Monday, November 30, 2015

Trump Doubles Down on "Arabs Celebrating 9/11" Claims





            It’s like Alexander Stille said (although the quote has been misattributed to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels): “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.”
            Such is the case with the claim that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been repeating over the last week and a half; the claim that hundreds or perhaps even thousands of Muslims were seen in northern New Jersey on September 11th, 2001, celebrating the attacks.

            In recent interviews with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, and Chuck Todd of CBS’s Meet the Press, Trump has stated that in either Jersey City or Paterson, the town’s Muslim and Arab populations were shown on television, in tailgate-style parties, celebrating the terrorist attack which brought down the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
On ABC’s This Week, Trump told Stephanopoulos, “There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down”, continuing, “It was well covered at the time”. Trump says he has a clear memory of this, and that many people agree with him, and remember the same thing.
The Anti-Defamation League called Trump’s comments “irresponsible” and “factually challenged”. Chuck Todd responded that Trump has no evidence of this, and that all he has to go on is “re-tweets” and “hear-say”. Stephanopoulos told Trump that the police said it didn’t happen. However, Trump has refused to back down on the claim, and has even doubled down, asking “Why couldn’t it have happened?”. This is certainly no rational scientific basis for proof.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, former New York Governor George Pataki, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio – all Republican candidates in the 2016 race for the presidency – have asserted that no such thing happened. To date, Trump has not been able to provide any evidence supporting this claim, although he claims that the Washington Post reported it.

Although it is true that Paterson and Jersey City do have sizable Muslim populations (Paterson has 25 or 30 thousand, and Jersey City has 10,000) – and although it is also true that some 1,100 foreigners were arrested in the United States in the days after the attacks (mostly from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt) – it is fair to say that Trump might be confused.
While many Americans remember seeing televised of images of foreigners celebrating 9/11, those images were of foreigners in foreign countries. Also, it is not clear whether the images were filmed immediately following 9/11, or instead simply footage of Muslims chanting “death to America”, filmed before the attacks.
What seems more likely than what Trump and his supporters seem to remember, is that they have mixed-together in their minds, the images of foreigners overseas celebrating, with what they heard from reports of people appearing to be Arabs seen celebrating the attacks in northern New Jersey.

Shortly after 8:46 A.M. on September 11th, 2001 – right after the first tower was struck by a plane – a homemaker, identifying herself only as “Maria”, living near Liberty State Park in Jersey City, called the police. She reported seeing three men sitting on top of a white Chevrolet van, which was parked on the roof of the rear parking lot of The Doric Apartments in adjacent Union City, near a waterfront park.
The men were videotaping the smoldering tower, smiling, laughing, cheering, dancing, giving each other high-fives, and posing for pictures. “Maria” wrote down the van’s license plate, and called the police, saying that they were wearing Arab dress, and that she thought the men were Palestinians. She later said “they didn’t look shocked”.
At 3:30 P.M. that day, a B.O.L.O. (“Be On Look-Out”) bulletin was issued to police regarding the call. Around 4 P.M., in the nearby city of East Rutherford, New Jersey Police Officer Scott deCarlo and Sergeant Dennis Rivelli pulled over a vehicle – a box truck – on Route 3 / Route 120, near the former site of the New York Giants Stadium. The five occupants refused to exit their vehicle when instructed, so the officers pointed their firearms at them.
The occupants – Paul Kurzberg, Sivan Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari, and Yaron Shmuel – were all men in their twenties, and were Israeli citizens who had admittedly served in the Israeli military. In their possession were foreign passports (one man had both an Israeli and a German passport), maps of the New York City area with routes highlighted, socks containing $4,700 in cash.
During the arrest, one of the men was reported to have said “We are not your enemy”, and according to some reports, continued, “the Palestinians are your enemy.” One of the men had booked a flight to Thailand for September 13th.
The men were held in a federal prison in Brooklyn, spending 71 days in custody, until they were released around Thanksgiving of 2001. The men were questioned; one of the men refused to take polygraph tests, while tests were administered to at least two of them.
The white Chevrolet van that the men were driving was owned by their boss, Dominic Otto Suter, the owner of moving company Urban Moving Systems. The company – based in Bayonne, New Jersey – was located at 3 18th Street in Weehawken, right across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan, the location of the World Trade Center.
On September 14th, 2001, Suter left the United States, leaving nobody acting as the company’s agent. He later returned to the U.S., confident that he would never face prosecution. On June 22nd, 2001 – three months before the attacks – the company received $498,750 from the U.S. Federal Government Assistance Program, an arm of the Small Business Administration. The company’s warehouse was later raided by the F.B.I..
Urban Moving Systems has been alleged to be a front for the Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks, commonly known as M.O.S.S.A.D., the State of Israel’s military intelligence agency. While the five men were being held in federal prison, their families were asked to stay quiet, and their parents enlisted the help of then New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and then- Mayor of Jerusalem Ehud Olmert (who later became the Prime Minister of the State of Israel) for assistance with the case.
Steve Gordon was hired as the men’s attorney in the United States, and Ram Horvitz was hired as their attorney in Israel. Alan Dershowitz also negotiated with the U.S. government on their behalf.
In November 2001, three of the five men later appeared on an Israeli television talk show, and one of them said "our purpose was to document the event", a statement which arguably suggests they had foreknowledge of the attacks. The same man said that the five were questioned regarding their possible connection to M.O.S.S.A.D..
On June 21st, 2002, Barbara Walters reported the story on 20/20, although a video of the report cannot be easily found online.

