I am a non-Jewish political scientist and historian from Hamburg. Thirty years ago, I started to study Nazi ideology, especially antisemitic ideology, in order to understand how Auschwitz could happen and in order to understand how my own parents were able to love Hitler when they were young.

Then came 9/11. Just as I had previously sought to understand the Nazi ideology, now I wanted to understand the ideology of the Islamists. I wanted to know: what ideas propelled the group led by Mohamed Atta into action?

I got an answer when the first trial of a member of Atta’s group took place in Hamburg in 2002. Let me quote what witnesses from the group told the court about Atta: “Atta’s outlook was based on a National Socialist way of thinking… He considered New York to be the centre of world Jewry, which was, in his opinion, Enemy Number One.” The members of his group were convinced that the Jews had instigated the Second World War. They “believed in a Jewish world conspiracy”.

Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaida, shared this outlook. His hatred of the USA was based on the conviction that “the Jews” control the country and abuse it for their own Jewish and Israeli ends. So we can see: although 9/11 was directed against the USA, the motivation for the action was antisemitic hatred.

But most governments, mass media and activists did not want to talk about the antisemitic dimension of 9/11. They showed no interest in the fantasy world of the perpetrators.

The American official 9/11 Commission report of 2004 is a case in point. The word antisemitism does not appear in the report’s section on “Bin Laden’s Worldview”. In the framework of the “war on terror”, no specific provision was made for a struggle against the ideology that had motivated the terrorism in question.

The big question then is: why was the antisemitic dimension of 9/11 ignored? What prevents people from acknowledging antisemitism when it arises?

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Joe Biden speaking on the 9/11 anniversary

First, rationalisation. I have already mentioned the American official 9/11 Commission report that ignored Osama Bin Laden’s antisemitism. Instead, this document gives the wrong impression that Islamism originally arose in response to recent American and Western policies.

This is a typical example of rationalisation at work. Unable to make sense of the real motivation behind 9/11, the Report’s bewildered authors found shelter in an idea that was familiar to them: the West is guilty. If the West had behaved differently, so goes the argument, then the attack would not have happened.

But antisemitism rejects this logic. This is not an easy thing to grasp, since we live in a world in which we automatically believe that there must be a plausible source for every problem.

But this is not how antisemitism operates. Antisemitism disregards the common-sense logic of cause and effect. Think of the Shoah.

The Nazis believed in their own delusion that the Jews were responsible for all the suffering and misery in the world. They were convinced that only the Jews’ total destruction could save the world.

Now for the second answer. Let us suppose that American Nazis had carried out a similar attack on the World Trade Center. Would governments and media have displayed the same lack of interest in the attackers’ antisemitism?

This is inconceivable. So why is antisemitic behaviour, when engaged in by Muslims, judged differently to that of Nazis?

Some regard Muslim antisemitism as a slightly distorted form of liberation struggle by the Arabs, others excuse it as a response to the activities of the Jewish state. All agree that Israeli Jews are responsible for the antisemites’ behaviour. Israel is the cause, so goes their mantra, and Jew-hatred the effect.

Any fact that might contradict this approach is ignored. Thus, for example, many in the academic milieu don’t want to know anything about the influence of Nazi Germany on the Arab world and its after-effects.

Nazi Germany’s antisemitic propaganda in the Arabic language left enduring legacies in the Middle East; the striking similarity between contemporary anti-Jewish slogans and graphics and those of the Nazis is no accident.

Too many, however, refuse to take the Islamists’ Jew-hatred seriously and confront the plain meaning of what they say and write.

All relevant surveys — worldwide or in Western Europe — show that antisemitic attitudes are far more prevalent among Muslims than among non-Muslims. Moreover, the Islamist’s antisemitism is marked by an exceptional radicalism. Let us take one example, the Holocaust.

Old-style neo-Nazi groups in Europe tend to deny or minimise the Holocaust; they rarely openly justify it.

But Sayyid Qutb, the most famous member of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 20th century, justified the Shoah and described it as a divine and just punishment: “Then Allah brought Hitler to rule over them.” Such statements arouse no significant criticism or condemnation in the Arab public discourse. Moreover, they are not confined to marginal groups.

In 2009, Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, today’s leading ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood, repeated Qutb’s approach. His justification of the Holocaust was aired on Al-Jazeera TV: “Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption.

"The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. […] He managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers.” What Qaradawi hopes for is clear: The next “divine punishment” such as the Holocaust will be perpetrated by Muslims.

This renewed punishment of the Israeli Jews, allegedly justified on religious grounds, is what the Islamists in Tehran are preparing and propagating. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei has described “the war on Palestine [as] a war on the existence of Islam”.

He declared: “The fate of the world of Islam and the fate of all Islamic countries … depend on the fate of Palestine.” His conclusion is clear: “We believe that annihilation of the Israeli regime is the solution to the issue of Palestine.”

What the Tehran regime is preparing in plain sight goes far beyond 9/11. The Revolutionary Guards boast that they “will raze the Zionist regime in less than eight minutes”.

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, has stated that by 2040 at the latest Israel will no longer exist. A countdown clock in Tehran shows the number of days to go before Israel’s appointed end is supposed to come.

Western governments, however, do not take this antisemitism seriously. Why? Presumably because they are yet again in the grip of the cause-and-effect delusion and rationalise Tehran’s Jew-hatred by believing that Israel must in some way be responsible for it.

Many modern academics avoid this issue out of fear of being labelled “anti-Arab” or “Islamophobic”. This is a serious problem; many in Western universities, fearing ostracism, do not say what they think and restrict the scope of their research.

Hostilities against Israel appear today in the form of a pincer movement: on one side we have classic antisemites such as Ali Khamenei or Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah.

On the other side we find non-Jewish and Jewish fellow-travellers of antisemitism — the so-called anti-Zionists — who take up and further Iran’s attempts to make the destruction of the Jewish state ideologically and emotionally more acceptable.

An essential feature of such anti-Zionism is the forgery of the Middle East’s factual history. They cling to the PLO mantra that “Zionism is … organically linked with world imperialism and is opposed to all liberation movements or movements for progress in the world”, to quote the PLO Charter of 1968.

In fact, the opposite is true. Before 1948 Zionism was not promoted but combatted by “world imperialism” — if we mean by that the British government and the Pentagon and State Department in the USA — because at the start of the Cold War it was considered a tool of Moscow.

And in 1946 Zionism was not opposed but supported by the “movements for progress in the world” referred to by the PLO.

This included not only all the Soviet bloc governments but also all those leftist, liberal and conservative forces in the USA that had adopted an anti-Nazi position during the war. In the face of the Shoah, in 1945 all these forces advocated the establishment of a Jewish state.

Moreover, in 1948, when the Arab countries attacked Israel, they came out in defence of this state, while also denouncing antisemites and Nazi collaborators such as the former Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin el-Husseini.

In 1975, the UN General Assembly voted to target Zionism as “a form of racism”. Although this resolution was overturned in 1991, hatred of Israel has remained virulent especially in universities.

It is high time to dispel the miasma that has distorted the study of Middle Eastern history since then.