An approximation of Hitler’s hellish vision came true on Sept. 11. But it was not Nazis or even neo-Nazis who carried out the attack - the deadliest terror strike in history allegedly came at the hands of foreign Muslim extremists.

Still, in the aftermath of the slaughter, white supremacists in America and Europe applauded the suicide attacks and praised Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the massacre. An official of America’s premier neo-Nazi group, the National Alliance, said he wished his own members had "half as much testicular fortitude." Neo-fascist youth in France celebrated the event that evening with champagne at the headquarters of the extreme right Front National. German neo-Nazis, some wearing chequered Palestinian headscarves, rejoiced at street demonstrations while burning an American flag. Jan Kopal, head of the Czech National Social Bloc, declared at a rally in Prague that bin Laden was "an example for our children." Horst Mahler, a former left-wing terrorist and prominent member of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) in Germany, proclaimed his solidarity with the terrorists and said America had gotten what it deserved.

What’s going on here? For decades, American extremists have lumped Arabs in with dark-skinned "mud people." In Europe, neo-Nazis have been implicated in countless xenophobic attacks on Arabs, Turks and other Muslims.

The peculiar bond between white nationalist groups and certain Muslim extremists derives in part from a shared set of enemies: Jews, the United States, race-mixing, ethnic diversity. It is also very much a function of the shared belief that they must shield their own peoples from the corrupting influence of foreign cultures. Both sets of groups also have a penchant for far-flung conspiracy theories that caricature Jewish power.

But there is more. Even before World War II, Western fascists began to forge ideological and operational ties to Islamic extremists. Over the years, these contacts between Nazis and Muslim nationalists developed into dangerous networks that have been implicated in a number of bloody terrorist attacks in Europe and the Middle East. Wealthy Arab regimes have financed extremists in Europe and the United States, just as Western neo-Nazis have helped to build Holocaust denial machinery in the Arab world. Just last year, a meeting sponsored by a US Holocaust denial group brought together Arab and Western extremists in Jordan. And after the Sept. 11 attacks, a spate of articles by American neo-Nazis and white supremacists appeared in Islamic publications and Web sites.

Although links like these illustrate the ties between Muslim extremists and Americans, such ties are far more developed in Europe. But since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, there are a number of signs that an operational alliance may be taking shape in the United States as well.

Perhaps the best contemporary snapshot of this Nazi-Islamist extremist axis comes in the person of one Ahmed Huber, a neo-Nazi whose home in a suburb of Berne was raided by Swiss police on Nov. 8, after US officials identified him as a linchpin in the financial machinations of Osama bin Laden. The raid was part of a coordinated law enforcement dragnet that seized records from the offices of Al Taqwa, an international banking group. Al Taqwa, which literally means "Fear of God," had been channelling funds to Muslim extremist organisations around the world, including Hamas, a group active in the Israeli-occupied territories.

Huber, a former journalist who converted to Islam and changed his first name from Albert, served on the board of Nada Management, a component of Al Taqwa. After Swiss authorities froze the firm’s assets and questioned Huber, the 74-year-old denounced Washington for doing the bidding of "Jew Zionists" who "rule America."

A well-known figure in European neofascist circles, Huber "sees himself as a mediator between Islam and right-wing groups," according to Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Portraits of Hitler and SS chief Heinrich Himmler adorn the walls of Huber’s office, alongside photos of Islamic political leaders and a picture of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the present-day boss of the French Front National.

In accordance with his self-proclaimed mission to unite Muslim fundamentalists and extreme right-wing forces in Europe and North America, Huber has travelled widely and proselytised at numerous gatherings. In Germany, he speaks often at events hosted by the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, which publicly welcomed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Huber also befriended British author David Irving and other Holocaust deniers while frequenting "revisionist" conclaves.

At the same time, Huber made the rounds of the radical Islamic circuit in Western countries. In June 1994, he spoke about the "evils of the Jews" at a mosque in Potomac, Maryland (just outside Washington, D.C.), where videotapes of Huber’s speeches are reportedly on sale. During a subsequent visit to Chicago, he attended a private assembly that brought together, in Huber’s words, "the authentic Right and the fighters for Islam." Huber told journalist Richard Labeviere that "major decisions were taken [in Chicago]. ... [T]he reunification is under way."

