St. Petersburg, Russia, jails Hizb ut-Tahrir member

RFE/RL
Wed, 30 Nov 2016 16:37 UTC

A court in the Russian city of St. Petersburg has jailed a member of the banned Hizb ut-Tahrir organization. Dmitry Mikhailov, an ethnic Russian, was found guilty on November 29 of organizing a Hizb ut-Tahrir cell in the city and sentenced to 16 years in prison on the same day. Mikhailov pleaded guilty.

A total of nine people linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir have been arrested and brought to trial in St. Petersburg since 2014. Most of them have been sentenced to long prison terms. Russia's Supreme Court banned the group in 2003, designating it a terrorist organization. The London-based Sunni political organization is also banned across Central Asia.

Hizb ut-Tahrir seeks to unite all Muslim countries into an Islamic caliphate but says its methods for reaching that goal are peaceful.

Comment: See also: "Moderate rebel" supporter, Hizb ut-Tahrir member at Chicago conference: "Islam ishere to dominate"

Hizb ut-Tahrir has been a great supporter of the "revolution" in Syria, i.e., supporting the moderate terrorists. They are relatively marginal in the United States, but their ideology shows that while they do not advocate violent means (they consider themselves a political, intellectual movement), their end goal is the same as the "rebels" in Syria: the creation of an "Islamic State" in the Middle East, thus their support of the "rebels". Gadaffi and Assad both went after this group in the years before the "revolutions" in both countries. There's a video of Ibn Thbait discussing the Syrian "opposition" with Ali Harfouch in 2013. In Part 1, Harfouch makes clear that all the fighting groups are Islamists advocating the creation of an Islamic state (the only secularists are exiles in suits living in foreign countries). In Part 2, Harfouch states:

Hizb ut-Tahrir is deeply rooted in the Syrian revolution and it is constantly coordinating with key figures, whether it's from the quote-unquote radical Islamic movement in terms of providing them advisory [sic] or with the quote-unquote more moderate movement in certain terms of warning them not to fall into neoliberal plots and so forth. [HuT's] role has been to orient the revolution ...

It's an interesting discussion, worth watching. They say that HuT maintains the "purity" of the revolution in Syria, subverting the U.S.'s aims of installing "moderate" groups in power and marginalizing the "radical Islamists" who are attempting to "uproot the political structures/neolib politics", i.e., "excluding Islam". So ironically, the very "moderate" groups we hear about in the news (e.g., Ahrar al-Sham, Noureddin al-Zenki, etc.) are ideologically opposed to those who could even remotely be considered "moderate", and actually disdain the U.S.'s alleged plans for Syria. It's kind of funny how much these guys resemble the neoliberal ideologues and social justice warriors in their apparent naivete about what exactly they are supporting with their respective "revolutions"...