London, UK, 29 October 2008 – Earlier this month, the Sunday Times was forced to publish a humiliating retraction of baseless allegations it published in an August 2007 article by the then Conservative Shadow Home Secretary David Davis.

Commenting on the retraction, Taji Mustafa, media representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain said, "The current Tory front bench clearly believes the infamous maxim that ‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it’ . Not only David Davis, but David Cameron, Dame Pauline Neville-Jones and other Tory front benchers have repeatedly made false allegations about Hizb ut-Tahrir, and by blindly publishing these the Sunday Times has associated itself with the anti-Islamic propaganda machine.”

“The Conservative party has developed its policy towards Muslims generally and Hizb ut-Tahrir specifically based upon arguments from a coterie of hard right anti-Islamic think tanks such as Policy Exchange, Civitas and the shadowy Vigil. There are parallels with the US prior to the Bush Presidency and the rise of the Project for the New American Century and their liberal totalitarian views. This is hardly surprising since David Cameron was flown off to meet Rupert Murdoch earlier this year – an Australian-American billionaire oligarch (as opposed to a Russian one) famous for his neoconservative views.”

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Notes to Editors:

Full text – Sunday Times Correction 12/10/08

An opinion piece (The wrong voice for Muslim Britain, News Review, August 5, 2007) stated that Hizb ut-Tahrir (HuT) wants to set up a caliphate in Britain, that it had allowed comments on its website describing the Glasgow airport and Haymarket bomb attacks as a “welcoming treat for the newly formed Brown cabinet”, and that Mohammed Babar, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were members of HuT. In fact, HuT’s publications only call for the reestablishment of the caliphate in the Muslim world and we accept that there were no such comments about the bomb attacks on its website. HuT has always denied that Babar, al-Zarqawi and Mohammed were members of HuT.