Kurush Mistry, an Indian-origin American who was seen abusing Jewish persons and putting anti-Israel posters in Manhattan, has been fired from his job. Mistry worked as an Oil Analyst at Freepoint Commodities, a commodity trading and finance services company. Kurush Mistry along with his Indian-origin wife Shailja Gupta was seen in a viral video pasting antisemitic posters over posters of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas, and chanting anti-Israel slogans, apart from harassing a Jewish person who had confronted them.
After the video was posted by Post Millennial journalist Andy Ngô on X, it went viral. Soon they were identified by the journalist as Indian origin couple, Kurush Mistry who works at Freepoint Commodities and Shailja Gupta who is a visual artist and a filmmaker. Today the company announced that Mistry is no longer with the company after his antisemitic hatred was revealed in the video.
The company posted on its LinkedIn page, “Freepoint is committed to fostering a culture of mutual respect and tolerance. We welcome the diversity of views and opinions held by our employees, but Freepoint does not tolerate discrimination and hate speech directed against any group. We are aware of the recent antisemitic incident reported on social media, and the individual involved is no longer associated with Freepoint.”
Before joining the company, Kurush Mistry worked at Morgan Stanley Capital International, Barclays Capital, and the Lehman Brothers.
It is notable that the founder and CEO of Freepoint Commodities is David Messer, a Jew. Many people on social media wondered if IIM-A graduate Mistry knew that the company he works for is owned and run by a person Jewish, given that he displayed his antisemitism such openly.
In the viral video, the Indian origin American couple were seeing covering posters of Israelis abducted by Hamas in the October 7 attack with anti-Isarael posters. One such poster said, ‘Israel is an apartheid state and commits genocide’. Another poster said “occupiers face consequences”.
When one Jewish person confronted them, Mistry showed him the middle finger, and Shailja Gupta asked him to ‘f**k off’.
Saying that the person does no who her father is, she tells him ‘go back to your country’. When he said that he is American Jew, she replies she is also American, and asks him to go back to Isarel. She further said, ‘you don’t want my country to exist’. When the person asks which country she is talking about, she said ‘Palestine’.
The couple came prepared with printed posters, duct tapes and other stationeries to cover up the posters of the hostages.
Apart from her antisemitism, Shailja Gupta is also deeply Hinduphobic. Ahead of the Indian festival of Rakshabandhan in 2021, Gupta took to Facebook to characterise it as a ‘sexist holiday’. She insinuated that Rakshabandhan was a “Goldmine for child labour” and a “yet another opportunity to pivot the emotional festival into Export Cash Cow.”
On October 7, armed Hamas terrorists raided the southern border areas of Israel, killing people with abandon and taking captives with them. According to reports, over 240 Israelis have been abducted and taken to Gaza after the October 7 attack, which also led to the deaths of 1,400 Israelis, triggering a national mourning and subsequent Israeli retaliation against the Hamas terrorists.
Since then, propagandists and Hamas sympathisers around the world have tried to downplay the attacks on October 7 that triggered the Israeli retaliation and blamed the Netanyahu government and Israelis by dehumanising them as “settlers” and “occupiers” as a means to justify the attacks against them and hold them instead responsible for Hamas’ depravity. Anti-Israelis have been removing and defacing posters of abducted Isarelis in American cities and educational institutions.