A former advisor to the government of former US President Barack Obama (2009-2017) was arrested this Wednesday after being recorded ridiculing a street vendor of Egyptian origin in New York with Islamophobic comments. Stuart Seldowitz, the name of the arrested person, is accused of three counts of harassment – one of them as a hate crime. with aggravated harassment in relation to a series of anti-Islamic statements, as reported this Wednesday by the New York Police Department.

Seldowitz (64 years old) had been filmed by an In the images you can see how the former National Security Advisor sardonically asked the Muslim worker if he had raped his daughter “like Muhammad”, to which he politely responded that he should leave, while Seldowitz continued to intimidate him and even called him a “terrorist.”

“It’s not my fault that you pray to a criminal (…) You support the killing of small children (…) You kill children, not me (…) If we kill 4,000 Palestinian children, you know what? It was not enough“, continued the former official, rebuking the seller because “he had no right to be on the sidewalk.”

Seldowitz later gave an interview to NBC News in which he justified his behavior by claiming that The incident had started with an “innocent” conversation in which the merchant revealed that he supported the attack by the Islamist group Hamas on Israel, on October 7, because “everything was for Palestine.”

The former advisor to the Obama Administration served as president of the International Affairs division at the Gotham Government Relations law firm, which clarified this Wednesday that They have already broken their ties with the accused. “The video of his actions is vile, racist and does not comply with the dignity of the standards that we practice in our company,” they settled from Gotham Government Relations.