A former State Department employee charged with a hate crime in November after he harassed a halal food vendor in Manhattan, calling him a “terrorist,” may have his charges dismissed if he completes a 26-week anti-bias course and fulfills other requirements, according to prosecutors.
At a court appearance Wednesday, Manhattan prosecutors said that if the man, Stuart Seldowitz, completed the program through the organization Queens Counseling for Change, had no new arrests and did not violate a protective order, they would ask that his charges be dropped. Mr. Seldowitz agreed, according to prosecutors.
Mr. Seldowitz, 65, has no other criminal history and prosecutors frequently refer people who have committed nonviolent, misdemeanor hate crimes for such training. In recent years, the Manhattan district attorney’s office has sent 10 cases to the Queens organization, according to a spokeswoman.
Afaf Nasher, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations of New York, said in a statement on Thursday that “light punishments are a slap in the face to the victims.”
“Seldowitz’s vile verbal abuse and harassment targeting an innocent street vendor were caught on video for all to see,” said Ms. Nasher. “The sweetheart deal he received from the Manhattan D.A.’s office is a shameful affront of our justice system and wholly unfitting of his actions.”
Mr. Seldowitz’s lawyer, Scott Bookstein, declined to comment on Thursday.
Video recordings of the encounters between Mr. Seldowitz and the vendor spread online as tensions intensified between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups after the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7. In New York, where demonstrations about the conflict have become a near daily occurrence, those tensions have been particularly high.
The number of hate crimes logged in the city during October was more than double that of the previous October. Antisemitic incidents more than tripled. Last year through mid-December, the Manhattan district attorney’s office initiated 111 hate crime cases, compared with 92 in 2022 and 81 in 2021, according to a spokeswoman.
The charges against Mr. Seldowitz were brought after the vendor, whom the police identified as a 24-year-old man, told officers that he had been approached by another man who made Islamophobic statements several times while he was working on the Upper East Side, causing him to feel “afraid or annoyed.”
In several videos, Mr. Seldowitz can be seen taking pictures of the vendor, berating him and telling him: “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, you know what? It wasn’t enough.” Mr. Seldowitz also threatens to send pictures of the vendor to “friends in immigration.”
In one clip, he calls the vendor “ignorant” and admonishes him for not speaking English before continuing to make derisive comments about Islam’s founder, the Prophet Muhammad.
Mr. Seldowitz had a decades-long government career in both Democratic and Republican administrations, including as acting director for the National Security Council’s South Asia Directorate and a post in the State Department’s Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs.
Gotham Government Relations, a Manhattan lobbying firm, announced in 2022 that Mr. Seldowitz was its new foreign affairs chair. The announcement was later taken down from the firm’s website. David Schwartz, the firm’s president, said in November that Mr. Seldowitz was never an employee of Gotham Government Relations and was not registered — as far as he was aware — as a lobbyist for the firm.
Mr. Seldowitz told The New York Times in an interview in November that he “got rather upset” after the vendor expressed support for Hamas. No such claims by the vendor were captured on any of the videos that were immediately made public.
“I’ve said things to him, that in retrospect, I probably regret, though — that I do regret,” he said. “Instead of focusing in on him and what he said, I expanded into insulting his religion and so on.”
