The man who orchestrated a vile Islamophobic rant in New York City has been arrested at his home.
Stuart Seldowitz, who worked as a former official in the Barack Obama government, called an Egyptian street vendor a terrorist and said the deaths of 4,000 Palestinian children “wasn’t enough” in the verbal attack, which has been widely shared on social media.
Responding to the incident, New York Police said a 24-year-old man had complained he had been approached “multiple times” by a person making “anti-Islamic statements” that caused him “to feel afraid and annoyed”.
Seldowitz told local television news before his detention on Wednesday that the video posted on social media failed to tell the whole story and that he became upset after the man expressed sympathies for the Palestinian group Hamas – although none of the videos shows the vendor mentioning the group that rules Gaza.
“The comments that went beyond him [the vendor], and could be interpreted as attacks on Muslims and Arab-Americans and so on, were probably not appropriate,” he told WNBC television. “The comments I made calling him out for his support of terrorism – those I think were appropriate.”
After Seldowitz’s actions went viral, New Yorkers rallied to support the vendor, lining up to buy chicken and rice at the food cart in Manhattan’s Upper East Side neighbourhood on Tuesday.
The Street Vendor Project, which works with the thousands of food carts in New York, described a “moving scene” with New Yorkers from “all walks of life coming together” and “taking a stand against anti-Muslim hate”.
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