It claims to be a peaceful organisation that does not support violent extremism but yet again radical Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir has failed to condemn the death cult Islamic State.
The group rallied against any moves by the Abbott Government to ban them at an “urgent” press conference at the group’s Lakemba headquarters on Thursday night.
Despite an open invitation to every member of federal parliament and the media the group refused to take any questions from the Daily Telegraph or Channel 7.
Hizb ut-Tahrir, which identifies itself as an Islamic political group, has more than 300 members in Australia. It is banned in several Middle Eastern countries and cannot hold rallies in Germany.
Late last year the group’s leader Abu Anas, who was part of the 100-strong crowd on Thursday, said his group believed in “another world order” which they were ready to “sacrifice everything for”.
“They send their troops to Iraq to bomb Iraq to spread democracy. We will send our troops to Australia, to France to Germany,” he said in October. Spokesman Wassim Doureihi delivered a lengthy statement and fielded most of the questions during Thursday’s press conference.
He had previously refused to condemn IS in a TV interview and said allegations his group supported IS were an “outright fabrication”. “Hizb ut-Tahrir is not interested in the superficial politics of condemnation. We refuse to answer questions that heap collective guilty on the Muslim community,” he said.
“Our position on Islamic State is an exclusively Islamic one, adopted in response to a divine obligation of enjoying the good and forbidding the evil, irrespective of the nature or source of that evil. But we will not allow the West to exploit our position for its own duplicitous purposes, rallying the world against ISIS’s crimes when it serves it and turning a blind eye when it doesn’t.”
Mr Doureihi said the group did not support the Islamic caliphate that IS is trying to establish in Iraq and Syria but would not condemn young Muslim Australians who were travelling there to fight.
“ISIS or other groups, Muslim or non-Muslim, we saw the example of the IRA, example of the Basques in Spain, are born as a set of structural conditions that give rise to great injustice and people choose to respond. Some will do it politically, some will do it culturally, some will do it violently,” he said.
“ISIS is born as a reaction to the injustice imposed in the Muslim world.” He said the government was making his group, and the wider Muslim community, the scapegoats for his “dog whistle” politics. Mr Doureihi would not comment on if they group would go underground if banned. “Hizb ut-Tahrir is a party of ideas. Is Tony Abbott willing to ban ideas? What will he ban? It’s laughable,” he said.
“At this point it’s purely fluff. We will address it when it becomes reality.
“We are too extreme for the moderates and too moderate for the extremists.” Mr Doureihi said Muslims were being “drastically dehumanised” and had to “constantly justify our existence” and his community was “under siege”. He said the Muslim community was painted by politicians and the media as a “black entity” that did not belong in Australian society.