Monday, January 12, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
Western governments have increasingly moved to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, often classifying it as a terrorist or extremist organization. It is already banned in the UK, Germany, most Arab countries, Russia, China and others. Right now Australia is considering a ban on the group after a recent Sydney conference was publicized where the leaders said the West "sucks blood from humanity," advocated for a "Muslim army" under Sharia, and framed Islam as the only solution for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
The justification for these bans usually begins with the group’s stated aims. Hizb ut-Tahrir rejects liberal democracy and advocates replacing it with a global Islamic caliphate governed by sharia law. It presents Islam not merely as a religion but as a political system destined to supersede Western civilization. Its rhetoric is frequently antisemitic, dismissive of pluralism, and grounded in a vision of Muslim supremacy.
It is no stretch to say that the group's ideas are hostile to Jews, to women, to dissenters, and to the moral assumptions that underlie liberal societies. If Hizb ut-Tahrir ever held power, its worldview would translate into repression.
There is a problem, though. Hizb ut-Tahrir is explicitly non-violent. It does not carry out attacks. It does not issue operational instructions for terrorism in Western countries. Its leaders insist, consistently and publicly, that their method is ideological persuasion rather than armed struggle. Their ideas are corrosive, but they remain ideas.
It appears to have used socialist concepts to build itself this way specifically to take advantage of Western freedoms and inoculate it from being banned legally in the West.
This brings up the question of where free speech ends and where limiting speech is better.
That distinction matters more than many people are comfortable admitting. Once a society begins banning organizations solely for what they believe rather than what they do, it enters terrain that has rarely been stable and has often proved dangerous for minorities. Jews in particular do not have the luxury of treating this as an abstract concern. Measures justified as exceptional responses to one threatening ideology have tendency to be reused later against Jews, once the legal tools exist and the political mood changes. A framework that allows the state to suppress Hizb ut-Tahrir for advocating a religious supremacist worldview could, under different conditions, be turned against Zionism, against halachic norms, or against Jewish communal self-defense. This is not a slippery-slope fallacy: it is a recurring pattern.
At the same time, pretending that Hizb ut-Tahrir is merely another set of opinions that should be ignored is willfully naive. Its ideology does not sit in a vacuum. It is a sustained narrative that delegitimizes Western society, portrays Jews and non-Muslims as exploiters, and presents the destruction of the existing order as morally necessary. It may not tell followers to commit violence, but it devotes considerable energy to explaining why violence committed by others is understandable, justified, or admirable. Over time, that difference becomes less sharp than Western legal categories would like it to be.
The problem, as I see it, is that the West's concept of free speech is unnecessarily expansive and out definition of incitement is needlessly and extraordinarily narrow. We tend to locate responsibility almost entirely at the moment of explicit instruction, as though speech and action are cleanly separable until a specific verbal threshold is crossed. That approach forces societies to wait until violence is imminent before acting, while treating years of ideological conditioning as irrelevant. It assumes that moral preparation is harmless so long as it avoids certain words.
Hizb ut-Tahrir operates comfortably within that space. It questions the legitimacy of liberal democracy, depicts Western societies as morally bankrupt, frames Jews as agents of global injustice, and presents political Islam as the only path to dignity and justice. Violence elsewhere is praised without being ordered. Martyrdom is romanticized without being demanded. None of this satisfies the Western legal definition of incitement, yet it steadily lowers the moral barriers that make violence against civilians unthinkable. On the contrary, for many, the logical conclusion from being influenced by such ideologies is violence.
Jewish ethical reasoning has never been so constrained. The concept of lifnei iver recognizes responsibility at the point where one predictably enables wrongdoing, not only at the moment of execution. Moral culpability attaches when a person removes obstacles to harm, even indirectly, even without intent. Speech that repeatedly renders violence excusable or noble is not treated as morally neutral simply because it avoids direct commands.
Seen through that lens, the problem posed by Hizb ut-Tahrir is not that it holds extreme beliefs, but that it functions as a preparatory environment. It habituates listeners to a worldview in which violence by others becomes morally intelligible. That places it in a different category from ordinary dissent or even radical critique, and it justifies a different kind of response.
This does not require banning ideas. It requires acknowledging that speech operates within systems. A society can restrict organizational activity, funding, coordination, and amplification when those structures predictably serve as pathways toward violence, without criminalizing theology or private belief. That approach is narrower, more defensible, and far less likely to metastasize than ideological prohibition.
Free speech in the West has gradually ceased to be treated as an instrument and has come to resemble an article of faith. It is defended as absolute, detached from consequences, and insulated from moral evaluation. That was never its original purpose. Free speech was meant to facilitate truth-seeking, protect dissent, and prevent tyranny. It was not meant to obligate societies to host movements whose explicit goal is to dismantle the conditions that make free speech possible - or to dismantle the host societies themselves.
Free speech cannot function as a suicide pact, but neither should it be reduced to a reflex that substitutes for thinking. The harder task is to take ideas seriously enough to evaluate how they function over time, at scale, and in emotionally charged environments.
The question, then, is not whether Hizb ut-Tahrir should be banned. It is whether Western societies are capable of developing a more mature understanding of incitement, one that accounts for moral enablement and foreseeable harm without granting the state a license to police belief. The system should be able to distinguish between reasonable ideas and "Globalize the Intifada!"
If that effort fails, the tools created to address groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir will not remain confined to them. History suggests they rarely do. And Jews are always going to be the first targets.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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