Lisa Macdonald, Sydney

A July 30 emergency public meeting titled “The war on Islam intensifies” attracted 300 people to the Auburn Town Hall.

Soadad Doureihi from Hizb ut-Tahrir, the meeting’s organiser, described the oppression of Muslim populations by “Western colonialism”, including the occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, as the root cause of terrorist actions like those in London on July 7. Muslims have a duty to resist such occupations, he said, and all Australians should “hold their government to account”.

Hizb ut-Tahrir has been in the media spotlight for the last few weeks after unsubstantiated claims, denied by the British wing of the group, that it is linked to the London bombings. Doureihi said that, despite every Muslim organisation in Australia publicly condemning the London bombings, the government was not satisfied. They want to force us all to take responsibility and apologise for all terrorist attacks, he said, so they can intimidate Muslims everywhere.

Responding to PM John Howard’s demand that all Muslim leaders in Australia publicly condemn “extremist” Muslims, Doureihi said: “They try to force us to accept a new version of Islam, with invented labels such as ‘moderate’, ‘extreme’ or ‘fundamentalist’. We must make it unacceptable for Muslims to carry these labels: we have Muslim and non-Muslim.”

He pointed out that ASIO’s anti-terrorism laws are being widely used to persecute Australia’s Islamic community. “Muslims are forced to declare where their allegiances lie, while Anglo-Saxon mass murderers continue to kill.” Nationalism, too, is being used against Muslims, he said. “They try to tell us we are Australian Muslims rather than Muslims living in Australia. But our allegiance is not with the ones who found this land, but with the one who created it, Allah.”

Doureihi described Australia as one of the many places where Muslims are fighting attempts to crush their culture and force their “assimilation” through fear and intimidation. Islamic values are under threat in the West, he said, and Muslims need to maintain unity against attempts to impose “secular capitalist” values upon them.

From Green Left Weekly, August 10, 2005.
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