Media Release
The Secular Liberal West, not Islam, in Need of Change

Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott yesterday, 08/12/2015, added his voice to an ever-growing raft of former and current Federal Government ministers calling for Islam to be “reformed”. Speaking to Paul Murray on Sky News and in an opinion piece published in the Daily Telegraph, he called for a “religious revolution inside Islam”, claiming also the superiority of western culture: “a culture that believes in decency and tolerance is much to be preferred to one which thinks that you can kill in the name of God.”

Such calls do not come as a surprise in the least. What we are now seeing from government ministers is merely the more blunt articulation of what has been government policy for years. Indeed, Tony Abbot himself made very similar comments as the Federal Health Minister in the Howard Government way back in 2006.

The aim of reforming Islam is to maintain and further western economic and political subjugation of the Muslim world by doing away with those aspects of Islam that make it a liberating force from oppression. Locally, the aim is to force assimilation by westernising and secularising Islam to make it more submissive to modern secular, liberal ideological and political norms.

Uthman Badar, media representative of Hizb ut Tahrir Australia, said,
“The political agenda, of Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull alike, should be clear to all: forced assimilation of Muslims justified on exaggerated fears of a security threat.

What decency and tolerance does Mr. Abbott speak of? The decency by which millions in the Muslim World are made to live perpetually miserable lives under despots propped up by western states? Or the tolerance of giving them the options to be killed by drones, fighter jets or machine guns?

If violent reactions by unrepresentative Muslim individuals point to a problem in Islam, then the mass violence inflicted by elected western governments on entire nations since the self-declared Enlightenment till this day must point to a thousand problems in western secular liberal ideology.

Islam is not up for negotiation or reform and is not in need of such. On the contrary, it is the secular liberal west, which has led humanity for the last three centuries and brought it to the deplorable state it is now in, that needs revolutionary change.”

Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir
in Australia