In its pathological hatred of Jews, Islamism is indistinguishable from Nazism. By reminding the world of this fact, Abu Hamza has done us all a favor.

As some readers in New York will be aware, the Egyptian-born Muslim preacher is standing trial at the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court, on terrorism charges that include nine counts of soliciting to murder Jews and other non-Muslims.

Minus the prosthetic hooks that normally replace his hands – they were blown off along with one eye in a bomb-making accident before he settled in London – Mr. Hamza looks less threatening than he did in the 570 video and 2,700 audio tapes of his sermons, some of which the court has been watching and hearing. Like anybody else, he is innocent until proved guilty as charged.

But the content of those sermons leaves no doubt that Mr. Hamza’s anti-Semitism is of a kind that would have fitted into the pages of Der Sturmer, the pornographic Nazi newspaper, even down to his macabre sense of humor.

Darwin, he claimed, invented the theory of evolution because of the Jews, adding in his inimitable English: “The source of man is monkey? No, the source of monkey is man and he’s a Jew.” Nazi caricatures commonly depicted Jews as hideous, ape-like creatures in order to dehumanize them.

“Our houses are full of Jews,” according to Mr. Hamza. “In the television, in the radio, in the books of your children, in the mind of the children, in the chest [i.e. hearts] of your children and your wives and some of you.”

Jews, he claimed, “know how to control … our leaders.” Israel, he told his audiences, was blackmailing leaders in the West, many of whom were homosexuals. Homosexuals should be stoned to death, according to Mr. Hamza. Christians, too, are enemies of Islam. Tourists are “shaitan” (Satan) and legitimate targets. Indeed, all “kaffirs,” or non-believers, are fair game for “shaheed” (martyrs), or suicide bombers.

But his greatest hatred is reserved for Jews. It is a Muslim’s religious duty to destroy the Jews because of their “treachery, blasphemy, and filth,” he stated in a sermon six years ago.

“Allah has cursed them,” Mr. Hamza declared. “This is why he send Hitler for them. Jews they have nowhere to go, they are going to be buried in Palestine, all of them.”

This is not the voice of a madman. This is the authentic voice of Islamism.

Mr. Hamza seems to be well aware that many Westerners dismiss his views as deranged, and that suits him just fine. Discussing suicide attacks, he claims that “the enemies of Islam” are intimidated and despair, saying: “They’re crazy, they’re crazy, what can we do?”

Mr. Hamza’s views are not crazy, but standard Islamist political theology. Like millions of others, he is working to establish a global caliphate, with a Muslim in the White House.

When he allegedly promised “martyrs,” or suicide bombers, “the mercy of Allah, no fear upon him, 72 beautiful women in paradise,” he was merely echoing countless Islamist clerics who use the Koran to incite terrorism.

The similarity between Islamist and Nazi anti-Semitism is, or should be, unsurprising. One of the main sources of Islamist anti-Semitism, after all, was Nazi ideology, which provided a model for the Baathist and other Arab regimes. Hence Holocaust denial is commonplace in Muslim culture, as the West has recently been reminded in the case of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Less well known is the fact that the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, wrote a pseudo-scholarly book denying the Holocaust while in Moscow.

What seems to be difficult for many people in Britain to grasp is that such murderous anti-Semitism is being preached every day in the heart of our cities. Abu Hamza is not an alien from outer space, but was a pillar of the Muslim community during the years when he preached at the Finsbury Park Mosque. After police closed the mosque, he continued to preach in the street outside, in English.

At these open-air sermons, he was surrounded by young heavies who kept non-Muslims at arm’s length, but he made little attempt to hide his activities. When the police finally arrested him and removed evidence from his house more than a year ago, they found an 11-volume manual of terrorism, the Encyclopedia of the Afghani Jihad, which Mr. Hamza did not bother to dispose of even after it had been removed and examined by the police on a previous raid. He is careless and defiant, because he is confident of ultimate victory.

Here in Europe, not a day passes without gestures of appeasement. Iran may be referred to the U.N. Security Council for pursuing nuclear weapons, but not threatened with sanctions. The Dutch army does not want to serve in Afghanistan because it does not like the “American style” of counter-insurgency operations. In France, Muslim youths are to be rewarded for rioting by lavish sums of taxpayers’ money.

What most Europeans do not care to admit is that they are not just appeasing Muslims: They are appeasing anti-Semites. The term “Islamo-fascist,” commonly applied to extreme Islamists, is actually too mild, because anti-Semitism was not integral to fascism; more accurate would be “Islamo-Nazi.”

Abu Hamza, as regular readers of this column will know, is my neighbor. Every time I pass his house on the way to the mailbox, I feel an uncanny sense of nameless horror. I knew I had felt it before, but I could not remember where until his trial opened last week. It suddenly dawned on me that I felt the same way a year ago when I visited the new Holocaust memorial in Berlin, built on the site of Hitler’s bunker. They said Hitler was a madman, too. But he almost succeeded in his aim of creating a Europe without Jews. President Ahmadinejad says he wants a Middle East without Jews. Abu Hamza says Allah has cursed the Jews. Which part of the Islamo-Nazi program do Europeans not understand?