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Christians of Iraq
Contact Links Historical articles Historical pictures Photos of Bombed Churches Home Only this link has access to all News articles
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Islamists Down Under By Lowell Ponte
FrontPageMagazine.comApril 25. 06
"[T]he conflict is so clear, so stark there is no middle ground," said Usman Badar, who in 2005 was President of the Muslim Student Association at Sydney University. "How do you come to middle ground on whether sovereignty belongs to the people or to Allah? You can't."
Schools down under have begun welcoming Badar and other speakers who, as Sydney Morning Herald reporter Miranda Devine wrote on Sunday, "appear to be fully assimilated, second-generation Australians" who wear conventional Western clothing and speak fluently in "broad Australian accents" as well as Arabic.
"But they belong to a political group called Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation) that calls for the creation of a global Islamic state, or caliphate, under strict sharia law," wrote Devine. "The message from these young men is one of division, non-assimilation and rejection of the values of the 'kafir' -- non-Muslims."
This radical Islamist movement now being invited onto campuses in one of America's most dependable allies in the war against terrorism has been banned in Germany, Holland, Russia and many Muslim countries. Once tolerated in Britain, it has, according to Devine, also been banned there. Those familiar with this movement's message, methods and terrorist connections know how dangerous it is.
Muslims living in Western nations "must be aware of the plot of the kafir, the plot of the Western society to enforce on them a palatable Islam," said another Hizb ut-Tahrir spokesman Soadad Doureihi in an April 8 public speech in Bankston, Australia, titled "Should Muslims Subscribe to Australian Values?" (Video of his lecture can be seen here.)
"Secularism is a clear assault on the fundamental belief of a Muslim," Doureihi told his audience of 200 men and 50 women, many of them Muslims. "Democracy is a clear assault on the fundamental belief of a Muslim also."
In the society Doureihi and Hizb ut-Tahrir advocate, in other words, there would be no equal rights for those of other faiths or for women. No speech or writing would be permitted that questions Islam, and no democratic votes would be taken to choose national leaders or determine government policy. All would be controlled by a small group of Muslim theologians, as (despite its rigged, fake elections and figurehead president) it is today in theocratic Iran.
Hizb ut-Tahrir in Australia claims to advocate non-violence. But to judge this tree by its worldwide fruits, this movement radicalized many future terrorists.
These Hizb ut-Tahrir "graduates" include one of the founders of Fatah who, prior to that, was a founder of Hizb ut-Tahrir. Another former Hizb ut-Tahrir member became the "spiritual leader" of Islamic Jihad.
Hizb ut-Tahrir has been the "finishing school" for several top members of Al-Qaeda, the group behind the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. According to terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna of Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, one former Hizb ut-Tahrir member who became a leader of Al-Qaeda is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Think of Hizb ut-Tahrir as a "gateway drug" that seduces young Muslims away from assimilation, then softens their brains and hardens their ideological dogma to forge them into True Believers in the utopian vision of a future Islamo-fascist Third Reich's global domination.
After Hizb ut-Tahrir separates young Muslim sheep and goats from their larger society, the most fanatical goats and follower sheep often are led to contact its ideological fellow travelers. These radical kinsmen in parallel Caliphate movements such as Al-Qaeda then try to recruit and hook the most susceptible youngsters on the "harder stuff" of zealous religious fanaticism, terrorism, assassination, the promise of 72 virgins in Paradise and suicide bombing.
Such are the Islamist "drug pushers" of Hizb ut-Tahrir to which Australian schools are now exposing their Muslim and religiously adrift other students.
At least some of those purpose-craving students will become addicted to the dogma, certitude and comradeship these passionate anti-democratic propagandists offer, and a few will likely use their Australian passports as future agents of global terrorism.
These agents of Hizb ut-Tahrir aim to banish free speech and democracy for the rest of us, but they are eagerly exploiting Australia's freedom and toleration to advance their totalitarian agenda.
