Call for race-hate action over extremist rants against Jews

Board president Jeremy Spinak has written to the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board seeking for Hizb ut-Tahrir’s spiritual head, ­Ismail al-Wahwah, and an Australian spokesman for the group, Wassim Doureihi, to be prosecuted under race-hate laws.

On July 25 last year, in Lakemba in Sydney’s west, Mr Wahwah delivered a speech in Arabic calling for Muslims to engage in Jihad to “rid” the world of Jewish “hidden evil”.

“Judgment Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews,” Mr Wahwah told the crowd.

“Tomorrow you Jews will see what will become of you — an eye for an eye, blood for blood, ­destruction for destruction.”

A video of the speech captures a crowd chanting “Khaybar, Khaybar” in support of Mr Wahwah’s comments. Khaybar was the scene of a massacre of Jews in the seventh-century in what is now Saudi Arabia.

In a separate video, Mr Dour­eihi talks of a “civilisational struggle between Islam and kifir (non-Muslims)” and calls for Jews to leave Israel or be forced out.

Mr Spinak said the comments were a “blatant call for violence against Jews on the basis of their race”.

“It is clear that the speech threatened physical harm toward Jews (and) it also incited others to threaten physical harm toward Jews,” he wrote in his letter to the Anti-Discrimination Board.

“It is important to note that the diatribe was crude Jew-hatred reminiscent of last year’s anti-­Israeli rallies in Sydney that ­descended into blatant anti-Semitism, complete with Nazi swastikas and placards evoking racist images that had nothing to do with any Middle East conflict.”

Mr Spinak said Mr Wahwah’s speech had been delivered in Arabic and the complaint was being made now because a copy carrying English subtitles had recently been released.

Hizb ut-Tahrir could not be reached for comment yesterday.

The extremist organisation has a stated aim of overthrowing of democracy and Western freedoms and implementing sharia law. It refers to Muslim immigrants from the Middle East to the West as “soldiers” who it hopes will bring about that revolution.

Tony Abbott has said he would like to see Hizb ut-Tahrir banned in Australia as it “nurtured terrorism”, was “un-Australian” and that it incited terrorism.

The government has said the group has in the past been careful to fall short of breaking race-hate laws in its public commentary.

The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies has called for the two Hizb ut-Tahrir members to be prosecuted under section 20D of the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act, which prevents publicly threatening of physical harm against a race of people or inciting others to threaten physical harm.

The maximum penalty is six months’ imprisonment.