Huber acknowledges meeting al-Qaeda operatives on several occasions at Muslim conferences in Beirut, Brussels and London. He has been quoted in the Swiss media as saying that bin Laden’s associates "are very discreet, well-educated and highly intelligent people."

Described as "the financial heart of the Islamist economic apparatus," Al Taqwa is intertwined with the Muslim Brotherhood, a longstanding, far-right cult whose emblem is a Koran crossed by a sword. The influence of the Brotherhood extends throughout the Muslim world, where it vigorously, and often violently, opposes secular Arab regimes. In 1981, partisans of the Muslim Brotherhood were implicated in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Members of Islamic Jihad, an extremist sect closely associated with the Brotherhood, were also involved in the Sadat assassination. By the early 1990s, Islamic Jihad would closely ally itself with bin Laden’s al Qaeda.

The roots of the Muslim Brotherhood and, in many ways, the Nazi-Muslim axis go back to the organisation’s formation in Egypt in 1928. Marking the start of modern political "Islamic fundamentalism," the Brotherhood from the outset envisioned a time when an Islamic state would prevail in Egypt and other Arab countries. The growth of the Muslim Brotherhood coincided with the rise of fascist movements in Europe - a parallel noted by Muhammad Sa’id al-’Ashmawy, former chief justice of Egypt’s High Criminal Court, who decried "the perversion of Islam" and "the fascistic ideology" that infuses the world view of the Brothers.

Youssef Nada, current board chairman of Al Taqwa, had joined the armed branch of the Muslim Brotherhood as a young man in Egypt during World War II. Nada and several of his cohorts in the Sunni Muslim fraternity were recruited by German military intelligence. Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian schoolteacher who founded the Muslim Brotherhood, also collaborated with spies of the Third Reich.

Advocating a pan-Islamic insurgency in British-controlled Palestine, the Brotherhood proclaimed their support for the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, in the late 1930s. The Grand Mufti, the preeminent religious figure among Palestinian Muslims, was the most notable Arab leader to seek an alliance with Nazi Germany.

Although he loathed Arabs (he once described them as "lacquered half-apes who ought to be whipped"), Hitler understood that he and the Mufti shared the same rivals - the British, the Jews and the Communists. They met in Berlin, where the Mufti lived in exile during the war. The Mufti agreed to help organise a special Muslim division of the Waffen SS. Powerful radio transmitters were put at the Mufti’s disposal so that his pro-Axis propaganda could be heard throughout the Arab world.

After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Grand Mufti fled to Egypt. His arrival in 1946 was a precursor to a steady stream of Third Reich veterans who chose Cairo as a postwar hideout, including former SS Captain Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann’s chief deputy. Convicted in absentia for war crimes, Brunner would later reside in Damascus, where he served as a security advisor for the Syrian government.

During this period, the Grand Mufti maintained close relations with the burgeoning Nazi exile community in Cairo, while cultivating ties to right-wing extremists in the United States and other countries. H. Keith Thompson, a New York-based businessman and Nazi activist, was a confidant of the Mufti. "I did a couple of jobs for him, getting some documents from files that were otherwise unavailable," Thompson acknowledged in an interview.

Thompson also carried on a lively correspondence with Johannes von Leers, one of the Third Reich’s most prolific Jew-baiters, who converted to Islam and changed his name to Omar Amin after he took up residence in Cairo in 1955. "If there is any hope to free the world from Jewish tyranny," Amin wrote Thompson, "it is with the Moslems, who stand steadfastly against Zionism, Colonialism and Imperialism." Formerly Goebbels’ right-hand man, Amin became a top official in the Egyptian Information Ministry, which employed several European fascists who churned out hate literature and anti-Jewish broadcasts.

Another German expatriate, Louis Heiden, alias Louis Al-Hadj, translated Hitler’s Mein Kampf into Arabic. The Egyptian government also published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous anti-Semitic forgery that purports to reveal a Jewish master plan for taking over the world. A staple of Nazi propaganda, the Protocols also are quoted in Article 32 of the charter of Hamas, the hard-line Palestinian fundamentalist group that is supported by the Muslim Brotherhood even though Muslim scholars say such views are an anathema to mainstream Islam.

