I suppose it can happen to anyone.
Republican Presidential wannabe Ben Carson was me-tooing Republican front runner Donald Trump’s widely condemned and unproven assertion that after the twin towers fell Trump saw thousands of people that he assumes were Muslims cheering in delight in New Jersey.
Me, too, said Ben Carson — who said he saw a film of it.
Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson joined GOP rival Donald Trump in claiming that he, too, saw news footage of Muslim-Americans cheering as the World Trade Center towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001 — despite the fact that no such footage has turned up yet.
“I saw the film of it, yes,” Carson told reporters at a Monday campaign event, adding that it was documented by “newsreels.”
But later that day, he walked back his comments, telling ABC News that he “was thinking of the Middle East, not New Jersey.”
Hey, anybody can confuse the Middle East with New Jersey. It happens all the time.
Same topography, same kind of streets, same trees, the population looks exactly the same on film.
In the desert in the Middle East you might see a camel or a tourist riding a camel. At New Jersey 7 Elevens, they sell Camels.
I live in San Diego, which any day Dr. Carson will confuse with Greenland.
He’ll say he saw that in a movie with the grain being loaded. But then it’ll turn out to have been Kansas, which is easy to confuse with San Diego, which is also easy to confuse with Jersey City, which is easy to confuse with the Middle East.
Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.