Tories show their repressive side with ban on HT
A speaker at a Hizb ut-Tahrir demonstration in London, October 2023 Yesterday (Monday), out of nowhere as far as I could tell, the Tories announced that they were going to proscribe Hizb ut-Tahrir, a political party founded in Palestine whose name means Liberation Party, as a so-called terrorist organisation. The pretext was that, allegedly, they praised the Hamas attacks of last October “and associated incidents” and have “a history of praising and celebrating attacks against Israel and attacks against Jews more widely”. By way of justification, the security minister Tom Tugendhat, parrots disputed Israeli claims about the attacks, notably the unsubstantiated rape claims, as fact. The idea of banning HT has been mooted at least twice before, under both Labour and Tory governments, and rejected both because of lack of evidence of their involvement in violence and because they are too small for banning them to be of any benefit. Apart from Germany and Austria, the majority of countries which have banned HT are dictatorships, a fact the government cites as a reason to ban them here.
I’m not a member of HT and never have been. I’m the generation that remembers when the London branch, or what was claimed to be, was controlled by Omar Bakri Muhammad who later broke away to form Al-Muhajiroun, which for a while adhered to similar principles but in the early 2000s became an explicitly “salafi-jihadi” group, albeit one focussed on sabotaging other Muslims’ efforts while courting media attention for their increasingly extreme stances until Omar Bakri fled the country and Anjum Choudary was arrested. HT at this point started to become more obscure although the likes of Harry’s Place kept bringing them to the attention of their readership, which included people at the Times newspaper and in Tory think-tanks. However, HT was held with suspicion by other Muslims for their questionable aqeedah, their exaggerated view of their founder Taqiuddeen al-Nabahani (I once heard him called a mujtahid mutlaq, something nobody has claimed since the third or fourth generation of Muslims) and the simple fact that they have achieved precisely nothing — not one positive change of government in any Muslim country — throughout their history.
However, the government’s reasons for banning them are considerably weaker than the usual reasons for proscribing an organisation for terrorism. Having praised the 7th October attacks is not the same as having participated or actively encouraged them before the event; it puts them in the same category as Sinn Fein, which was not banned, rather than the IRA with which it was strongly associated with (likewise, the political fronts for the banned Ulster Loyalist terrorist groups remained legal). A couple of years ago they also banned the political wing of Hizbullah, the Lebanese political party, on the grounds that there was no distinction between the political and military wings, but HT has no military wing; their strategy hinges on what they call “seeking the nusrah” (assistance), such as from other Muslim countries or their armies as we have seen in their recent demonstrations outside embassies in London, including that of Egypt which may well have been the source of any pressure the government were under to ban them.
It also reminds us that ever since the notion of terrorism was in popular discourse, powerful people have used the term as a way to suppress dissent and to demonise opposition; what people understand as terrorism is the use of acts of violence targeted at the general public to force political change, while politicians might use it to mean any act of violence for political ends, including acts of sabotage that are not aimed at causing injury to anyone, or at worst acts that cause mere disruption. In this case the government are lining up not only with the oppressors of Israel (where HT is not banned) but with the Arab dictators who want any organised opposition to their regimes crushed, and having done so (at least to any overt opposition) at home, they now seek to do the same to groups influencing the Arab and Muslim diaspora, by exploiting fears about security and distorting the meaning of ‘terrorism’. If HT can be banned on such flimsy and spurious grounds, any organised Muslim opposition to the Israeli occupation or to the foreign-backed dictatorships in the Muslim world could be banned if the government comes under pressure or someone from a securocratic think-tank has a word in a minister’s ear. Only two countries in the “free world” have banned HT, namely Germany and Austria; the others include Russia, China and Egypt. There is no good reason to ban the British arm of HT; the claims made to justify it are baseless and the ban must not stand.
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