Additionally, on September 12th, 2001, at noon, another Urban Moving Systems van was directed to pull over into a rest stop. The vehicle was traveling east on I-80 near the town of York in northern Pennsylvania. The occupants, Roy Barak and Motti Butbul, were charged with having a broken turn signal and a missing fire extinguisher. A box cutter, or multiple box cutters, was found in the truck.
Both men were fingerprinted and photographed, and were incarcerated in York for nearly two months. Barak spent his first week in a cell, and his second in solitary confinement. Barak, a former paratrooper, was given two polygraph tests, and was found to have overstayed a six-month visa in the U.S.. Butbul, a former cook, declined to be interviewed, and was found to have no work permit. Both men, like the five arrested in New Jersey, were Israeli citizens in their 20s. Both men were deported to Israel on November 9th, 2001.

Out of 1,100 foreigners arrested in the days and months following the 9/11 attacks, sixty of them were Israelis, according to U.S. sources. However, according to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, between 90 and 100 were Israelis. The Washington Post reported in late 2001 that thirteen of the people arrested by federal authorities in connection to the attacks were from northern New Jersey.
Then- Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted that Israelis were arrested. Furthermore, in December 2001, a four-part series on FOX News, reported by Brit Hume and Carl Cameron, uncovered more Israeli connections to 9/11, including allegations that Israeli agents posed as art students in Florida, and toy salesmen in American malls.
These facts come in addition to reports that a van full of explosives was pulled over on or near the George Washington Bridge on the day of the attacks, and that a van bearing an image of the Twin Towers on fire was also seen in New York City soon after the attacks.
It is not easy to tell whether these vans were one and the same, but there exists an image of a white van, with a mural painted on its left side, depicting the two towers, with one of them being struck by a plane, and at the top, the words “Urban Moving Systems Incorporated.” Some have pointed out that the word “M.O.S.S.A.D.” (the Israeli equivalent of the C.I.A.) can be found in the name of the company: “urban MOving SystemS incorporAteD”. This adds (ahem) jet fuel to the possibility that Urban Moving Systems was a front for M.O.S.S.A.D..

            It has been said that the outcome of America’s future lies in the country’s response to “Who did 9/11?”.
Although Donald Trump’s supporters tend to be hard-core nationalists and protectionists who oppose political corruption – and, therefore, would be likely to respond with outrage when presented with information that members of any nation were seen celebrating the attacks – Trump’s open admission that his money fuels that corruption (and his past statements that “We love Israel”, and prefers to have his accounting done by “funny little guys in tiny little hats”) seem to assure that his statements about seeing Muslims celebrating 9/11 in northern New Jersey, will most likely not undergo the thorough investigation they deserve.
But if Trump or his people do happen to stumble upon the “dancing Israelis” story – as it is “popularly” known, at least among the 9/11 Truth community – the chances are high that the story will be ignored by mainstream media, and that the Anti-Defamation League would continue to condemn any statements by Trump suggesting an Israeli role in the attacks.



Written on November 30th and December 1st, 2015


Edited on February 8th and 10th, 2016,
and May 24th, 2019

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