JERSEY SURE: Mark Steyn explores the weird dissembling throughout yesterday by Washington Post “fact checker” Glenn Kessler in response to Trump’s remark that watched on TV “thousands” of Jersey City Muslims celebrating the carnage caused by radical Islam on 9/11:
The past is another country, wrote E M Forster, and the immediate post-9/11 period was a very different land from today’s America. Here, for example, is bigshot mainstream liberal Jonathan Alter writing in Newsweek (then owned by The Washington Post) that there were Muslim schoolchildren in the New York area who had prior knowledge of 9/11.
But the moment passed, and liberals stopped writing such stories, and then denied such stories had ever been written. And year on year more of the specifics of that day were disappeared – starting with the images of the men and women who hurled themselves from the upper floors of the Twin Towers for the chance to spend their final moments falling through clean, bright sky rather than in that hellish inferno. A soft-focus blur, a generalized sadness, a yellow ribbon or two is all that remains. Yet there were Muslims who cheered 9/11 in Oslo and in Yorkshire, and if like Donald Trump you live in New York City, you would have read and heard similar stories from your own neighborhood.
Big Government’s Joel Pollak suggests one possible source for Trump’s statement — in addition to the above MSM articles found by Steyn and Power Line’s John Hinderaker, Trump is “confusing rumors about Jersey City with actual, televised Palestinian celebrations abroad:”
Many Americans remember images like those below, of Palestinians literally dancing in the streets and handing out candy to celebrate the death of thousands of Americans.
These celebrations did not represent all Arabs or Muslims, but they were certainly not isolated (nor were they confined to Arabs and Muslims; some leftists savored the spectacle as well). The footage caused so much public relations damage to the Palestinian cause that Yasser Arafat faked a blood donation in an attempt to save face.
If there had been celebrations like that in the U.S., they would have drawn instant attention and outrage. As John Hinderaker notes at Powerline, the Washington Post reported on Sep. 18, 2011 that “law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.” That seems to provide at least some basis for Trump’s claim that celebrations happened.
As Mark Steyn concludes his article, “There are two competing narratives here:”
If you loathe Trump, the story is: Trump’s suggestion of terrorist sympathizers among American Muslims is outrageous. But, if you’re minded to support Trump, the story is: Obama’s and Hillary’s and Kerry’s assertion that there are no terrorist sympathizers among Muslims is not only ludicrous but mendacious and deeply weird in its relentless insistence. Glenn Kessler’s “fact-check” confirms the latter.
Until the primary elections play themselves out in the coming months, low-information undecided voters are currently stuck between a choice of two highly flawed candidates leading their respective parties, each a product of years spent cocooned in the New York media bubble and its myopic funhouse mirrors. One made his money in New York real estate, the other through massive contributions from the media and Wall Street (including the Obama enablers at Goldman Sachs). Both in their own way are prone to speak in outrageous hyperbole because they have little fear of serious repercussions from their wild utterances. But as Steyn writes, given a choice between two crazed exaggerations — one where “thousands” of New Jersey Muslims celebrated on September 11th and another where “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism,” and given our current president’s ongoing escape into fantasyland, who would you count on to keep you safe in the coming years?