There were a few "pockets of celebration" in New York City among Muslims celebrating the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Tuesday, but he believes Donald Trump is "exaggerating" with his claims of
seeing thousands celebrating in New Jersey after the attacks.
"We did have some celebrating, that is true," Giuliani told
CNN's "New Day" program. "We had pockets of celebration, some in Queens, some in Brooklyn."
But rather than there being large numbers of people, there were more like "10, 12, 30, 40" involved, and some of them weren't met well by fellow New Yorkers.
"We had one situation in which a candy store owned by a Muslim family was celebrating that day, right near a housing development," Giuliani recalled. "The kids in the housing development came in and beat them up. I think both facts were corroborated to be true. They were celebrating the towers had come down. And some of the kids in the housing development got really upset about it and came in and did a pretty good job of beating them up."
Rather than expecting celebrations, though, Giuliani said he, then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, and other city officials expected "a lot of irrational acts of violence against people who appeared to be Islamic or Muslim," but that didn't happen much either.
"We had some language," he said. "We had some yelling and screaming. I can't give you a count of the number of acts of violence."
But if there had indeed been thousands of people celebrating, "I think I would have known that for sure," Giuliani said.
Kerik, meanwhile, was on CNN later in the morning, where he told the "Newsroom with Carol Costello" program that there were some reports of people celebrating, as Giuliani said, in Brooklyn and Queens, and agreed there were reports from Paterson, N.J. and Jersey City as well.
But, he pointed out that the police were not investigating people who were celebrating, but instead, it was the "intelligence guys. We weren't investigating people celebrating. You know, that's – the intelligence guys who were keeping their sort of thumb on the pulse of what was going on in the communities."
Kerik, though, said he'd have to agree with Giuliani that there were "anywhere from 10 to 15 people celebrating in different pockets of the community, the Arab community."
But even though he mentioned Paterson, as Trump did, he said he "can't say it's accurate" that thousands were celebrating.
"I definitely remember Paterson, New Jersey, because I'm from there," said Kerik. "The cops and the locals that I know were getting to me, basically saying there were a lot of people over there that were celebrating."
However, he said he wouldn't know what the numbers were and he was far too busy to be watching television.
"We had 71 incidents, hate crime incidents, that were investigated between Sept. 11 and Sept. 27," said Kerik. "A number of those were people responding to people celebrating. We had 863 bomb threats in that, you know, 20-day period. So, we were extremely busy. There was a lot going on. But I do remember a number of reports of people celebrating."
But he does remember seeing later footage of thousands of Palestinians protesting and cheering, but said nobody was looking at television in the immediate days after the attacks.
Giuliani, though, said on the earlier show that he doesn't "want to say" whether or not Trump is telling the truth.
"I think what he's doing is exaggerating," Giuliani said. "Right? People were celebrating. He's right about that."
But still, Giuliani said he hasn't seen evidence of thousands of people celebrating, "nor have I seen it since then" but if it was happening in New Jersey, he thinks he would have known, even if it was outside New York City.
However, Giuliani said it's up to Trump to "deal with it" and "show the evidence" if it happened, because if he saw a video, as he says, there still has to be a record of the incidents.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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