Thursday, December 03, 2015
Elder of ZiyonMondoweiss, while not directly saying there were any "dancing Israelis," uses the phrase as if it is true (it also calls them "laughing Israelis."
Albawaba refers to them as "grinning Israelis" and calls them "dancing Israelis" several times.
I described the facts a few years ago when a +972 writer accused Israelis of celebrating 9/11:
Apparently, Gurvitz likes to spend time on 9-11 truther websites, because those who actually remember the story know that there were no dancing Israelis on 9/11. The woman who reported them to the police described them this way:
MARIA: Like a few minutes must have gone on, and all of a sudden down there I see this van park. And I see three guys on top of the van, and I'm trying, you know, to look at the building but what caught my attention, they seemed to be taking a movie.MILLER: (VO) Maria says the three young men were kneeling on the roof of a white van. It was parked right here. They were taking pictures of each other with the World Trade Center burning in the background.If I would have had a camera with me that day, I would have been taking photos as well - and hundreds of people did. But there was no dancing and no celebration (although there does seem to have been excitement at witnessing such an event, and somewhat bad taste at taking tourist-type photos in front of the smoke.)
MARIA: And I could see that they were, like, happy, you know? They--they--they weren't--they didn't look shocked to me, you know? They didn't look shocked. I thought it was very strange.
The Israelis denied dancing to the US authorities and went on Israeli television and denied it again. But "truther" websites started the rumor that there were "dancing israelis" - and 972 mag now pushes that lie as well. And, of course, they weren't arrested for "dancing," as pseudo-journalist Gurvitz asserts.
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To be fair, I have no doubt that Israelis have mixed feelings at terror attacks abroad. They hope against hope that the victim country will now have an inkling of the fear that Israelis had to go through for years, before going on the offensive to stop daily terror attacks. In other words, they naturally hope that Europeans will start to empathize with what Israelis have had to live with and notice that they have common enemies. This is human, but it is a not close to the happiness that Gurvitz is describing in this sickeningly vile piece of garbage.
Then, after spending paragraphs about five supposedly happy Israelis, Albawaba mentions this:
Then in a CNN segment Tuesday, former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani said his city had actually witnessed some Arabs celebrating on the day.Actually, Giuliani said between 10 and 40.
"We had pockets of celebration," he told the CNN, including one situation in which a "candy store owned by a Muslim family was celebrating that day."
But these were groups of 10 or 20 people, the former mayor said. Still a pretty far cry from Trump's thousands.
Trump is certainly wrong in saying that thousands of Muslims were celebrating publicly in the New York area. But the man who would know confirms that there were perhaps dozens of Muslims known to be celebrating. So why is that not getting anywhere near the the same coverage as the mythical "dancing Israelis?"
Of course, there were thousands of Muslims celebrating 9/11 - in the Middle East and even in Europe as this Wall Street Journal article from 2001 showed in grim detail and as these videos from Fox News, CNN and MSNBC showed on that day.