What are the tangled roots of Hizb ut-Tahrir and its polarizing ideas?
The movement Hizb ut-Tahrir, as DiscoverTheNetwork.org explains, aims to replace existing governments with theocratic Muslim rule and to bring about worldwide Islamic government under a single ruler called the Caliph.
After the Prophet Muhammad's death, his right-hand man Abu Bakr took the title Kalifa, Arabic for "Deputy," as successor to the Prophet. He became the first of the four "rightly-guided" Caliphs (three of whom were murdered) who ruled with more religious than political authority, like a Muslim half-Pope and half-emperor.
The essential concept of the Caliphate was that one Caliph rules every Muslim on earth, and to him, not the country in which they reside, they owe their highest earthly allegiance. Every Muslim is therefore part of a single "Nation of Islam" under divinely-given Islamic Sharia law. And it is divinely destined that someday the entire world will become Muslim and be ruled by a succession of Caliphs.
Hizb-ut-Tahrir aims to restore and expand the Caliphate, the last vestige of which collapsed when war hero Mustafa Kemal ("Ataturk") and his "Young Turks" overthrew the last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and his underlings in 1923-24.
The eventual worldwide rule of the new Caliph, Al-Khalifah, Hizb ut-Tahrir teaches, will be that of a human being, fallible and prone to sin and error. "The post of the Khaleefah is decided by people and not by Allah."
The Caliph is selected, and can in theory be removed and replaced, but not by a democratic vote of the whole body of believers. This power will be held by the Ummah, "the nation of Muslims," a vague notion by which Hizb ut-Tahrir means an elite committee of the wise and powerful comprised entirely of men. (Hizb ut-Tahrir does not specify how this ruling committee of Islamic scholars and Ayatollahs will be chosen.)
Hizb ut-Tahrir explicitly rejects Western notions of both democracy and capitalism as defective, and as instruments with which the West has colonized and subjugated Islamic nations.
The Muslim world became weak and fell under the hegemony of Western unbelievers, Hizb ut-Tahrir teaches, because the last vestige of the Caliphate was extinguished in 1924. Two of its web site addresses are 1924.org and Khilafah.com. Restoring the Caliphate and expanding its rule to the entire planet, Hizb teaches, will usher in a new global Muslim Golden Age of peace and divine harmony.
The movement al-Hay'at al-Tahrir al-Islami ("the Islamic Society of Liberation") was founded in Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem in 1951 by Sheikh Taqi-ud-deen Al-Nabahani. Al-Nabahani had married into a wealthy family in Lebanon and used that wealth to propagate the party into other Muslim countries. He was a judge on Jerusalem's Islamic appellate court and reportedly "an associate and contemporary" of the anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Sheikh Haji Amin Al-Housseini, who spent much of World War II in Berlin.
Hizb-ut-Tahrir al-Islami ("the Islamic Party of Liberation") emerged as a "political party" from this society in 1952-1953 and was led by Al-Nabahani until his death in 1977. His place was taken by Palestinian cleric Sheikh Abd-el Qadim Zaloom, a former professor at Al-Azhar in Cairo, who led it until his death on April 29, 2003, publicly naming no successor as head of Hizb.
Hizb today reportedly has tens of thousands of secret members across the Muslim world and in at least 40 countries, attracted by its zealous vision of a triumphant Islamic future and their own frustration with today's ascendant Western world.
The "genius" of Al-Nabahani, wrote Heritage Foundation researcher Ariel Cohen, "was in marrying Orthodox Islamist ideology to Leninist strategy and tactics."
Hizb ut-Tahrir, Cohen writes, is a "totalitarian organization, akin to a disciplined Marxist-Leninist party, in which internal dissent is neither encouraged nor tolerated."
