A Westchester County man was busted Thursday for throwing a rock in the face of a Jewish Columbia University student whose Israel flag was torched during April’s campus unrest, authorities said.
Zuhdi Ahmed, 20, of Ossining, was arrested just after 6 a.m. and slapped with multiple charges – assault and menacing as hate crimes, as well as aggravated harassment, criminal possession of a weapon and harassment – in connection to the April 20 attack on student Jonathan Lederer, 22, police said.
He was allegedly part of a trio who confronted Lederer just before 10 p.m. at Amsterdam Avenue and West 116th Street, with one of them ripping away his Israeli flag and Ahmed throwing a rock at his face, cops and prosecutors said.
Ahmed then flipped yarmulke-wearing Lederer the bird and screamed at him, prosecutors revealed at his Manhattan Criminal Court arraignment Thursday.
A third person then grabbed the flag and set it on fire, cops said.
“Finally, I succeeded in grabbing my flags and ran to rejoin my friends,” Lederer wrote in an article he penned for The Free Press. “We ended up being chased out of campus and told to ‘go back to Poland,’ a poignant reminder that even in America, antisemites wish to condemn Jews like me to our ancestors’ tragic fate.”
The victim refused medical attention for minor injuries.
Before the violence erupted, Lederer said he and his friends were singing songs calling for peace, he wrote. The clash came during massive campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that saw anti-Israel demonstrators sit in and sometimes clash with supporters of the Jewish State.
“Amid multiple protests both inside and outside of Columbia’s gates, my friends and I decided to show our pride yet again, as we have on so many occasions since Hamas began its war,” he said.
Then they came face-to-face with the “masked keffiyeh-wearers” who tried to “intimidate” them, he wrote.
“They chanted, ‘F–k Israel, Israel’s a bitch,’” he wrote. “We were told, ‘You guys are all inbred.’”
Ahmed, a student at Hunter College, voluntarily surrendered to police Thursday morning.
He said nothing as he was walked out of the NYPD’s 7th Precinct, which houses the department’s Hate Crime Task Force – wearing a black sweatshirt with the word “Montauk” emblazoned in white, and blue jeans.
One of the other accused attackers, advertising heir James Carlson, was arrested in May.
Carlson, 41, was cuffed in connection to the hateful assault on May 1, and charged with criminal mischief, arson and criminal possession of stolen property, cops said.
Carlson, who also goes by Cody Carlson, aka Cody Tarlow, is “a longtime anarchist,” a high-ranking police source said last month.
The provocateur, who has arrests dating back to 2005, is one of three children of prominent advertising execs Richard “Dick” Tarlow and his wife, Sandy Carlson Tarlow.
Dick Tarlow died in 2022 at age 81 with an estate worth at least $20 million, court papers show.
Sandy Carlson Tarlow, who died in 2003 at age 59, was known for defining the “public face of Ralph Lauren,” according to her obituary.
A third suspect in the antisemitic attack remains at large.
Ahmed is due back in court Aug. 6.
