US institutions 'failing us': Victim of anti-Palestinian hate attack speaks out

A man who was attacked in broad daylight for apparently wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf while playing with his son at a New York park has warned that key pillars of American society are "failing" amid the ongoing Israeli war on Palestine's Gaza.

"Go away," a woman can be heard shouting as she walks menacingly towards Ashish Prashar, pulling what appears to be a phone from under her arm and throwing it at him.

She then closes in before throwing a cup of hot coffee at Prashar, who at that point had put his 18-month-old son behind his legs in the hopes of shielding him from any potential harm.

"I'm playing with my son here," Prashar says as the woman shouts at him to leave the park, at points using vulgarities as she attempts to grab Prashar's phone. "She's attacking me because I'm wearing a scarf. Don't come near me and my son … I've got a baby."

Prashar, a political strategist who once served as a specialist on US President Joe Biden's 2020 election campaign, posted a video of Tuesday's apparent hate attack on Instagram. It has since gone viral.

Speaking to Anadolu Agency in a video interview, the political activist and author said that prior to the start of video recording, his son went up to an older child who was playing basketball at Edmonds Playground in Brooklyn, New York, and began interacting with him.

Shortly thereafter the woman, who appears to be the older child's mom and who has not been publicly identified, "aggressively" came up to Prashar and asked if he supports the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.

"'You know, you're a terrorist, your son, you're terrorists.' And I'm like, 'I don't want to talk about it.' She goes, 'Get away from my kid.' And I was like, 'Okay, cool.' You know, no problems. 'My son was just enjoying what your son was doing.' And she just kept going, kept coming. She's like, 'Get out of the park, you don't belong here'," said Prashar.

"She specifically said she was Jewish-American, and I don't belong here. All people of colour understand what that means. It's not just the park, it's probably the country, right?

"She's still screaming at me that, you know, 'your people are dogs, Arabs, they're dogs, and they burn babies in ovens. And I hope someone burns your baby in an oven'," he added.

Those words took an additional insidious dimension when the woman threw a cup of coffee at him.

Prashar says the liquid just "grazed" his face, but had he not put his son down, the child could have been seriously injured. "She had intent to actually scald my son after making that statement about burning. And I'm lucky it just grazed me," he said.

Prashar said that in some ways he is grateful that his son is so young, because that might allow him to be spared lasting memories from Tuesday's assault.

"All I can do as a parent, and all my wife has done since then, is just shower him with love, and let him know that is his reality, not the attack that happened. That is not how people are going to treat him. And that's all that really matters," he said.

'Deliberately dehumanised us as a race'

Multiple calls to the New York Police Department’s 88th Precinct seeking additional information on the attack were not immediately answered.

But after a bystander escorted Prashar back to his nearby home, he put his son down for his daily nap and went to the police to file a report.

The report was taken by an officer at the precinct, but a detective has yet to be assigned to the case, he said. The individual who escorted him and his son from the playground has offered to serve as a witness.

Prashar showed Anadolu Agency a copy of a flyer that he says community members have made of their own accord to help identify the suspect. It bears stills from the video and asks anyone who might know the woman to call the 88th Precinct.

But it is key American institutions, from the US' highest office to the news media, that Prashar blames for the climate he says enabled Tuesday's attack.

This is "symptomatic of the dehumanisation that is taking place as a result of what's happening in Gaza," said Prashar, whose family is from India.

He pointed to statements made by Biden in which the president claimed to have seen photographic evidence of beheaded babies following the October 7 Hamas attack, which killed some 1,400 people.

The White House later walked back the president's remarks, saying Biden had not independently viewed pictures that corroborated the claims.

But the beheaded babies allegation was also echoed by news outlets, several of whom later retracted their reporting that was based on anonymous Israeli sources.

"Our institutions are failing us, and they are completely leaving us all vulnerable to these attacks. Because this isn't now just attacks on Palestinians. This is an attack on any brown person in this country. This is spreading like wildfire. And it's because they have deliberately dehumanised us as a race,” he said.

"My kid and any other kid who's got any semblance of brown DNA in them is a target for people who believe all that hysteria caused by our president," he said.

Hate crimes targeting Muslim and Arab Americans have been on the rise amid Israel's ongoing assault on Gaza, which has killed over 10,500 Palestinians, the largest group among them children, followed by women.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations on Thursday reported an "unprecedented" surge in reported cases of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab attacks.

Between October 7 and November 4, the Muslim advocacy group said its national office and state chapters received 1,283 requests "for help and reports of bias, which is a 216 percent increase over the previous year."

Asked if he now regrets supporting Biden's election campaign, Prashar says he does, and believes that Biden's public image as a loving elder only extends to certain groups.

Keffiyeh a cherished gift

Prashar said his decision to don the keffiyeh, a scarf worn throughout many parts of the Middle East that has become an international symbol of the Palestinian national movement, was a choice he regularly makes, and was not particularly novel on Tuesday.

He said it is a piece of clothing he regularly wears as a memento of his time working in the occupied West Bank for Tony Blair, the ex-UK premier who also served as a Middle East Peace envoy until 2015.

The keffiyeh was gifted to him by a Palestinian woman who was a recipient of some of the microfinance projects on which Prashar had been working, he said.

It continues to remind him of the imperative of the Palestinian right to self-determination, which he emphasised is not an either-or proposition.

"It means something special to me from a special person. And also, once you experience the environment that is the Palestinian territories, you can't unsee apartheid in its reality," he said.

"This has always been a scarf that connects me to any liberation for Palestinian people, because to me … Palestinian liberation doesn't mean Jewish people are unsafe.

"The idea that it's so binary, that you can't support liberation of a people, and if you do, you don't want the others to exist, it's such a binary argument that is polluting our politics right now. And that is what our president himself is contributing to. Unfortunately, people in office have a vested interest for us not to know that."