Caitlin Johnstone
ROGUE JOURNALIST
It sounds made up, but that’s exactly what just happened; Vice has a whole article out about it. The video was uploaded today, and within hours the man was identified as Stuart Seldowitz, who helped direct US diplomacy on Israel-Palestine from 1999 to 2003 and then served on the Obama administration’s National Security Council.
Stuart’s identity was confirmed by his former employer Gotham Government Relations, who released a statement denouncing him and saying they’ve ended all affiliation with him.
Seldowitz is seen hounding the New York City vendors in multiple differentvideos wearing multiple different outfits, showing a sustained campaign of harassment and abuse. He told them while fully aware he was being filmed that Israel killing thousands of Palestinian kids “wasn’t enough”, insulted their religion, threatened them, mocked their intelligence and their English, called them terrorists, and asked “Did you rape your daughter like Mohammed did?” From the videos he appears to be harassing them for no reason other than because they are Muslims selling halal food.
That such a horrible person could climb his way to the highest echelons of the world’s most powerful government — working on Palestinian affairs no less — illustrates an important point about the US empire and what it is. There are no barriers stopping such creatures from rising to the top of that power structure, just the opposite in fact — they get an express lane to the top. That’s why bloodthirsty swamp monsters like John Bolton, Lindsey Graham, Victoria Nuland and Elliott Abrams find themselves so intimately involved with US policymaking.
That’s the true face of the US empire, right there. That’s the empire at its most honest. Not dressed up in affable charm and slick PR work, but sneering and hurling racist invective at immigrants who are just trying to do their jobs in peace. Not performing carefully rehearsed faces of compassion for the Palestinians who are being tragically unintentionally killed as collateral damage in Israel’s war of defense against Hamas, but staring right into the camera and saying “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, you know what? It wasn’t enough.”
Too many people look at Israel as something separate from the US empire, seeing it as a small nation run by a historically mistreated ethnic group that everyone singles out and picks on unfairly. If you look at Israel separately from the US-centralized global power structure, it feels off to have any forceful animosity toward Israel and its government, because it feels like you’re picking on the little guy.
It’s only when you see clearly that Israel is just an arm of the same empire that’s been murdering people by the millions around the world with nonstop invasions, bombing campaigns, proxy conflicts, starvation sanctions and CIA coups that you understand that, yes, Israel really is exactly as evil as it appears to be, and its behavior in Gaza is exactly what it looks like.
The US empire backs Israel for the same reason it backs most of the world’s dictatorships: because a globe-spanning empire can only be held together by nonstop violence and tyranny. Israel and other US-aligned states in the middle east are like the chair and the whip of a lion tamer — weapons used to violently abuse the populations of a crucial geostrategic region into compliance. It suits the empire perfectly to have a nuclear-armed government which exists in a constant state of war in the middle east governed by officials who speak English with American accents and interests which are reliably in alignment with those of the United States.
Stuart Seldowitz is not an aberration but a perfect manifestation of all this. This is the sort of mind which keeps the empire marching along from administration to administration no matter who Americans elect. This is the sort of mind which keeps the weapons flowing, the blood pouring, the fossil fuels burning, and the terrified screams which power the imperial machine continually erupting into the night sky.
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This is a dispatch from our ongoing series by Caitlin Johnstone
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.
ADDENDUM
Vice News ran a similar piece, and although it is a US-intel-controlled media outlet, overall it seems straightforward and reasonably balanced.
Ex Obama Adviser Says Killing 4,000 Palestinian Children ‘Wasn’t Enough’
A lobbying group has cut ties with an ex-adviser to former President Barack Obama after videos surfaced that show the man making Islamophobic comments and threats to a food cart employee in New York City.
The videos, posted on X (formerly Twitter) by a Columbia University student, show Stuart Seldowitz asking someone off camera, “Did you rape your daughter like Muhammad did?” and saying that killing 4,000 Palestinian children “wasn’t enough.”
Seldowitz was acting director for the National Security Council South Asia Directorate under Obama and was deputy director/senior political officer in the U.S. State Department’s Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs from 1999 to 2003. More recently, he served as foreign affairs chair for Gotham Government Relations, which announced his new role in a press release in November 2022.
