Media Spreads Misinformation Against Hizb ut Tahrir

Karachi: Following the news report entitled ‘Hizb ut Tahrir made three attempts to penetrate Army’ published in Daily Dawn on October 30, 2012, a series of political and current affairs TV programs have been aired on local news channels spreading a lot of misinformation and marking baseless allegations against HuT.

The most absurd aspect of these shows was the fact that the programs were scheduled to discuss subject of Caliphate and Hizb ut Tahrir yet they did not invite any speaker from Hizb ut Tahrir, which is against media ethics as it is quite childish to blame someone who is not present before the media.

A show was aired on Samaa yesterday where three people were invited, Waseem Akhtar (MQM), Ijaz ul Haq (former Religious AffairsMinister) and Saleem Safi (analyst) all of them had nothing to do with Caliphate. In order to rule out chauvinism from the show, some member of alleged party should have been given the chance and space to defend the party and to present the clear picture and objectives of the discussed group.

Despite their political and analytic intellect, renowned journalists like Saleem Safi and Najam Sethi seems to be lacking knowledge and understanding about HuT, first accusing the group of using Islam for their own vested interest and was hitting out at Jamat e Islamai (even though the program was on Caliphate and Hizb ut Tahrir and not on Jamat e Islami) while the latter tagging it a UK-based party, not knowing that Hizb ut Tahrir (Party of Liberation) was founded in the holy land of Palestine by Taqi ud Din Al-Nabhani and has its Central media office in Lebanon.

Apparently realizing that half-truth is twice as bad as a lie they kept on repeating that HuT is not banned in UK and it functions from there, creating a negative impact of Hizb on the ordinary viewers without telling the whole fact that the group is not banned in Indonesia, some Central Asian and many other countries across the globe as well.

Moreover, the analysts, anchors and politicians proved their hypocritical stance as they supported Dictator Pervez Musharraf of banning out Hizb ut Tahrir but opposed banning out democracy from the country. As a responsible Muslim, we must debate on what is right and what is wrong, instead of forcing media’s agenda upon viewers which is certainly unfair.

It is very regrettable to say that media is trying to build a negative campaign against HuT giving the impression that it works violently to impose Islam in Pakistan like TTP or Al-Qaeda. Another unrealistic reporting against HuT was witnessed few days back when it was wrongly reported by leading newspapers that Hizb ut Tahrir has also set up camps to collect hides mixing up HuT with secular or so called religious parties who collects Bhatta or animal hides in the name of social works.

On the other hand, some viewers also feel that these programs were aimed to pave the way for filtering the army of any Islamic or anti US Officers serving in the well-disciplined Islamic organization so that it would become more difficult for Hizb ut Tahrir to re-establish Caliphate and bring about radical peaceful change in Pakistan.