Here is the Donald Trump quote in question – and, full disclosure: I grew up in New Jersey, I love New Jersey, and I am not well-disposed towards casual libels of that state – courtesy of Yahoo News: “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…” And that seems to be a pretty straightforward quote, there. Trump explicitly claimed that there were thousands of Muslims cheering the destruction of the Twin Towers, and they were doing it in New Jersey. Fine.

Show me.

Seriously, show me.  I know that at least some Palestinians in the West Bank danced in the streets when the word came down, because Reuters filmed it (and later indignantly denied conspiracy theorist claims that it faked the footage)* and I watched the footage with my own eyes. But we’re not talking about the East Jerusalem. We’re talking about places like Jersey City or Paterson. And I want to see the footage that Donald Trump claims that he saw. I want to see it, and I want to know where Trump saw it.

That last bit is kind of important. Why? Well, check out the comments section here for an eyeful: among a certain type, stories of Arabs celebrating 9/11 in America meld seamlessly into stories of Jews celebrating 9/11 and then more or less drift into 9/11 Trooferism in general.  This is dangerous ideological territory, in other words; the entire mindset is one that a lot of us in this business have learned to recognize, usually while backing up slowly and looking around for a nice, heavy stick.

But I’m a reasonable man. If Donald Trump has evidence, let him show it. I am, as they say, all agog to see what he actually has.

(Image via Shutterstock)

Moe Lane

PS: This would normally be the time that I would start using the term ‘falsifiable,’ except that I don’t think that the people I’d be using it on would really get the point.

PPS: This is not an invitation to air out MIHOP, LIHOP, and/or Dancing Israelis theories. We ban 9/11 Troofers on sight here, largely because they smell bad. In more ways that one.

*I also know that at least some Iranians in Iran did a candlelight vigil mourning the attacks, because I also saw it at the time and the images stayed with me.