Thank you, Timothy Cootes. Your admirable dissection and trashing of Uthman Badar's amazing mindset, make my own written response look inadequate in comparison.

I love the quote from 1984 where someone said "a good book does not tell you anything new, it just arranges your scattered thoughts into some sort of order."

10 out of 10.

And thank you for sticking up for free speech, although I am sure that Nicola Roxon now has you marked for "re education" in some media gulag, somewhere within the wastelands of Canberra.

And you are right with your assertion that the more the Uthmar Batin's of the Caliphate write, the more they stick their collective feet in their mouths.

After reading this excellent piece, for which I thank you Timothy, it makes sense not to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir. It's a better option to let people like Uthman Badar **hang themselves**

Sydney demo: Uprising in the Muslim world 2011 [Jan 31 2011]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhrWpOkqUHE

@ 15:50 Br. Wassim Doureihi

@ 32.11
"To those who are before me today, to the Muslims in the West, to the Muslims in this country, I say to you that indeed are a part of this great ummah, let it be clear that you are not Australian, you are not British, you are not American, you are Muslim. Those who would divide you from the body of this ummah, let it be known that our allegiance is to Islam and Islam alone. That our support is to Muslims & to Muslims alone

Let it be known that you are part of this great ummah & don’t believe anyone that will suggest otherwise

We are not an ummah which will be content at the crumbs which are thrown at us. We are not an ummah which will be content at sharing the power. We are not an ummah which will be content to remain in a position of subjugation. We are not an ummah which will be confined to remain in artificial borders. We are not an ummah which will be content with sharing the power. We are not an ummah which will be content to accept the most vile rulers of mankind. We are the ummah of Mohammed etc - you know the rest"

An informative article, however, most of the arguments presented by the author have already been made by commenters on Uthman Badar's original article.

"...does not represent the values of the wider Muslim community in Australia."

I admit to considerable scepticism as to the influence and proportion of "moderate" Moslems in any majority Islamic society. If the majority of Moslems were indeed moderate, majority Moslem nations would not be the oppressive, violent societies that they are, even Indonesia and Turkey, the best examples of "moderation" have serious problems with creeping Islamisation and the persecution of religious minorities.

As to the "irrational values that belong in medieval Europe." The late Middle Ages in Europe were a period of rapid technological and cultural progress, in contrast to contemporary Islamic societies.

Another myth of Islamists, and totalitarian propagandists in general, is that the West's human rights political philosophy is not universal, they're careful not to allow a free and informed discussion.

Westerners escaped by a hair's breadth from Islamisation and then fought for a thousand years to maintain their civilisation against continual Moslem attacks, Uthman Badar's inept propaganda is simply another stage in a long conflict.

A very good article.

This is a key point:

"I extend, then, your right to free expression"

The issue is this: we live in and enjoy privileges of a free society which is immeasurably better than the society offered/demanded by Uthman Badar.

Should our free society offer the same rights to people like Uthman Badar when his type would not reciprocate and when they use those rights to actively usurp and try to overthrow our free society?

Having just read Uthman Badar's article, I am having difficulty understanding Tomothy's condemnation. You should go back and read the article again.

I have lived through the various wars in which we have participated as pawns of the United States and its other allies, and I am generally appalled at the crass disregard for human life shown by those in charge of such wars. This is even more disturbing when one considers that the aim of most of those conflicts has been apparently to improve the conditions of the citizens we finish up killing.

I suggest that Timothy and his youthful friends, take a step back and look at the reason behind the mindset of the militant Islam community. They have had a gut full of the West telling them how to run their countries and killing their people. We are only playing into the hands of their leaders who find ready listeners to their distortions of the Koran to justify vengeance attacks even as the U.S. and its allies send drones to kill people in Pakistan.

It is time we woke up to those who just put the blame on one side. Both are equally culpable.

"Both are equally culpable."

No they're not.

Worst attempt at moral equivalence yet.