A would-be member undergoes two years of indoctrination, becoming a full member only after he "melts with the Party." Members belong to compartmentalized cells and know the identities of only the others in that cell. "When a critical mass of cells is achieved," writes Cohen, "according to its doctrine, Hizb may move to take over a country in preparation for the establishment of the Caliphate."
Hizb-ut-Tahrir was established in the United Kingdom by Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, who joined the party as a teenager in Lebanon during the early 1970s. He also created another organization that aims to create a global Islamic Caliphate, Al Muhajiroun ("The Emigrants," a name he has said "refers to the early followers of the Prophet Muhammad."), which he has led from an office in London.
Al Muhajiroun, the Sheikh has said, was established in Mecca but launched publicly in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with 40 founding members on March 3, 1983, a date chosen because it was "the 59th anniversary of the destruction of the Ottoman Caliphate."
Expelled from Saudi Arabia for radical political activity, the Sheikh arrived in Great Britain on January 14, 1986. He soon began to establish both Al Muhajiroun and Hizb ut-Tahrir on fertile British soil.
In October 2000 the Sheikh co-signed and issued a "Warning to All Jewsin the UK" that "if you support Israel financially, verbally or physically you will become part of the [Middle East] conflict." He, in other words, explicitly warned Jews in democratic Great Britain, the mother of parliaments, that if they opened their mouths in support of Israel, they risked being attacked in England by Islamist terrorists.
The Sheikh in 1999 became chief sponsor in Great Britain for the International Islamic Front (IIF), a group persuading and assisting young British Muslims to undergo "guns and live ammunition" combat training and then go overseas to fight Jihad ("Holy War") in Chechnya and the Balkans.
Osama bin Laden in 1998 issued a fatwa that declared it a Muslim's "individual duty" to kill Americans and he created a new organization called the International (or World) Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.
Sheikh Bakri Mohammad described himself as the head of the "political wing" of IIF with no "structural link" to bin Laden, according to the India newspaper Indian Express, but the Sheikh acknowledged that "the military wing of the International Islamic Front is run by Osama bin Laden."
The very word Islam means "surrender" or "submission" (to Allah). Muslims refer to the combined nations where Islam is the dominant religion as Dar al-Islam, which literally means "the Zone of Submission."
Like Hizb ut-Tahrir, Al Muhajiroun aims to restore the Caliphate, a monolithic form of religious-political rule of all the world's Muslims that existed during the succession of four "rightly guided" Caliphs who ruled after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Every Muslim on Earth would look to this single ruler, and with Islam's global conquest all human beings will become citizens of a single Nation of Islam.
The new Caliph, called Al-Khalifah or "leader" on Al Muhajiroun's web site, "whose foreign policy is to conquer the whole world by Jihad," will thereby bring the dawn of a world of peace, love, economic fairness and divine harmony.
By striving "to establish Al-Khilafah in order that Islam dominates the World (Izhaar ud-Deen) and becomes the World order," reads the web site, Al Muhajiroun teaches that its followers are doing the will of Allah.
Under this coming worldwide "Domination of Islam (Izhaar ul Deen)" people will not necessarily be forced to become Muslims, implied the Al Muhajiroun web site, but they will be taught "to accept it as a political way of life and a solution for their [and society's] problems."
"When the state [of the global Islamic Caliphate] is established, when people see the mercy of Islam," Soadad Doureihi told his Australian audience on April 8, "they embrace Islam in droves."
Australians and others in the West will at best, in other words, either bend their knee to Islam and convert or live the rest of their lives on their knees in dhimmitude as second class citizens with fewer rights and higher taxes than Muslims.
Until that day arrives, the web site frankly has said, one of Al Muhajiroun's tactics will be "To formulate a fifth column as a community pressure group which is well equipped with the Islamic culture e.g. ruling, social, economic, judicial, penal and ritual systems in order to become capable of implementing Islam fully and comprehensively in society."
The weapons to be used to establish global Islamic political power range from debate, media appearances and the law to the funding of Jihadists and recruiting of suicide bombers.
