, posted on X: “Islamophobia is hate. Plain and simple. This vile, disrespectful rhetoric has no home in our city. We reject it – and we’re glad to see we’re not alone.”
New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, called the encounters captured on video “hateful, disgusting and unacceptable. Vile rhetoric like this has no place in New York, and we condemn it in the strongest of terms.”
The Daily Beast reported that it had spoken with Seldowitz, who claimed the vendor had instigated the incidents by expressing support for Hamas, arguing “there should be some comment back to someone who is endorsing terrorism and the killing of innocent civilians”.
In a separate conversation with ABC News, Seldowitz admitted he overreacted and regrets what he said, while simultaneously claiming he had not tried to intimidate Hussein.