After Israel’s overwhelming victory in the Six Day War in June 1967, a mood of desperate militancy engulfed the Palestinian refugee camps. Eager to continue their vendetta against the Jews, several right-wing extremists subsequently joined the Hilfskorp Arabien ("Auxiliary Corps Arabia"), which was advertised in the Munich-based Deutsche National-Zeitung, a pro-Nazi newspaper, in 1968.

The following year, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked several commercial aeroplanes. When three PFLP members stood trial after blowing up an Israeli jet in Zurich, the legal costs for their defence were paid by Francois Genoud, an elusive Swiss banker described by the London Observer as "one of the world’s leading Nazis." Genoud had previously picked up the tab for Adolf Eichmann’s legal defence, and a number of other Nazi war criminals and Arab terrorists would also benefit from his largesse. Where did the money come from? According to European press accounts, Genoud was managing the hidden Swiss treasure of the Third Reich, most of which had been stolen from Jews.

After World War II, Genoud served as the financial advisor to the Grand Mufti. In 1958, the Swiss Nazi set up the Arab Commercial Bank in Geneva to manage the war chest of the Algerian National Liberation Front, whose partisans were fighting to free their country from French colonial rule. Several Third Reich veterans, including Maj. Gen. Otto Ernst Remer, who had served as Hitler’s bodyguard, smuggled weapons to the Algerian rebels, while other German advisors provided military instruction.

In addition to brokering arms sales to Arab militants, Genoud helped subsidise terrorist networks in Europe and the Arab world. This financier of fascism waited until the statute of limitations ran out before admitting that he had personally written and sent ransom notes demanding $5 million to the German airline Lufthansa and several news services after PFLP terrorists hijacked another jet in 1972. That same year, the Black September organisation murdered nine Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. When Black September leader Hassan Salameh needed medical attention, Genoud arranged for him to be treated at a private clinic in Lausanne.

After bombing four US Army bases in West Germany in 1982, Odfried Hepp, a young neo-Nazi renegade, went underground and joined the Tunis-based Palestine Liberation Front (PLF). Hepp, one of West Germany’s most wanted terrorists, was arrested in June 1985 while entering the apartment of a PLF member in Paris. Four months later, PLF commandos seized the Achille Lauro cruise ship and murdered Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound Jewish American. Included on the PLF’s list of prisoners to be exchanged for the Achille Lauro hostages was the name of Odfried Hepp.

Islamic fundamentalism got a tremendous boost when the Ayatollah Khomeini toppled the Shah during the 1979 Iranian revolution. The Ayatollah’s description of the United States and the Soviet Union as "the twin Satans" dovetailed neatly with the "Third Position" politics of many European and American neofascists, an ideology that rejects both American capitalism and Soviet Communism. Some white supremacists also shared Khomeini’s dream of launching a "holy war" against what was seen as decadent, Western-style democracy. When Iran issued a call for the assassination of author Salmon Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, several neo-Nazi groups supported the Iranian fatwa.

Far-right fanatics also hailed the 1983 suicide car-bombing by Iranian-backed Shiite terrorists that killed 271 US Marines in Beirut. The British National Front had nothing but praise for Khomeini’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards: "Their belief in their cause is so strong that they will run through mine fields unarmed to attack enemy positions; their ideals are so all-consuming that they will drive truck bombs into enemy camps knowing full well their [own] death is inevitable. ... This power, this contempt for death, is the stuff of which victories are made."

In 1987, French police cordoned off the Iranian embassy in Paris and demanded that a magistrate be allowed to interrogate Wahid Gordji, an Iranian official suspected of orchestrating a series of bombings that rocked the French capital during the previous a year. French investigators got on to Gordji’s trail after they discovered a check for 120,000 francs (about $20,000) that he had written to Ogmios, a neo-Nazi publisher and bookstore in Paris. The money was used to underwrite a slick catalogue promoting The Myth of the Jewish Holocaust and similar titles. But the Iranian government rebuffed the French authorities who wanted to question Gordji. The six-month embassy stand-off was finally resolved after French officials met with representatives of a group called "The Friends of Wahid Gordji" a group which included the redoubtable Nazi banker Francois Genoud.

Links between white supremacists and the Iranian government continued after Khomeini’s death in 1989. On several occasions in recent years, American neo-Nazi chieftain William Pierce has been interviewed by Radio Teheran.

