US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s recent accusation against Muslims, saying that they cheered for the September 11, 2001 attacks, is a “mangled” version of what really took place on that day, American scholar Kevin Barrett says.

The Republican presidential frontrunner said on Saturday that not only Arab Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 attacks, but Muslims across the world celebrated the fall of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

“Donald Trump is conveying interesting versions of urban legends and some actual facts about what followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,” Barrett told Press TV on Sunday.

“Israeli intelligence agents were caught wildly celebrating the airplane crashes and then the explosive destructions of the Twin Towers,” Barrett said, adding that the agents were working in coordination with people already placed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s terror watch list.

“These dancing Israelis were cheering wildly, flicking cigarette lighters in front of the burning and then exploding Twin Towers and they were then arrested, they were found with thousands of dollars in cash stuffed in their socks,” he added.

After failing lie detector tests, Barrett said, the agents flew back to Israel, where they appeared on TV and boasted that they were sent to New York to “document the event.”

“That is an official admission from Israeli intelligence agents that they had full knowledge of the destruction of the World Trade Center,” Barrett added. “So Trump mangled this story.”

“Well, that set off a chain of controversy in the American media because there were no Muslims who were celebrating anything in New Jersey,” the analyst stated.

Netanyahu also cheered 9/11 attacks

Elsewhere in his remarks, Barrett said that even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was among those who were heartened by the attacks.

“His first reaction was he said ‘it is very good!’ but none of this will ever be reported in the Western Zionist-controlled mainstream media,” he added.

Professor Barrett dismissed allegations by Western media that people in Palestine were cheering the attacks, accusing them of passing off older videos as evidence.

“In one case a Zionist news crew managed to convince some Palestinian children to cheer and seem to be celebrating in return for candy,” he noted.

Although Osama bin Laden repeatedly denied any connection to the attacks, Israel and the US designed them and tried to convince the world that al-Qaeda was behind the vicious act, Barrett said.

“So once again Donald Trump’s words are pointing towards a true story but in both cases the story is pointing towards the real authors of the massacre of September 11, 2001, and that is the Israeli Zionists,” the scholar concluded.

Trump has come under fire for proposing a plan to establish IDs and a database to track American Muslims.

In the past five days, the real-estate mogul’s support has fallen by 12 points. The decline in his popularity among Republicans is the biggest since he leapt to the top of the field in July, according to the poll released on Friday.

However, Trump is not backing down from his controversial claim that Muslims cheered as the Twin Towers fell on 9/11.

He has told NBC News that he has "the world’s greatest memory" and everybody knows about this, insisting that his claims were valid and flaunted the support he said he received on his Twitter page.

Trump also demanded apologies from those people who dared to doubt his recollection of the 9/11 attacks. “I want an apology,” he tweeted. "Many people have tweeted that I am right.”