Hater charged
A MOTORIST who allegedly snatched a hijab off a driver’s head and told her “Muslims are not supposed to be driving” was hit with hate crime criminal mischief and harassment charges Thursday.
Prosecutors said Michail Isakharov’s road rage took a racially biased turn when he cut in front of Gehad Elsayed and bellowed a hateful message at her on a Brooklyn street last month.
Isakharov got out of his car and approached the 22-year-old while stopped at Ave. C. and Ocean Parkway in Kensington about 9 a.m. on Nov. 14.
Police said Isakharov became enraged when Elsayed pulled out a phone and snapped pictures of him and his car.
The 40-year-old grabbed her work phone out of her hand and threw it to the ground, and when she tried again with her personal phone, he reached into her car and yanked off the bottom part of her hijab, according to court papers.
He then told her that President-elect Trump is going to move Muslims out of the country.
But Isakharov’s lawyer, Charles Miller, said his client was driving his pregnant fiancee to a doctor’s appointment, and chastised Elsayed for texting when she almost sideswiped his car.
“Only thing my client was doing was protecting his fiancee against a wild driver,” Miller said. “He said for her to stop texting, He didn’t break her phone. He didn’t make any Muslim slurs.”
Judge Michael Gerstein set Isakharov’s bail at $4,000, and suspended his license.
Meanwhile, police are investigating a potential bias crime in Manhattan, at City College of New York, where a 25-year-old woman noticed writing in a window frame of a Jewish prayer room that said, “Jews are pests! Hitler was right to kill them all!”
The school contacted police, and the NYPD hate crimes unit has been notified. There were no arrests. On Tuesday, police released a sketch of a man who attacked a Muslim MTA worker wearing a hijab at Grand Central Terminal Monday morning.
Cops arrested Christopher Nelson, 36, of Bay Ridge, on Sunday for allegedly threatening Alm Elsokary, an off-duty cop wearing a hijab in Brooklyn.Police have yet to make arrests in another incident last Thursday, when three white men taunted an 18-year-old Muslim woman on an uptown No. 6 platform at 23rd St. and Park Ave.