The Daily Beast reports: It seemed likely that after Donald Trump lied about the residents of Jersey City’s behavior on Sept. 11, 2001 — claiming they cheered the attacks across the river in New York City — Chris Christie, New Jersey’s governor, would be first in line to repudiate him.
That was a naive assumption. It turns out a Republican presidential candidate would sooner slow-dance with Hillary Clinton than criticize the party’s frontrunner in defense of American Muslims.
At a rally in Birmingham, Alabama on Saturday, Trump said, “Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down, and I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering!”
This is, of course, incorrect. The New York Times reported that rumors of Muslims cheering in New Jersey were “discounted by police officials at the time.”
Trump then claimed on Sunday on ABC’s This Week that he had seen footage of the thousands of people cheering on TV — but no such footage seems to exist.
A request for comment from Christie, sent at around 10:30 Sunday morning, went ignored all day by his campaign. Which was curious, since the governor’s tough talk against “crazies” fear-mongering about Muslims — never mind his constant talk about the 9/11 attacks throughout the course of his presidential campaign — has been a defining aspect of his governorship.
In 2011, Christie nominated Sohail Mohammed as a Superior Court judge. When rumors began to circulate on the Internet that Mohammed was tied to terrorism and sympathetic to Sharia, Christie came to his aid.
“This Sharia law business is crap,” he said. “It’s just crazy and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies.” [Continue reading…]
The Washington Post spoke to Jerry Speziale, the police commissioner of Paterson, N.J., for his response to Trump’s claims and he said: “That is totally false. That is patently false. That never happened. There were no flags burning, no one was dancing. That is bullshit.”
Speziale’s statement might not be completely accurate because as Jim Galloway, a journalist at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, noted yesterday: “As the towers came down, some people indeed saw a group of five — not thousands, but five — Middle Eastern men clowning around and photographing themselves in front of the burning towers from the New Jersey waterfront. They weren’t Arabs, and they weren’t Muslims.”
At that time, an FBI bulletin was issued warning law enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area to watch for a “vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack”:
White, 2000 Chevrolet van with ‘Urban Moving Systems’ sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for prints and detain individuals.
Twenty-five minutes after the alert had been sent out, the van was stopped by officers with the East Rutherford Police Department who arrested its five occupants who all turned out to be Israelis.
Christopher Ketcham later investigated the story in detail and published his findings in a 2007 report, “What did Israel know in advance of the 9/11 attacks?”
I have reposted that report and an accompanying article, “The Kuala Lumpur deceit.”
