In the weeks leading up to the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Muslim clerics and academics across the Arab world publicly trafficked in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, blaming Israel and American Jews for the attacks that claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans and destroyed New York City’s Twin Towers and a wing of the Pentagon.

Majed Al-Mitri, a Yemini researcher and academic, took to an Arabic television station last week to declare that 9/11 was orchestrated “by the U.S. and by the Jews in a clandestine manner” as a way to target “Islam and the Muslims,” according to a translation of his remarks by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which has been tracking conspiracy theories relating to 9/11 in the lead up to today’s anniversary.

“The US is conducting the greatest distortion campaign in its history,” Yaha Al-Kateb, another Yemini academic, stated in a Sept. 5 television interview in which he referred to the attack as “the alleged 9/11 operation by the so-called Al-Qaeda,” according to MEMRI.

Citing “documents published in some books,” Al-Kateb goes on to speculated that 9/11 is “entirely untrue” and that “the U.S. and Israel had prior knowledge of it.”

Could the 9/11 attack have been stopped, had the Bush team reacted with urgency to the warnings contained in all of those daily briefs? We can’t ever know. And that may be the most agonizing reality of all.