The right-wing blogs are defending Trump's allegation that "thousands" of Muslims in New Jersey were seen cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001. The leading story bears the headline: "Washington Post’s Fact Checker Doesn’t Read the Washington Post."
As I wrote in the earlier post, the Washington Post, on September 18, 2001, wrote:Cue the outrage and indignation! Trump had it right all along!
In Jersey City, within hours of two jetliners’ plowing into the World Trade Center, 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.
Except: He didn't.
It is obvious that the WP's 2001 article is a hideously abbreviated (and somewhat garbled) account of the five "dancing Israelis" who worked for Dominik Suter's scammy moving company, Urban Moving Systems. The young Israelis, who looked "Middle Eastern," reportedly had set up a camera before the event and celebrated as it occurred. They gave every appearance of having foreknowledge.
(If you are confused by the numbers, I should explain that they refer to end notes in the linked article. The cites all go to contemporary news reports.)The New York Times reported Thursday that a group of five men had set up video cameras aimed at the Twin Towers prior to the attack on Tuesday, and were seen congratulating one another afterwards. (1)Police received several calls from angry New Jersey residents claiming "middle-eastern" men with a white van were videotaping the disaster with shouts of joy and mockery. (2)
"They were like happy, you know … They didn't look shocked to me" said a witness. (3)
[T]hey were seen by New Jersey residents on Sept. 11 making fun of the World Trade Center ruins and going to extreme lengths to photograph themselves in front of the wreckage. (4)
Witnesses saw them jumping for joy in Liberty State Park after the initial impact (5). Later on, other witnesses saw them celebrating on a roof in Weehawken, and still more witnesses later saw them celebrating with high fives in a Jersey City parking lot. (6)
"It looked like they're hooked in with this. It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park." (7)
True, someone did call the cops saying that "Palestinians" dressed in white "sheikh" clothing had loaded suspicious materials into a white van. It was a day of high excitement, so we can forgive a rattled witness who thought he saw swarthy miscreants dressed up like Lawrence of Arabia. A moment's thought would tell you that the very idea is ridiculous: Palestinians don't dress that way in the Middle East, and certainly would not do so while skulking around New Jersey.
Besides, how would the caller know that he saw Palestinians? The use of that term is, perhaps, quite revealing. It is possible that the caller was a co-conspirator intentionally trying to "false flag" the Palestinian people.
If so, the trick did not work, since the cops soon found the van and identified those within it.
When a van fitting that exact description was stopped just before crossing into New York, the suspicious "middle-easterners" were apprehended. Imagine the surprise of the police officers when these terror suspects turned out to be Israelis!A trace of the van's license plate revealed that it was owned by Suter's company. Fascinatingly, a Jerusalem Post report of the incident left out the all-important detail that the people in the van were Israeli! This omission prefigured Trump's error.
According to ABC’s 20/20, when the van belonging to the cheering Israelis was stopped by the police, the driver of the van, Sivan Kurzberg, told the officers:Why did he feel Palestinians were a problem for the NYPD?
"We are Israelis. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are your problem." (10)
The police and FBI field agents became very suspicious when they found maps of the city with certain places highlighted, box cutters (the same items that the hijackers supposedly used), $4700 cash stuffed in a sock, and foreign passports. Police also told the Bergen Record that bomb sniffing dogs were brought to the van and that they reacted as if they had smelled explosives. (11)
The FBI seized and developed their photos, one of which shows Sivan Kurzberg flicking a cigarette lighter in front of the smouldering ruins in an apparently celebratory gesture. (12)
A few days after the attacks, Urban Moving System's Israeli owner, Dominick Suter, dropped his business and fled the country for Israel. He was in such a hurry to flee America that some of Urban Moving System's customers were left with their furniture stranded in storage facilities (21).I apologize for the lengthy quotation of a piece which is itself filled with long quotes. I tell this story in detail to emphasize one point: Our right-wingers (most of whom are strong supporters of Israel) made a hilariously unwise decision when they dredged up this matter.