On Tuesday afternoon, Gotham announced on Twitter that it had cut ties with Seldowitz.
“Gotham Government Relations has ended all affiliation with Stuart Seldowitz, an individual who hasn't contributed to our work in years. The video of his actions is vile, racist, and beneath the dignity of the standards we practice at our firm,” the statement said. His page has also been removed from the firm’s website.
Neither Gotham nor Seldowitz responded to VICE News’ requests for comment.
A New York police spokesperson said police are aware of the videos and are “monitoring the situation.”
Want the best of VICE News straight to your inbox? Sign up here.
In one of the two-minute videos, Seldowitz has his phone out and is speaking to a man who appears to be inside a food cart. Seldowitz mentions his “friends in immigration” and says, “the Mukhabarat wants your picture,” seemingly referring to an Egyptian intelligence agency.
“The Mukhabarat in Egypt will get your parents. Does your father like his fingernails? They’ll take them out one by one,” he continues, as the man he’s addressing repeatedly tells him to leave and says he doesn’t speak English.
“Tell me why I should go? I’m standing here. I’m an American. It’s a free country. It’s not like Egypt,” Seldowitz responds. He instructs the man to “smile for me” as he holds his phone up.
Seldowitz then repeatedly asks, “Did you rape your daughter like Muhammad did?” When the man again says he doesn’t speak English, Seldowitz calls him “ignorant.”
“Muhammad, your prophet... He was a rapist,” he says.
Seldowitz then asks the man if he speaks Arabic, “the language of the Quran.”
“The holy Quran that some people use as a toilet. What do you think of that, people who used the Quran as a toilet? Does it bother you?” he asks, laughing.
He then berates the man for not speaking English.
“That’s why you're selling food in a food cart, because you’re ignorant. But you should learn English, it’ll help you when they deport you back to Egypt and the Mukhabarat wants to interview you.”
A second video shows Seldowitz holding up two buttons to the food cart’s windows, one says Israel on it; the other is hard to discern.
“It’s not my fault that you pray to a criminal,” Seldowitz says when the food cart employee opens the windows. The employee asks Seldowitz to leave “please,” but Seldowitz refuses.
“I’m going to put up big signs here that say ‘This guy believes in Hamas,’” Seldowitz says and accuses the vendor of not having a permit or visa.
When the vendor says he’s an American citizen, Seldowitz asks how he became a citizen and calls him a “terrorist.”
“You support killing little children. You’re a terrible person,” Seldowitz says.
The vendor responds, “You kill children, not me.”
Seldowitz says, “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, you know what, it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough.”
In October, Seldowitz was interviewed about the Israel-Hamas war in an hour-long podcast by Amy Peikoff. Peikoff is former chief policy officer of Parler, a “free speech” social media network favored by right-wing users for its lack of content moderation.
He said Hamas was to blame for any Palestinian civilian deaths and said reports about the poor conditions in Gaza are exaggerated.
“The Israelis will and have in the past done almost everything that can reasonably be expected to keep civilian casualties down as low as possible,” he said, describing the Israeli Defense Forces as a “moral army.”
“Responsibility for the civilian casualties can squarely be laid at the doorstep of Hamas.”
Seldowitz also told Peikoff it’s “very hard” for Americans to relate to Palestinians “because their culture, their history, their religion and so on is so different than most of us.”
Seldowitz is also a senior consultant in humanitarian diplomacy for GDC Inc., a logistics company that services places impacted by war and natural disasters. In a Jerusalem Postarticle from July, GDC’s Chief Executive Officer Moti Kahana specifically called out Seldowitz as a key member of his team.
On Tuesday, Kahana, an Israeli-American, tweeted that he heard about a “confrontation” involving Seldowitz.
“I do not know the specific details of the event, and I and GDC’s team condemn such language. Mr. Seldowitz has worked with us in the past and saved thousands of Muslim lives in Afghanistan and Syria. We will await further details,” he said.
Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Photo Credit: GDA via AP
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