US white supremacists have also snuggled up to Iran’s archenemy, Saddam Hussein. During that 1991 war, Oklahoma Ku Klux Klan leader Dennis Mahon organised a small rally in Tulsa in support of Saddam. Mahon says he later received a couple of hundred dollars in an unmarked envelope from the Iraqi government.

In addition, shortly before the war, German neo-Nazis solicited support from Iraq for an anti-Zionist legion composed of far-right mercenaries from several European countries. The members of this so-called international "Freedom Corps" pretentiously strutted around Baghdad in SS uniforms. But as soon as bombs started to fall on the Iraqi capital, the neo-Nazi volunteers scurried back to Europe.

On June 28, 2000, the Times of London reported that Libyan leader Muammar Ghaddafi had ordered the deposit of $25 million into a bank in Carinthia, the Austrian province governed by Jorg Haider, de facto leader of the far-right Freedom Party. (The Freedom Party is an immigrant-bashing organisation that is home to many neo-Nazis and former Nazis and has downplayed German war atrocities.) Colonel Ghaddafi’s cash gift - which Haider described as "Christmas for Austria" - was meant to ease the strain of sanctions imposed on Austria by the European Union after the Freedom Party joined Austria’s national governing coalition.

This was the second rabbit Haider pulled from his hat as a result of two private forays to Tripoli, where he met Ghaddafi. After his first Libyan excursion, Haider announced he was tackling Austria’s high gas prices by arranging for Libyan gasoline to be sold in Carinthia at a discount. News photos showed Haider, the Porsche-driving populist, beaming as he pumped gas for motorists.

Links between Libya and the European far right have been scrutinised in several parliamentary and judicial probes in Italy. One Italian judicial inquiry found that the Libyan embassy in Rome had provided money to aid the escape of Italian terrorist suspect Mario Tuti shortly after the bombing of an express train near Florence in 1974. Tuti was later captured and sentenced to a lengthy prison term for orchestrating the attack, which killed 12 people.

Ghaddafi’s financial largesse and his militant anti-Zionism has generated support for the Libyan regime among right-wing extremists around the world, including in Great Britain, where the Green Book, Ghaddafi’s political manifesto, was promoted by the neo-Nazi National Front. In 1984, according to former British Nazi leader Ray Hill (who later renounced racism and worked with anti-racists), the Libyan People’s Bureau put up money for a special anti-Semitic supplement to the National Front’s monthly magazine. In addition, Ghaddafi’s government picked up the tab for several junkets so that neofascists from England, France, Canada, the Netherlands and several other countries could visit the Libyan capital.

Col. Ghaddafi is also widely admired by white supremacists in the United States. The Green Book has been featured as the top online book on the Web site of the American Front, whose professed aim is "to secure National Freedom and Social Justice for the White people of North America." Asserting that he is "against race mixing," American Front leader James Porazzo praises Libya and says that his group has much in common ideologically with Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, which has its own links to Ghaddafi. Porazzo also says he has "great respect for the actions of Hamas and Hezbollah," two radical Islamist groups involved in suicide bombings.

The Philadelphia-based American Front thinks highly of Osama bin Laden, too, describing him as "one of ZOG [Zionist Occupation Government, the name many extremists give to the federal government, which they believe is run by Jews] and the New World Order’s biggest enemies." And it is not alone. Wolfgang Droege, one of 17 Canadian racists who travelled on a "fact-finding mission" to Libya in 1989, is similarly enamoured of bin Laden, seeing parallels between bin Laden’s struggle and others supporting "racial nationalism" in North America.

While they wouldn’t want bin Laden, or anyone of non-European descent, living next door, leaders of the hard-core racist movement in the United States have seized upon the Sept. 11 attacks as an opportunity to expand their strategic alliance with Islamic radicals under the pretext of supporting Palestinian rights. After hijacked aeroplanes demolished the World Trade Centre and damaged the Pentagon, a number of Muslim newspapers published a flurry of articles by American white supremacists ranting against Israel and the Jews. Anti-Zionist commentary by neo-Nazi David Duke appeared on the front page of the Oman Times, for instance, and on an extremist Web site based in Pakistan (www.tanzeen.com). Another opinion piece by Duke ran in Muslims, a New York-based English-language weekly, which also featured a lengthy critique of US foreign policy by William Pierce, head of the rabidly racist National Alliance. In the wake of Sept. 11, several American neo-Nazi web sites also started to offer links to Islamic Web sites.

