HT accuse think tank of plagiarism

A couple of weeks ago, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a publicly-funded quasi-government ‘think tank ‘, released a report on the group, Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT).

The Australian reports:

Research has found it takes advantage of Australian tolerance to launch propaganda attacks on the country and that its adherents are primed to take the next step up to jihad, if called upon to do so.

The article goes on to summarise ASPI’s findings and recommendations. The research paper can be found here.

Needless to say, we don’t necessarily agree with HT, their methodology or objectives. However, HT’s response was interesting. They issued an open letter to the report’s authors accusing them, among other things, of plagiarism (“Responding to cheap plagiarism – The case of ASPI in Australia”).

Although an allegation of plagiarism against a taxpayer-funded research organisation that, it seems, has the government’s ear is very serious, HT did not provide any specific examples.

However, a very quick and cursory look over the ASPI report turns up some interesting results. Consider the following line:

…Ata- Abu al-Rishta, a Jordanian national of Palestinian origin who previously served as the party’s spokesman for fifteen years.

This sounds somewhat similar to this line from another report by another author writing for another organisation:

…’Ata’ Abu al-Rishta, a Jordanian national of Palestinian origin who served as the Party’s spokesman for the past fifteen years

Furthermore, ASPI’s description of HT’s supposed three steps to world domination could be seen to evoke echoes of an earlier piece of writing on the subject.

ASPI wrote:

The first step is quiet recruitment and avoidance of confrontation in order to build a vanguard. The second is public proselytising in order to introduce an ideological wedge between the umma and their governments. The aim is to convince both a critical mass and key power-holders to support HT. The final step is the revolution itself, when infiltrated governments and widespread agitation for change bring down borders and unite the umma under a single ruler, the Caliph.

And Zayno Baran in her 2005 Foreign Policy article [pdf] on the subject wrote:

Ht thus envisions a three-step process of its own. Ht’s focus in the first stage is on building the party, a goal accomplished by recruitment and propaganda….the second stage of ht’s grand plan…members form new cells and try to create tension between governments and their peoples….When the second stage is complete, the ground will supposedly be ripe for an Islamic revolution to establish a state ruled by sharia. The third stage will be reached, the group believes, when the umma embraces ht’s interpretation of Islam and all the implications associated with it.

Of course, we are not suggesting that the ASPI have engaged in plagiarism or simply lifted ideas from the pages of Foreign Policy magazine. However, the absence of any references in their report makes it very hard to assess the veracity of their claims or whether they were legitimately sourced from other materials on the subject.