![]() ![]() That same year, he traveled to Sierra Leone, where he sat in on reconciliation meetings as the country healed from a decade-long civil war. In 2011, the job took Ash to the West Bank, where he received his kaffiyeh as a gift. He joined a team working for former prime minister Tony Blair, the Middle East peace envoy at the time. The second thing happened years later, after he had begun a career in politics. He became a person who said, “Okay,” if he said anything at all. One morning, when a guard pinned him against the wall and shouted racist slurs, Ash just looked at him and let him yell. Anger was all around him there, and he told himself that in order to survive, he would need to become a different person - someone who didn’t react. He was arrested for stealing from a London department store and spent four months in prison. He considered himself a nonviolent person, in large part because of two things that had happened in his life. More than one person said they would have punched the woman in the face, if it had been them that day.Īsh didn’t want to punch the woman. People told Ash how well he handled the situation, how calm he’d kept his voice. One person sent close-ups of the coffee cup the woman had thrown, identifying the logo of the bakery where it had been purchased. An Israeli hostage poster, someone online said, though it was only an empty bag of chips, crinkling in his hands. They zoomed in on Ash’s son, who had been on the ground at one point, holding something small and red. Strangers zoomed in on the woman’s face, rushing to identify her. ![]() Sad faces, angry faces, Palestinian flags. Now his phone was filled with hundreds of messages. In a week, it had passed 1 million views. The next day, after Mary said to him, “She hurt our child and needs to be held accountable,” Ash decided to post the video on Instagram, too. Later that day, he walked to the 88th Precinct in Brooklyn and showed the video to the police, who elevated it to the Hate Crime Task Force in Manhattan. Ash went home and showed the video to his wife, Mary Rinaldi. But in a time of rising hate crimes, with anger and outrage available to anyone at any time online, that’s not the way it worked out. “I told you to leave.”įorty-seven seconds - that’s how long the video lasted. ![]() The cup flew past him, but the lid came off. She raised her hand again and this time hurled the coffee cup. Her phone crashed, landing in the leaves. She raised her hand and hurled her cellphone toward him. She walked toward him, nearly in front of him now. Her figure came into focus on the screen: a woman in a hat and sunglasses, phone in one hand, paper coffee cup in the other. The phone shook, pointed at the ground, a blacktop covered in dry leaves. The Washington Post’s best immersive reporting and narrative writing. And then he made a decision that would cascade outward in the weeks ahead, testing what he thought he believed about accountability and compassion.Īt 10:19 a.m., he pressed the record button. He grabbed his phone inside his jacket pocket. They were not Palestinian - Ash was Punjabi, born in London - but they might look Palestinian to the woman, whose voice was getting louder now. He scanned the playground, and now the facts of the situation came to order in his mind: Around his neck, he was wearing a kaffiyeh, a Palestinian scarf. That morning, it was one month into the Israel-Gaza war, and as the woman came closer, Ash asked himself what was happening. Two weeks from now, in a courtroom, a prosecutor would summarize what Ash said he heard: Maybe the boy was this woman’s son, Ash thought, and now she was coming closer, and she began to speak. He watched his son, who was 18 months old, standing near the three-point line, happy, babbling, fascinated by an older boy playing basketball. Ashish Prashar, 40, had taken off his jacket and laid it on the ground. They were at a basketball court on a Tuesday morning in Brooklyn, just after 10 a.m. NEW YORK - There was a woman walking toward him, but he didn’t recognize her. ![]()
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