Donald Trump has stuck by assertions that ‘thousands of people were cheering’ in New Jersey on September 11, 2001 but according to interviews he’s wrong

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

At the entrance to the Trump Plaza residential tower in Jersey City, the view is merely decent. The tower sits directly across the Hudson river from Manhattan, but it’s a few blocks inland, and big buildings on all sides obscure the water.



Walk straight up the hill to Summit Avenue, which clings to the ridgeline of the Hudson Palisades, however, and the vista of the Manhattan skyline is totally brilliant, gorgeous and huge. The view is especially good from the prayer room on the third floor of the Islamic Center of Jersey City, a mosque and educational facility established in 1972.

Donald Trump, the real estate developer and Republican presidential candidate, has turned a spotlight on Jersey City and its residents by insisting that the “Arab populations” here celebrated the fall of the twin towers during the September 11, 2001 attacks.

“I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down,” Trump said at a rally in Alabama on Saturday. “And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.”

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The comments have sparked a backlash – from Jersey City residents, the mayor, officials who recalled the community’s sacrifices after the attacks, and an army of disbelieving fact-checkers. But Trump stuck by his assertion on Monday.

The hard-charging Republican declared himself vindicated by a snippet of an 18 September 2001 Washington Post story that said “law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks”.

“I want an apology!” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Many people have tweeted that I am right!”



According to multiple interviews on Monday with officials and community leaders in Jersey City who were there at the time of the 9/11 attacks, Trump is not right.

Ahmed Shadeed, director of the hilltop Islamic Center since 2000 and a Jersey City resident of four decades, said the Muslim and Arab community, which locally numbers up to 50,000, went into a defensive crouch after the attacks.

“Celebrating?” Shadeed said in an interview at the mosque. “How would a community, in agony like this? It was an attack on Islam. It was not an attack for Islam, it was on Islam.”

Trump’s remarks about Jersey City, residents said, amounted to slander of a city that answered the call of crisis on September 11 – accepting victims, staging a command center, hosting first responders for months – and which suffered disproportionate losses in the towers’ collapse.

Sandra Cunningham, majority whip in the state senate, called Trump’s assertions “absolutely not true”. Her late husband, Glenn, was mayor of Jersey City when the attackers struck.

“As soon as the buildings started coming down, people in Jersey City were on the waterfront offering people places to stay the night,” Cunningham said in a phone interview. “They were on the waterfront with water and with food for people coming over from New York.

“Our hospitals handled many people who were brought to Jersey City, and I have to say, that it is one of the proudest moments […] because I think the entire city opened their arms to help these people.”

The current Jersey City mayor, Steven Fulop, vented on Twitter. “Either @realDonaldTrump has memory issues or willfully distorts the truth, either of which should be concerning for the Republican Party,” wrote the Democrat.

Abdul Mubarak-Rowe, spokesperson for the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic relations, called Trump’s version of events “a bald-faced lie”. “I’ll just be very blunt with you,” Mubarak-Rowe said in a phone interview. “It’s bigoted, racist rhetoric.”

“This is an urban legend that has been going on for 14 years,” said Ryan Jacobs, a city hall spokesman. “It’s been looked into, it’s been denied, there’s no evidence of it. The people definitely did not cheer in Jersey City on 9/11, and that’s basically all there is.”



At the bottom of the hill in Jersey City, the Trump Plaza residential tower welcomes visitors with seasonal decor. Pumpkins are perched on bales of straw, with dry stalks of corn tied to No Standing signs.



But the Trump organization was not welcoming questions from the media about the controversial remarks of the man whose name out front was the color of the building’s yellow brick. A concierge at the Plaza on Monday referred questions to a spokeswoman, who subsequently declined to comment.



Up on top of the hill, there was no such hesitation to talk. In addition to the mosque, the Islamic center houses an elementary school and community facilities.

The reaction in their community to the September 11 attacks, Shadeed and Hamed el-Shanawany, director of the nearby Al-Hoda Islamic Center, said, was not one of celebration, but of fear, that if radical jihadis were determined to be responsible, reprisal attacks would follow against their community or fellow communities.

As they sat talking in a library behind a prayer room, Shadeed and Shanawany scrolled their cellphones, exchanging messages, they said, with peers who were planning a meeting on Tuesday to discuss the 13 November attacks in Paris, Trump’s comments – and a potential hate crime assault in a city laundromat at the weekend on a woman wearing a headscarf.

“Please, don’t spread rumors, don’t say something if you’re not sure of what it is, especially if you say it to the media,” Shanawany said, in reference to Trump’s remarks. “Because of this, there are people taking action against community members.”

Shadeed recalled the morning of the September 11 attacks, when he was away from the mosque, at nearby Journal Square.

“We had almost 200 students in the school,” said Shadeed. “I was afraid of a backlash, if this was really an ‘Islamic’ terrorism. So I came running to the school, trying to call the parents, to pick their kids up. Also some parents had come from New York, so we offered them a place to stay because they couldn’t get back.

“The community, we were scared. We were afraid that there would be a backlash against us.”

While there have been incidents of hate crime attacks against Muslims in the city in the past two years, such attacks are infrequent, and community relations are good, the two men said.



Shanawany, who was born in Egypt, credited local officials and law enforcement with strong outreach efforts following the attacks.

“This is the country of freedom, human rights, dignity, equality,” Shadeed said. “When Donald Trump or any bigot hates or discriminates against somebody, you actually discriminate against everybody.



“This is America, and what he did was not American.”

Cunningham, the legislator, said the September 11 attacks and the aftermath “was a time when the Arab community joined with the rest of the city and helped the people”.

“Jersey City lost residents who were in the towers,” Cunningham said. “We lost a fireman who went over just because he saw something happening and wanted to help.

“I know of no one, absolutely no one, who indicated joy and happiness at a time like that. No one.”