US state department official Stuart Seldowitz arrested and sacked for race-baiting food vendor
Anna Chen – 23 November 2023
When Stuart Seldowitz launched his Islamophobic rant at a New York food truck vendor, he discovered the hard way that his Masters of the Universe privileges had been rescinded.
Gloating grotesquely, “We killed 4,000 kids, it wasn’t enough. We should have killed more”, about the raging carnage in Gaza, Seldowitz hadn’t reckoned on the public’s collective sense of injustice making the vendor’s video go viral. If he had been an average jerk off the street, his hate-fuelled tirade would have been bad enough. The revelation that this oleaginous sophisticate had been deputy director of the US State Department’s Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs, provides a major insight into the perverse attitudes in charge.
It wasn’t even the first time he’d harassed food worker Mohammad Hussein. He’d returned again and again over two weeks to insult him and his religion until Hussein finally caught him on camera. Maybe he couldn’t get enough of the halal cuisine. Or maybe he was a sadistic supremacist venting his inadequacy on someone doing his job.
The authorities dragged their heels for two weeks but have finally detained him. New York police charged him with aggravated harassment, hate crime stalking, stalking causing fear, and stalking at a place of employment.
On top of this, we now know that Seldowitz had spent a year harassing the Russian consulate, calling women working there “whores”.
It’ll be glossed over but, if a picture speaks a thousand words, Stuart leaves us with an indelible snapshot of the state of western hegemony.
He is the walking mindset of the ruling class with its pants down. A glimpse of what lurks beneath the superficial charm.
His assumption that this triumphalist behaviour is socially acceptable demonstrates the distance between the governing class and the rest of us. A picture of the dominant western male whose time at the top is over, Seldowitz is more than just an individual bully. He embodies America at the historical pivot of world power and the failure of character in dealing with it.
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