NEW YORK - New York’s former mayor Rudy Giuliani has warned Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner,  that “it’s going to make him look really bad” if evidence does not turn up to support his claims that Muslim Americans celebrated the September 11 terror attacks.
“I don’t want to say he’s not telling the truth or not,” Giuliani, also a Republican who was mayor of New York when 9/11 attacks took place, told CNN on Tuesday. “Let him deal with it. Let him explain to people. Let him show the evidence of it.
“If thousands of people were demonstrating and he saw it on television, then there must be some tape of it somewhere. If it shows up, it will corroborate him. If it doesn’t show up, it’s going to make him look really bad.” Giuliani said that he had heard of isolated celebrations of “10, 12, 30, 40” people around New York’s boroughs, not the “thousands” that Trump asserts celebrated from New Jersey.
“We did have some celebrating, that was true,” said Giuliani. “We had pockets of celebration, some in Queens, some in Brooklyn.” Giuliani stopped short of calling Trump a liar, but said the Republican frontrunner was distorting real accounts: “I think what he’s doing is exaggerating.”
The former mayor and onetime presidential candidate said he heard “some reports of people celebrating that day” but only described one specific incident. “We had one situation in which a candy store owned by a Muslim family was celebrating that day, right near a housing development,” Giuliani said. “And the kids in the housing development came in and beat them up.”
Giuliani expressed uncertainty even about this incident, however, saying: “I think both facts were corroborated to be true. They were celebrating that the towers came down and some of the kids in the housing development got really upset about it, and they came in and did a pretty good job of beating them up.” The former mayor stressed that he saw no footage of any celebration.
He said that, if anything, he and the then police commissioner Bernard Kerik feared retaliatory attacks against Muslim Americans, and were “very proud” that there were few incidents. “We had some yelling and screaming,” Giuliani said. “I can’t give you a count on the number of acts of violence, but nothing really serious.”
The alleged celebration and assault that Giuliani described could not immediately be confirmed through New York police.
Three men allegedly attacked a Pakistani store owner in New York in October 2001, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that tracks hate crimes. The SPLC and Human Rights Watch also recorded several dozen anti-Muslim and anti-Sikh incidents between 2001 and 2010.
Chris Christie, New Jersey’s current governor and Trump’s rival in the 2016 race, said on Monday that Trump’s claim was “just wrong. It’s factually wrong.” Fellow Republican candidate Ben Carson at first said he had seen the video to which Trump referred, then retracted his comments, saying the video was in fact from the Middle East.
Trump has adamantly insisted he saw “thousands and thousands of people [who] were cheering as that building was coming down”, citing an article in the Washington Post that reported allegations of people celebrating. The reporter of that article has said he was unable to corroborate the claims at the time, and was drawn into a public spat with the billionaire, who appeared to mock the reporter’s disability.
Trump has also claimed video exists of such celebrations; news channels widely broadcast video of celebrations in the Palestinian territories following the attacks, but none in the US. Fact-checking organization Politifact ruled that Trump’s claim “defies logic”, since many people would remember the event had it occurred and photos and video would not be uncommon of a major celebration in a densely populated center.