Suter's departure was abrupt, leaving behind coffee cups, sandwiches, cell phones and computers strewn on office tables and thousands of dollars of goods in storage. Suter was later placed on the same FBI suspect list as 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and other hijackers and suspected al-Qaeda sympathizers, suggesting that U.S. authorities felt Suter may have known something about the attacks. (22)The Jewish weekly The Forward reported that the FBI finally concluded that at least two of the detained Israelis were agents working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and that Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the five Israelis, was a front operation. This was confirmed by two former CIA officers, and they noted that movers' vans are a common intelligence cover. (23). The Israelis were held in custody for 71 days before being quietly released. (24)
"There was no question but that [the order to close down the investigation] came from the White House. It was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters that this basically was going to be a cover-up so that the Israelis would not be implicated in any way in 9/11." (25)
We have zero evidence that there were "Muslims" celebrating on that day. The September 18, 2001 WP report does not mention Muslims; it obviously refers to "Dominik's boys." If we view that WP story in conjunction with all of the other contemporary news coverage, it soon becomes clear that those young Israelis were the only rooftop "partiers" questioned by police.
There are no contemporary reports of celebratory Muslims -- just celebratory Israelis.
Were those Israelis merely conducting surveillance, as many have alleged (and as they themselves claimed on Israeli television)? Initial news reports held that the van was carrying explosives. If so, then we have no choice but to consider the theory that these Israelis were planning to destroy the bridge -- on the same day that the twin towers came down. (For more on the explosives, see the video embedded above.)
Anyone who doubts the sourcing for this story need merely double-check the citations. Or go to Google and look up the relevant terms -- Dominik Suter, "Urban Moving Systems," "Dancing Israelis," Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari.
Is ABC News mainstream enough for you...?
Millions saw the horrific images of the World Trade Center attacks, and those who saw them won't forget them. But a New Jersey homemaker saw something that morning that prompted an investigation into five young Israelis and their possible connection to Israeli intelligence.This report is surprisingly good for a mainstream news piece, although it downplays the darker implications. ABC makes no mention of the explosives, or of the reports that the Israelis set up cameras before the event. (The fact that we have never seen their footage is very telling.) There is also no mention of the fact -- amply documented elsewhere -- that "Urban Moving Systems" was a criminal enterprise, as were many other Israeli-run moving companies in that period, operating with seeming impunity. (See here and here and here.)
My question: Did Donald Trump display a failing memory...or did he intentionally bring up an incident that Israel's blinkered fans would prefer to keep forgotten? If the former, he's a fool. If the latter, he's brilliant.
NOW HEAR THIS!
As always: I will never allow assholes to use this blog to blather on about "controlled demolition" and similar nonsense. In my opinion, those myths were deliberately created to deflect attention from the tale of Suter and his lads.
Alas, I know full well that if the "controlled demolition" nutcases get a foot in the door, they will barge in and wreck the joint. One must never argue with such people, not even for a moment. They are like Holocaust revisionists and those dolts who think we never went to the moon: Utterly unworthy of debate.
Therefore, the only person allowed to discuss 9/11 on this blog is yours truly. You may not discuss the issue here from any perspective. An unfair rule? Perhaps, but experience is a harsh teacher, and I learned my lesson nearly a decade ago. The "controlled demolition" bozos must not be allowed even the slightest opening.
It's a big internet, folks, and there are other sites. Dig or split.
9 comments:
I dig and I'm still here. Trump IS brilliant. Isn't it interesting that you never see Donald Trump and Bill Clinton in the same place at the same time?
What exactly would they have been covering up about Urban Moving Systems, and why would their truck have tested positive for explosives?
So is this just an egregious error of memory from the Donald (which I can accept as more likely), or some oblique message he's sending (someone?) in a deniable way?
Either way, it picks up a rock long forgotten to expose what's crawling underneath it.
A view most will probably not take or hear about, and something easily distracted from (hey, look! a squirrel!!!)
XI
The Dancing Israelis story is very disturbing and may have been designed to be so. It induces a state of cognitive dissonance by which most people who hear about it simply reject the facts, and only a very few (such as you and I, Joseph) examine the facts, and only a few leap to confirmation-biased conclusions.
WhatReallyHappened's opening sentence is very telling: "A Mossad surveillance team made quite a public spectacle of themselves on 9-11." Since when do Mossad agents go around making a spectacle of themselves? Hmmmm
Dan Rather's report is that the celebrants were on a rooftop parking lot. Other reports place them in Liberty Park. Do we have TWO iterations of the Dancing Israelis? Hmmmmm.
So we're supposed to believe that the Israelis celebrated spontaneously? And they remembered to bring their Arab costumes beforehand? And they blew the cover on the Mossad's massive attack on the USA because they had to act like a bunch of drunken frat boys?
The Counterpunch writeup says they celebrated in the proximity of a white van that advertised their cover, Urban Moving Systems. And then by all accounts they were arrested in the very same van a few hours later. Was it a spontaneous reaction that they hadn't bothered to clean out the cash, the box cutters, and the explosive residue? These Mossadnicks are starting to look like Rummy and Bush.
