A video of a man, a former state department official and reportedly an advisor to president Obama, harassing a street vendor in New York City has gone viral.

The street vendor in Manhattan who was racially harangued about the Gaza conflict woke to huge lines of well-wishing customers on Wednesday as the the former state department official who was filmed berating him was arrested and charged with racial harassment and stalking as a hate crime.

Mohammed Hussein, 24, was back to work at the Q Halal Cart grill on Wednesday on the corner of Second Avenue and East 83rd Street, with lines of customers queuing for food in a sign of support.

Hussein has said he is still shaken by the encounters with Stuart Seldowitz, 64, who repeatedly harassed him with Islamophobic invective. Seldowitz called Hussein a “terrorist”, said 4,000 dead Palestinian children in Gaza “wasn’t enough”, called the Prophet Muhammad a “rapist” and told the vendor he’d be tortured “when they deport you back to Egypt”.The vendor repeatedly asked Seldowitz to leave him alone in the clips, to which Seldowitz was filmed replying: “Why should I go. Why should I go? Tell me why I should go? I’m standing here. I am an American. It’s a free country.”

Seldowitz was arrested and charged at the 19th precinct on the Upper East Side on Wednesday with one count of aggravated harassment of race or religion and four counts of stalking as a hate crime.
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After the videos were shared online and Seldowitz was publicly identified, the political lobbying firm he had consulted with said it had cut ties with him, and offered to represent Hussein. “I’ll represent the food vendor pro bono if he wants to bring a lawsuit,” Gotham Government Relations president David Schwartz said.

I watched the video and what struck me was how smug and self-satisfied Seldowitz looked throughout it all, smiling all the time, full of the confidence that in this encounter with an immigrant street vendor, he had all advantages of inequality. He spoke of how he could use his contacts in the state department and in Egypt to create trouble for the vendor and his parents.

I am not in general supportive of online viral shaming because it can be abused, with edited and misleading videos used against ordinary people. But in this case, Seldowitz seems to deserve it.

Jim Irsay, the billionaire owner of an NFL football team, was arrested in 2014 for driving while impaired. In a recent news conference, he claimed that he was discriminated against because he is a white billionaire.

The longtime NFL owner spoke about the circumstances of his arrest in an interview with the HBO show Real Sports that aired on Tuesday. Irsay later pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of operating a vehicle while impaired after initially facing four additional counts of possession of a controlled substance.

“I am prejudiced against because I’m a rich, white billionaire,” Irsay told HBO’s Andrea Kremer. “If I’m just the average guy down the block, they’re not pulling me in, of course not.”
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Police in the Indianapolis suburb of Carmel pulled Irsay over after observing a man in a Toyota Highlander driving slowly, stopping in the roadway and failing to use a turn signal. Authorities discovered various prescription drugs in Irsay’s vehicle along with more than $29,000 in cash.

A toxicology report showed Irsay had the painkillers oxycodone and hydrocodone as well as alprazolam, which is used to treat anxiety, in his system at the time of his arrest. Officers on the scene said he had trouble reciting the alphabet and failed other field sobriety tests.

Of course he’s right. The US is highly biased in favor of poor and people of color who get all manner of preferential treatment, especially from the criminal justice system. Kudos to Irsay for having the guts to point this out, even though he will suffer all manner of consequences for doing so, such as (oh, the horror!) being criticized by the media.

Meanwhile a group associated with Stephen Miller , serial sex abuser Donald Trump’s close advisor, has filed a lawsuit against the department store chain Macy’s charging that it “perpetuate[s] illegal racial discrimination — denying career advancement to white straight men.”

It is about time that we stood in solidarity with straight white men who have suffered for so long in silence as gays and people of color and women have been given preference over them.

As the death toll from the Israeli assault on Gaze rises to horrifying levels, with bombing attacks on even hospitals and refugee camps, protests against those policies have also increased, both in the US and around the world. Many of the critical voices in the US have been Jewish.

Even before 7 October, support for Israel among American Jews – who constitute the world’s second largest Jewish population after Israel – was shifting. One poll showed that while most Jews see caring about Israel as important to their Jewish identity, more than half disapprove of the country’s rightwing government. Another found that a quarter of American Jews agree Israel is an “apartheid state”, and one-fifth of those under 40 do not think the Jewish state has a right to exist.

These shifts have come with a surge in Jewish organizing on the left, with groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, which have long condemned Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, at the forefront of calls for a ceasefire and an end to US support of Israel’s war on Gaza. Since the war started, Jewish activists have shut down New York’s Grand Central station and been arrested for actions like occupying the halls of Congress and rallying in front of the home of the Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who is also Jewish.

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