Islam is a self-starter; it doesn't require anything done to it to be barbaric and primitive; look at SA which has the US genuflecting to it:

http://www.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=http://www.freakingnews.com/pictures/64500/Barack-Obama-Bowing-to-King--64695.jpg&imgrefurl=http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic%3D234912.40&h=426&w=611&sz=96&tbnid=lj-TSPOgKi3d-M:&tbnh=90&tbnw=129&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dpicture%2Bof%2Bobama%2Bbowing%2Bto%2Bsaudi%2Bprince%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=picture+of+obama+bowing+to+saudi+prince&usg=__GG00pp7skUaZxpi_YJLc7sITLs8=&docid=2Lg0i-QuB_IO7M&sa=X&ei=Shi4UfGSGfC5iAfenoCgCQ&ved=0CFsQ9QEwDg&dur=188

As for wars where we were pawns of the US; that would be WW11 when the corrupt yanks got between us and our japanese liberators I suppose.

The only surprise for me is that people like Badar even bother; he must be just brushing up on his Taqiyya and Kitman skills; they still work obviously because he can still suck in some useful idiots; that is, of course, if you are not islamic yourself

VK3AUU,

"We are only playing into the hands of their leaders who find ready listeners to their distortions of the Koran"

I agree that the recent Western interventions in Islamic countries are war crimes, however we shouldn't forget the central ideology of Islam.

The Koran is a sacred text and there are many interpretations, so believers can extract any meaning that suits their purposes, Islam has always been violent and expansionist- that's its nature. Moslems in the West would still attempt to Islamise their host country and destroy liberal democracy, either through violence or propaganda, even if America and its allies had never "intervened". Even that exemplar of multi-culti tolerance, neutral Sweden has failed to accommodate its Moslem minority, the result-- a week of riots.

That process has continued for 1400 years, Moslems are at perpetual war with infidels.

Cohenite. No I am not an Islamist, but I am getting weary of the holier than thou attitude of those, generally Christians, who are anti Islam. The West has no business interfering in the governance of those who they purport to convert to western democratic style government under the guise of helping them. Most of the aid which the unwashed multitude think is going to help the poor and needy in those countries, finishes in the hands of those in the corrupt governments who are seeking to make themselves rich. In return, the West gets concessions to oil and other valuable mineral resources.

America did great things after the second world war with such things as the Marshall Plan, but after that they got greedy. Now they are going through a new McCarthy type era which will be shown to be their undoing, both politically and economically. We are backing the wrong horse if we keep following them down this path of destruction.

David

"The West has no business interfering in the governance of those who they purport to convert to western democratic style government under the guise of helping them"

This is the problem. You do not 'convert' people to be free.

The Western model of individual rights based democracy cannot be 'forced'; it is a contradiction in terms.

What Western intervention has [sometimes, I agree there were ocassionally more problematic motives] basically tried to do is either get rid of social structures and ideology which constrained individual rights or prevent them from occurring as per the Domino principle to justify intervention in Vietnam.

Intervention in islamic countries is a completely different situation. It is different because islam is incompatible with Western democracy.

Which is why the West is currently fighting in islamic nations.

But the policy behind these interventions will remain shizophrenic as long as this basic fact is not faced; which is islam is incompatible with Western values.

Outside of islam why would you think anyone does not want to be free?

For those of you who wish to slam the West for allegedly running the affairs of Muslim countries, and for those who say majority Muslim populated countries cannot be “moderate” we need only to look at what’s unfolding in Turkey. On the world stage we’re seeing protestors in a country with a majority Muslim population rallying against the government in an attempt to stop the imposition of an Islamic lifestyle by the PM.

When I refer to Turks, read: “moderate Muslims” (for the most part) who are not interested in having an Islamic Republic, nor do they want any part of Sharia based law (remember, Turkey is a secular country).

