"Islamists" denounce capitalism.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A militant Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir al Islami (The Islamic Liberation Party, or HT), held a recruiting conference in Chicago on Sunday, July 19. Not surprisingly, the major liberal-left media pretty much ignored the event, as they have done with countless similar events in recent years. Also not surprisingly, some of the media usually designated as "conservative"--led by Fox News--went in the other direction, hyperventilating with headlines that almost gave the impression Osama bin Laden himself might be appearing at the conference.

Writing for the Counter Terrorism Blog, Madeleine Gruen addressed this reality disconnect in a July 19 column entitled, "Hizb ut-Tahrir America: Let's Not Exaggerate; Let's Be Accurate." Pointing to a Fox News headline that blared "Al Qaeda Holding Recruiting Conference at Chicago Hilton" as ah example of the tone of the reporting, Gruen opined: "This is like a bizarre game of 'Telephone' in which the nature of the threat has been distorted from one media report to another, until the message has been distilled to the crudest level. There is no need to overstate the potential threat a group like HTA [Hizb ut-Tahrir America] poses in the United States by shrieking 'al-Qaeda.' It does not need to be al-Qaeda to be dangerous."

Is HT/HTA dangerous? Yes. But contrary to popular lore, HT is not promoting "Islamic extremista," but rather a fusion of Marx and Mohammed--Islamo-Leninism, if you will. That fusion is certainly hinted at by the group's "Fall of Capitalism, Rise of Islam" theme for its Chicago conference.

The International Crisis Group (ICG), a globalist operation run by folks from (currently or in the recent past) the UN, the World Bank, and the Council on Foreign Relations, and funded by George Soros (who sits on the ICG board of directors and executive committee), says that "parts of the [HT] constitution look like a somewhat Islamicised socialism." That's from the ICG Asia Report of June 30, 2003, entitled "Radical Islam in Central Asia: Responding to Hizb ut-Tahrir," which likens HT to the communist Ba'ath parties of Iraq and Syria. (Hizb ut-Tahrir founder Sheikh Taqiuddin an-Nabhani was also a principal founder of the Ba'ath Party of Jordan). Here are a few more relevant excerpts (italics added) from the ICG report:

   The Islamic state proposed by Hizb ut-Tahrir is a utopian Islamic
   ideal that few Muslims would recognise as either attainable or
   desirable.... Indeed, there are many parallels between the Soviet
   state and the Islamic state proposed by Hizb ut-Tahrir, including
   the presumption of constant revolution/jihad with other powers....

   Like many Arab political parties that emerged after the 1930s, Hizb
   ut-Tahrir took on characteristics of a modern political party, with
   a program and structures. Many of these parties found inspiration
   in early Leninist ideas, echoing the concept of the party as a
   revolutionary vanguard....

   Nevertheless, Hizb ut-Tahrir had much more in common in terms of
   political structure with secular parties such as the Ba'athists,
   later to become a ruling party in Iraq and Syria, than it did with
   the major Islamic political movement, the Muslim Brotherhood....

   While it claims to be based on early Islamic history, the party
   [HT] owes much to modern revolutionary movements such as
   Leninism....

   It relies on a cell structure akin to early Communist
   organisations, with strict internal discipline to avoid
   infiltration and maintain ideological purity.