Press TV - The September 11, 2001 attacks were part of an Islamophobic project by Israel to replace communism with “Islamic terrorism” as a new global threat which would allow Tel Aviv and its allies to further their agenda, says an American scholar.

Kevin Barrett, a political commentator in Madison, Wisconsin, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV while discussing a survey of US Muslims and the new challenges they are facing under the presidency of Donald Trump.

The Pew research showed that almost three-quarters of US Muslims see Trump as unfriendly toward them.

Sixty-four percent of those with a more distinct Muslim identity, like a head covering for women, noted that they had recently experienced some sort of discrimination and nearly half of them say they had the same problem last year, such as being treated with distrust, threatened or called an offensive name.

“Trump rode onto the office on a wave of Islamophobia that he helped accelerate himself,” said Barrett. “This Islamophobia has kind of been the basis of American political cohesion since September 11, 2001 attacks.”

The analyst argued that Israel, the US and their allies orchestrated the 9/11 “public relations operation” and used it as an excuse to replace terrorism with communism as “the next great civilizational enemy.”

“So 9/11 was part of a project to create an inter-generation and essentially permanent hatred of Muslim in the US population and this was going to be the new orientation of the West,” Barrett said.

Referring to Israel as the “main beneficiary” of the attack and the growing trend of Islamophobia, Barret noted that the attack was also used “to destabilize the Middle East on behalf of Western economic interests.”

The scholar said Trump, although not knowledgeable about world affairs, had “good instincts” in populist policies and knew that the Islamophobic approach would eventually lure in voters.

During the campaign, Trump said “Islam hates us,” proposed “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” floated the idea of monitoring US mosques and officially re-introduced the term “Islamic terrorism” in the American political parlance.

And, just seven days after taking office on January 20, Trump signed an executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US.

Barrett noted that American Muslims needed to take a more active role in exposing the reality of this “anti-Islam scapegoating operation” that sought to spread Islamophobia by blaming Muslims for a series of false-flag operations.