How dangerous is what Al Muhajiroun and its connected Caliphate groups teach young Muslims? On Saturday in New York City a group of Islamist protestors from its offshoot Organization the "Islamic Thinkers Society" staged a protest in front of the Israeli consulate carrying signs depicting an Islamic flag atop the White House and saying: "Islam will Dominate."
"The mushroom cloud is on its way! The real Holocaust is on its way!" chanted the protestors in Arabic, as Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism reported on CNN. "Israel won't last long ... Indeed, Allah will repeat the Holocaust right on the soil of Israel"
"Islam is the fastest growing religion in the UK, with up to two million followers and more than 1,000 mosques across Britain," wrote Ori Golan. "In many cities across Britain, Muslims live in segregated communities, with separate education, social and cultural networks. It is within these closed communities that the extremists find recruits for al Qaeda and other terror groups."
Most British Muslims, of course, are not Anglo-Saxon converts but Islamic immigrants from lands like India, Pakistan, the Middle East and other parts of the world once ruled by the British Empire. Their children, born in the West, are brought up as Muslims and often carry the passports of Western nations.
Osama bin Laden has said that the goal of Al Qaeda is to "unite all Muslims and to establish a government which follows the rule of the Caliphs."
Sheikh Omar claimed to have resigned from Hizb ut-Tahrir on January 16, 1996 over a theological issue. But on the first anniversary of the September 11, 2001 Al-Qaeda terrorist attack on America, Islamist cleric Abu Hamza Al Masri marked the day by scheduling a conference to launch a new organization (reportedly funded by Al Muhajiroun with a six-figure cash donation) to be called the Islamic Council of Britain (ICB). ICB's stated goal is to "implement sharia law in Britain."
The poster advertising this conference at Sheikh al-Masri's Finsbury Park mosque in North London featured a large photograph of the World Trade Center towers, one already ablaze, the other about to be hit by another skyjacked airliner. In large letters the poster read:
"September the 11th 2001: A TOWERING DAY IN HISTORY."
Among the most prominent guests invited by Sheikh al-Masri to attend his conference was the British founder of both this political party and Al Muhajiroun, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad, who reported said: "The people at this conference look at September 11 like a battle, as a great achievement by the mujahideen against the evil superpower. I never praised September 11 after it happened but now I can see why they did it." (Conference flyers described the 19 skyjackers of 9-11 as the "Magnificent 19.")
Of Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda terrorists, Sheikh Omar said: "We don't perceive them as the U.S. perceives them; we see them as a sincere devoted people who stood firm against the invasion of a Muslim country."
Also invited was the British spokesman for Al Muhajiroun, Anjem Choundary. The third such distinguished guest invited to this conference was the British representative of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, Dr. Imran Waheed.
On July 7, 2005, four Islamist terrorist bombs exploded in a coordinated attack in London. Fifty-six people were killed and more than 700 were injured. Some of the bombers had been born and raised in Great Britain but radicalized by Islamist preachers and organizations.
And now, carefully-groomed propagandists for Hizb ut-Tahrir are being invited to sow dragons' teeth into the minds of students in the schools and universities of Australia. Can a crop of Islamist terrorists or dragons be far behind?
"The pushing to integration and assimilation is to get us to think and believe and feel in a certain way that Islam will not condone.," Soadad's brother Wassim, another Hizb ut-Tahrir advocate of imposed global Islamic government, told the Australian audience on April 8. "[I]f governments want to interfere in the individual, personal affairs of any citizen, they are going to create the conditions of civil unrest and chaos like in France."
By Lowell Ponte
FrontPageMagazine.comMr. Ponte co-hosts a national radio talk show Monday through Friday 6-8 PM Eastern Time (3-5 PM Pacific Time) on the Genesis Communications Network. Internet Audio worldwide is at GCNlive .com. The show's live call-in number is 1-800-259-9231. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader's Digest.