Daily Telegraph (Australia)
By Wassim Doureihi
THE debate over Hizb ut-Tahrir has proven to be nothing more than a poorly scripted melodrama.
Hizb ut-Tahrir is a global Islamic political party working to re-establish the Islamic Caliphate within the Muslim world.
Since its inception in 1953, Hizb ut-Tahrir has been subject to the severest of repression by tyrants in the Muslim world. Our members have been consistently persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and murdered.
Despite operating under the most horrendous conditions, Hizb ut-Tahrir continues to oppose all forms of tyranny and dictatorship exclusively through intellectual and political means and in fact considers violence a violation of Islamic law.
Hizb ut-Tahrir's courageous stance in mobilising public opinion in the Muslim world has earned it the universal support of Muslim masses and caused widespread consternation among its opponents.
Hizb ut-Tahrir is now being targeted in the West for three primary reasons: The party continues to courageously expose the crimes of Western governments to a global audience; it unrelentingly challenges the West's neo-liberal interventionist policies in the Muslim world and it works to present Islam as an ideological alternative to Western secular capitalism as a model of governance in the Muslim world.
Critics of Hizb ut-Tahrir are desperately seeking to suppress debate. Our opposition to the illegal state of Israel, for instance, is howled down as anti-Semitism, our displeasure at the West's foreign policy labelled subversion, our challenge to Western-backed dictators characterised as rebellion, our work to generate political awareness described as radicalisation and our call for the affairs of the Muslim world to be governed by Islam branded as extremism.
Governments have even lent sympathetic ears to opportunistic individuals parroting the established government narrative by seeking to draw spurious and unfounded links between Hizb ut-Tahrir and recent events in London and Glasgow.
In the last century, Western governments conducted a brutal and unashamedly interventionist policy in the Muslim world which wreaked havoc on local populations through military occupation, economic exploitation and political repression.
But despite the concerted effort to demonise and silence Hizb ut-Tahrir, we will continue a serious and open debate on the way forward for the Muslim world.
* Wassim Doureihi is the media representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir Australia
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