In addition to religion, the other factor driving this PM and his now daily deranged public threats is the excessively greedy demands of his Islamic mates who have become extra-ordinarily rich from being awarded lucrative government contracts. Greed is not the preserve of the West or the US, it is just as much alive and well elsewhere.

As for the inaccurate claims that Muslims are killed as a result of Western influence there are many examples right now throughout the world of Muslims killing other Muslims without any assistance from the big bad West, Syria stands out as such an example, notably foreign intervention from the east (Lebanese Hezbollah) in support of the Syrian regime. Take note.

Back to Turkey, where PM Tayyip Erdgoan (or “Gazdogan” as he’s now known) has called on his Islamic rooted AKP supporters to “strangle those who are protesting against my government”.

Tayyip is indeed putting his foot in his mouth more and more with each passing day as he plunges the country towards a civil war.

And finally I say to those who do not like the ways of the West that if you are indeed unhappy then you can either fit in, or shove off. After all, most of you live in the West by choice, not by compulsion. In a (Western) democracy, the choice is always entirely yours.

Politico,

"On the world stage we’re seeing protestors in a country with a majority Muslim population rallying against the government in an attempt to stop the imposition of an Islamic lifestyle by the PM."

Protests have occurred all over the Islamic world, in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and many other nations with little affect in regard to reducing the continual Islamisation of those countries. Turkey might be "moderate" relative to other majority Moslem nations but its human rights record is appalling, particularly in the treatment of religious and ethnic minorities.

"Moderate" Moslems are usually not liberal democrats--refer to the Pew surveys on Islamic attitudes to "democracy".

Most "Muslims" don't even read the Koran, the majority of them either can't read Arabic, can't read at all or can't read well enough to interpret the writings on their own. Islam is a way of life which allows inferior people, dumb people to feel superior in the same way that the underclas of dumb western people have a self righteous "holier than thou" attitude. The smart Muslims are most likely to become the dangerous "Radicals" because they are able to read the Koran and follow it's battle plan. Islam is only peaceful when it's contained within borders and where there are no external challenges to it's authority and no competing systems, like provincial Indonesia and Malaysia for example. Islam is a good system for a country like Somalia where the median IQ is about 70, it calms low IQ people down, gives their lives a structure and provides a basic set of amenities to make life tolerable.
The problem is you can't take low IQ African Muslims from the structured Islamic society, who via their religion assume themselves to be "ubermensch" and parachute them into Liberal Democracy where they will have to fend for themselves, the results are always predictable, the riots and murders of late were totally avoidable.
The Toxic ideology at play in this issue isn't Islam, it's the brutal system of egalitarian multiculturalism.

@Jay – “…Turkey might be "moderate" relative to other majority Moslem nations but its human rights record is appalling, particularly in the treatment of religious and ethnic minorities…” – could not agree more, spot on.
A large number of people there recognise that and are frankly fed up with it, recent examples being the arbitrary arrest of any “threats” to the ruling Islamist AK Party, hence the unrest.

Turkey represents an interesting case study due to its strong western influence; Ataturk set out to westernise the country as he could see the issues ahead if Turkey remained close to the Islamic influences of the Arab world.

I also wish to thank you, Timothy, for expressing so eloquently my own impressions of the rubbish that Uthman Badar expounds.

I do believe that most moderate Moslems, especially those that flee to seek sanctuary in any western country, would not wish to live again under any sort of Islamic regime, but find themselves trapped. There are obviously fanatics within their own communities who will not treat them kindly if they show any lessening of Islamic faith, even potential killers in their own families. Whole Islamic communities applaud so-called "honour killings". Consider the plight of Aayan Hirsi Ali, who had to flee The Netherlands after leaving the faith. In a Christian church it's a common sight to see someone not joining in a prayer, say, but everyone bows down in a mosque - I think from fear of one's neighbours, not of Allah.

We should outlaw mosques, and Islamic schools, to show solidarity with those who flee to our country to avoid Islamic tyranny. It might stop the boats, and, if Badar doesn't like it, he can piss off!