Free Republic

“The relentless decline of Capitalism has begun. The time has come to fight against poverty. Time to obliterate the injustices. Time for the correct system.” So declares a video promoting the global “Caliphate Conference 2012” next month in Austria, suggesting the “correct system” is an international Islamic-based one replacing capitalism, which the video blames for catastrophe, civil war, and never-ending poverty. Organized by the fundamentalist Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, the conference will take place on March 10th south of Vienna. ... a similar conference scheduled for March 4th in Belgium was cancelled after local opposition. The Blaze reported on the...

A recently released propaganda video by the Islamic extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir is quite revealing. Not only does the video demonstrate the group’s growing effort to package arguments in a manner designed to appeal to Westerners on the political left, but it also serves as a barometer of radical Muslim groups’ broader shift in rhetorical strategy. The video, “Iraq: Past and Present Colonialism,” appears for the first twenty-seven minutes to be a standard leftist critique of the Iraq war, indistinguishable from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. The slickly-produced video begins with the history of past colonialism in Iraq—including the Mongol conquest...