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.
Enter Stuart Seldowitz. Since 7 November, Stuart Seldowitz has been harassing workers at his local halal cart on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, according to reports. The police, who initially did nothing about Seldowitz’s harassment, finally arrested him on 22 November; he has been charged with aggravated harassment and several counts of stalking. Harassment of any sort is unacceptable, but Seldowitz’s behavior is particularly vulgar and disgusting. And it’s racist to the core.
The vendors made videos of these unsolicited encounters with Seldowitz that have since gone viral. In one video, Seldowitz suddenly asks the vendor, “Do you rape your daughter, like Mohammed did?” The man repeatedly and politely asks Seldowitz to leave and, not wanting to engage with a belligerent bigot, tells Seldowitz he doesn’t speak English. “You don’t speak English?” Seldowitz replies. “That’s why you’re selling food in a food cart. Because you’re ignorant.”
In another video, Seldowitz blurts out, “It’s not my fault that you pray to a criminal.” He badgers the vendors about their immigration status (which, as one vendor rightly responds, is none of his business), describes how the Egyptian secret police will torture both the vendor’s father in Egypt and the vendor, after he’s deported to Egypt, and asks a vendor what he thinks of “people who use the Qur’an as a toilet. Does it bother you?” Then he laughs.
Such behavior would indicate an awful, miserable human being, but it gets even worse. After an exchange with a vendor about children being killed, Seldowitz then tells the vendor, “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, you know what? It wasn’t enough.” (Note the “we”.)
The takeaway of Seldowitz’s hateful behavior is not that he reveals himself to be a bigot. That fact is painfully obvious. It’s also not that his racism is on display at a moment when Islamophobia and antisemitism are on the rise globally, though the racism expressed by Seldowitz in these videos does show how vigilant we must be in defeating such prejudice today. The real takeaway of Seldowitz’s hectoring and vile behavior lies with his former career.
Stuart Seldowitz, it turns out, is a former diplomat with the US government. A former state department employee and national security council official, Seldowitz worked under five different administrations, according to this press release by his (now former) employer, Gotham Government Relations. From 1999 to 2003, he worked in the state department’s office of Israel and Palestinian affairs, and during the Obama administration he was acting director for the national security council south Asia directorate. He is also said to be a three-time winner of the state department’s “superior honor award”.
What does it say about the US government and its foreign policy that a three-time winner of a “superior honor award” and a man who worked on the Israel-Palestine issue can harass and harangue a simple food cart vendor because of the vendor’s religion and ethnicity? It’s abundantly clear from the videos that these vendors, in the best of all American traditions, are trying to make a buck and get ahead. “You want to buy something?” one asks Seldowitz, frustratedly and pointedly. “I won’t give you a penny of my money,” Seldowitz responds.
When people harbor such racist and Islamophobic views, and also act on those views, and have already been rewarded, multiple times over, with positions of influence and accolades for their leadership in multiple administrations, you really have to wonder who is running our government. Why should such people, ideologues with clearly demonstrated bias, be instrumental in setting the foreign policy agenda of the US in the first place?
No wonder American foreign policy can count so many failures over the decades, from the disastrous invasion of Iraq to the present carnage in Gaza. A recent poll by Reuters found that almost 70% of Americans agreed with the statement “Israel should call a ceasefire and try to negotiate”. Meanwhile, the US government, from the White House on down, meets the idea of a ceasefire, of preserving life, with heartless and imperial contempt for the will of its own people, let alone the children of Gaza.
In fact, what we are watching in these videos is not merely the problem, as significant as it is, that racists and Islamophobes were (or are) employed in the American foreign policy establishment. What we are really seeing, in microcosm, is a walking and talking version of unmasked American foreign policy.
We have one party flexing its considerable power to intimidate a much more vulnerable party. (“Do you have a permit?” Seldowitz asks. “Because I actually know the guy who owns all these food carts.”) We witness all the smug and self-satisfied stereotyping that too often stands in for knowledge of other people and societies (Seldowitz tries several times but can’t even pronounce the word “hadith” correctly). We see the quick move to police and patrol the world (Seldowitz threatens to send a photo of one vendor “to my friends in immigration”). And we hear, after the fact, so many bad excuses for terrible behavior. “I have many people who are Muslims and Arabs and so on,” Seldowitz told the New York Times, “who know me very well and who know that I’m not prejudiced against them.”
I’m glad he has them, and so on.
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.
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and a Guardian US columnist