The psychological dynamics that propel the actions of Islamic terrorists have much in common with the mental outlook of neo-Nazis. Both glorify violence as a regenerative force and both are willing to slaughter innocents in the name of creating a new social order.

American extremists who claim that Jews fabricated the Holocaust to discredit Hitler and to justify the dispossession of Palestinians have made common cause on the propaganda front with jihadists from the Middle East. At the forefront of this collaborative effort is the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), the leading promoter of Holocaust denial in the United States.

Founded in 1978, the Southern California-based IHR distributes books, pamphlets, audio and videotapes that purport to prove the Holocaust never happened. These "assassins of memory," as French literary historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet calls the Holo-hoaxers, also publish the Journal of Historical Review, which tries mightily to impress its readers with footnotes and other scholarly trappings. A recent issue spoke breathlessly of a "white-hot trend: the rapid growth of Holocaust revisionism, fuelled by increasing cooperation between Muslims and Western revisionists, across the Islamic world."

Early last year, the IHR organised a conference on "Zionism and Revisionism" that was set for Beirut that March. Billed as an opportunity for North American and European extremists to meet their counterparts in the Islamic world, the event was delayed and relocated due to diplomatic pressure from the United States and Europe. An open letter signed by 14 leading Arab intellectuals also denounced the conference, which was eventually held in Amman, Jordan. The featured speaker at this scaled-down meeting, hosted locally by the Jordanian Writers’ Federation, was French negationist Robert Faurisson, a longtime IHR advisor, who told a sympathetic audience that "Hitler never ordered or allowed the killing of anyone on account of his or her race or religion" and that "the Germans suffered, in reality, a fate far worse than that of the Jews."

Driven by the proliferation of neo-Nazi propaganda and antagonism toward Israel, Holocaust denial has gained widespread acceptance across the Arab world in recent years. It’s no coincidence that commentary on the IHR Web site is translated and posted in Arabic, as well as in German and English. IHR director Mark Weber takes pride in the fact that he and other "revisionists," as they like to call themselves, have been interviewed on Iranian state radio. Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist regime has granted refuge to several European Holocaust-deniers, who were convicted of hate speech crimes in their home countries. Jürgen Graf, an IHR editorial advisor, fled to Teheran rather than serve a 15-month sentence in a Swiss prison.

A key IHR ally among Muslim extremists is Ahmed Rami, a former Moroccan army officer who fled his native country after joining a failed coup attempt against King Hassan in 1972. Today Rami runs Radio Islam, a Stockholm-based neo-Nazi propaganda outfit. In addition to articles such as "USA’s Rulers: They are all Jews," the Web site of Radio Islam carries the full text of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

For many Palestinians, denying the Holocaust is an effective way to reject any Jewish claim to Israel. Columbia University professor Edward Said, a Palestinian American, laments the proliferation of this tendency among Arabs. "If we expect Israeli Jews not to use the Holocaust to justify appalling human rights abuses of the Palestinian people," Said says, "we too have to go beyond such idiocies as saying that the Holocaust never took place."

Holocaust denial has become increasingly common in leading newspapers in Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria and other Arab countries, where official thinking is reflected in tightly controlled national media.

Of all the Arab nations involved in promoting anti-Semitic propaganda, Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most egregious offender. In the late 1970s, for instance, the Saudi government retained the services of American neo-Nazi William Grimstead as a Washington lobbyist. During this period, the Saudi royal family lavished funds on numerous Sunni fundamentalist organisations, including the Pakistan-based World Muslim Congress (WMC), which was headed by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the anti-Semitic Nazi collaborator, until his death in 1974.

A few years later, the WMC mailed Holocaust denial literature to every member of the US Congress and the British parliament. Issah Nakleh, a Palestinian writer affiliated with the WMC, became a fixture at IHR conferences in the United States and a regular contributor to the Journal of Historical Review. Nakleh was also well known to readers of The Spotlight, the anti-Semitic weekly published by the IHR’s now-defunct parent organisation, the Liberty Lobby. Acknowledging their political kinship, WMC secretary-general Dr. Inamullah Khan, a trusted advisor to the Saudi royal family, sent a letter to The Spotlight, praising its "superb in-depth analysis" and stating that the paper deserved "the thanks of all right-minded people."