So let's talk about the "Picture Van". This was a van stopped a few blocks from the improvised security HQ in Manhattan--stopped at King and 6th if I remember, and stopped because it had a painted mural showing an airplane attacking Manhattan. The driver was a Middle Easterner who did not speak English. He and his passenger were let go. Thus they must have been Israelis. No other explanation is possible. Did the Israelis paint a van with so provocative a scene out of spontaneous enthusiasm?
That's enough for now. I'll have some followup posts if you'll let me.
"Since when do Mossad agents go around making a spectacle of themselves?"
Actual Mossad agents are, of course, very professional. (Usually.) But they are surprisingly few in number: There is a SEVERE personnel shortage. (This is one of the things we learn from Ostrovsky's books.) Operations thus often rely on non-pros -- increasingly, we are talking about kids fresh out of the IDF.
They are, to put it bluntly, young and dumb.
Nevertheless, these amateurs were the backbone of the biggest spy ring in the history of this country -- the "art students" ring. I ran into a few of these kids at the Northridge Mall, a number of years ago: They were sneering and paranoid and not really very bright, although they seemed to think that they were hot shit.
Honestly, I have no idea how Israeli ops are so successful when the field agents are little better than toddlers. But that's how those guys roll.
I'd bet money he got it from the following article in Investors Business Daily in early 2007:
http://news.investors.com/022607-495105-northern-virginiastan.htm?p=full
I think he just lied about witnessing it himself instead of reading about it; and the location is wrong. New Jersey is mentioned as a similar place to "Northern Viginiastan's" "Taliban Towers", however.
So Joseph, you think the pro Mossad 9/11 perps somehow let it slip to the beanie-brigade that the op was coming, and the beanies spontaneously outed the op? And then after they did so, their supervisors didn't instruct them to clean out the van?
Who have you been hanging out with, lately?
You didn't address the Picture Van. Did the beanies spontaneously out the op by painting it on a van? The van shows that it was all theater.
It appears that the Mossad ordered the beanies to get arrested so they could insert in the public record the fact that they knew about 9/11 in advance. According to the German Press they had warned US authorities of 19 terrorists inside the US planning something big, and even named names.
Putting their foreknowledge in the public record would give them great blackmail material against the Bush administration.
The second benefit of the Dancing Israelis stunt was that it created a great meme to track through the internets--see who believes it, see who promotes it. Larry Silverstein's "pull it" stunt did the same thing, creating a meme to track through the internet.
Trump's not fucking with Israel. C'mon, no candidate does that. So, yes, I reckon the statement was for tracking purposes.
If you're in CPMAJO and you're discussing who you're going to appoint as the next US President, and in what directions you're going to send the candidates, then what they say about 911 is going to get considered. So is what they say about Israel. Tweak, tweak, track, track.
But I doubt that that was the reason for those Israelis being there with the van and getting noticed and arrested in the first place. Arrogant fuckfaces in sunglasses just out of the IDF sounds more like it. Even ones moving loads of explosives about. The Zionist support network for the 911 op - Urban Moving Services, art students, etc. - was huge.
The dancing Israelis sued US officials afterwards, seeking compensation for how they'd been treated. They lost. The legal docs are on the net. No shame whatsoever. Didn't Robert Fisk call the Israeli army "undisciplined rabble"?
The reference to "thousands" suggests that someone may have slipped "New Jersey" into Trump's speech later. Perhaps the original untrue statement was that Muslims all went "Yeah!" when they heard about 911. Then somewhere in the colouring and filling-in and soundbite creation process, New Jersey gets inserted. I mean Trump does talk a hell a lot of shit. Most people probably just hear "Ayrabs wanna kill yall".
James, under the theory that the Dancing Israelis and Picture Van stuns were the Mossad's Message to the World that they knew about 9/11 in advance. Since they had warned the Bushcists about the attacks, going public with their knowledge was an implicit blackmail threat.
If this reading is correct, then the investigation of Urban Moving Systems and the incidents would have been shut down by the Bushcists because they just wanted everyone to forget about it.
The Mossad would have dusted the van with explosives to up the ante on the blackmail (if they thought explosives had been used in the towers) and/or to further the internet-trackable meme that the Mossad blew up the towers.
Larry Silverstein's ambiguous and bizarre "pull it" remark also furthered the explosive meme, allowing the imaginations of confirmation-biased bigots to run wild with speculations that the Mossad did 9/11.
Post a Comment