Islamic political party, Hizb ut-Tahrir, have issued an open letter to the editor of the Daily Mirror after the newspaper published an article accusing the group of having links with British ISIS fighter Mohammed Emwazi, aka “Jihadi John”.
The following letter was published on HT’s website authored by the group’s media representative, Yahya Nisbet:
“Dear Editor,
As the media representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain, I write to you in respect of the many false and sloppy aspects of your recent article published on 2 January 2018, entitled “Tory Minister backs free speech for extremist group that ‘inspired Jihadi John”.
It is categorically untrue that Mohammed Emwazi had any links with Hizb ut-Tahrir – any more than any other passer-by in the street. This, I suspect, you know full well, so you employed the ridiculously dishonest journalistic device of surrounding your accusation with quotation marks, presumably in the hope that most readers will not notice such a shallow attempt to avoid publishing a libellous and downright lie.
Furthermore, you attribute your false accusation to an organisation who merely speculate that he happened to attend a London university that allowed on-campus panels which included members of Hizb ut-Tahrir as guest speakers. This source relies upon other newspaper articles which make completely untrue accusations about Hizb ut-Tahrir – referencing a man known for his desperation to make any attention-grabbing and spurious claim, regardless of the truth, as part of his work with a thoroughly discredited quango with a history of spreading lies.
Your article then repeats the lie that Hizb ut-Tahrir joined forces with al-Qaeda and that the party has been linked to violent attacks. You again disguise the baselessness of these lies by couching them in the statements “linked to” and “reported to”, abjectly neglecting your journalistic duty to verify the veracity of who is “linking” and “reporting” such allegations.
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Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) once said:
“It is enough of a lie for someone to report everything he hears.”
Sadly, this statement applies to the author of this article, as well as whoever approved it.
Hizb ut-Tahrir is a non-violent political party which restricts itself to intellectual and political work towards re-establishing the Caliphate upon a Prophetic model in Muslim majority countries. The party restricts itself to intellectual and political work because the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, undertook only intellectual and political work whilst working to establish the Islamic state in Medina.
Despotic regimes and those who derive benefit from protecting them dislike to be criticised in front of their people; and Hizb ut-Tahrir is the harshest of critics. Therefore we see that such people champion the call to ban and suppress the true words of the party, lest their benefits are affected in some way.
Anyone who has studied the history of Hizb ut-Tahrir and its work, know that it does not pursue armed action and that it has not established any military faction since its inception up to this day and will continue to not do so, because it is a violation of its principles as a political party; nor does the party have any kind of link with violent groups anywhere in the world.
This fact is well established in the reality of the work of Hizb ut-Tahrir, and in the party’s thousands of publications since its inception in 1953. Were the MP quoted in your article allowed access to our website, then perhaps she might see for herself that equating Hizb ut-Tahrir with “far-right racists” is not only intellectually lazy, but reveals a failure to understand our party and Islam more generally.
I expect, as a minimum, that you remove the above-mentioned article from your website and correct the many fallacies that you’ve published. I would further urge you to improve your editorial practices of pairing baseless allegations with subtly vague language constructs; and instead to quote only the facts that you can stand behind after rigorous and honest research.
We have said before and will continue to say that it is not Hizb ut-Tahrir that spreads terror and hate, causing fear and division; rather it is the government policy of muscular liberalism, those in the media who spread it, and ultimately the failure of secularism itself.
Allah says in the Quran:
“And do not mix the truth with falsehood, nor conceal the truth, while you know.”
[Al-Baqarah: 42]
