An Islamist extremist group in Sydneyhas asked if the federal government is planning concentration camps for Muslims.
Hizb ut-Tahrir compared Australia’s internment of Japanese and German prisoners of war during the 1940s with perceived modern-day hostility towards Muslims.
‘Startling Australian history. Germany wasn’t the only country with concentration camps,’ spokesman Hamzah Qureshi said in a Facebookpost.
Mr Qureshi put Australia’s detention of prisoners of war, in country New South Wales and Victoria, in the same sentence as Nazi concentration camps.
The notorious Auschwitz death chamber in Poland killed more than one million people, who were among six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
The reference to Nazi concentration camps comes at Hizb ut-Tahrir prepares to host a conference in Sydney’s west this Sunday titled: ‘Hatred rising: Living Islam in a hostile West.’
Hizb ut-Tahrir is still legal in Australia but was last week banned in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation.
It is also illegal in Germany and The Netherlands, and a range of Muslim-majority nations including Bangladesh, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
Earlier this year, Daily Mail Australia caught on camera another Hizb ut-Tahrir spokesman Uthman Badar saying that ex-Muslims deserved capital punishment for leaving the faith.
In Australia, towards the end of World War II in August 1944, more than 250 Japanese prisoners of war were killed after more 300 escaped from an internment camp at Cowra, in southern NSW, the National Archives of Australia says.
However, no historian has even compared the treatment of prisoners of war in Australia, who were fed and clothed, with the systemic execution of Jews, homosexuals and gypsies during the Holocaust orchestrated by Adolf Hitler.
This didn’t stop Hizb ut-Tahrir comparing Australia’s wartime past with Nazi Germany.
‘Concentration camps for Muslims in Australia?’, it said on a Facebook flyer.
‘An absurd question? Consider some rarely discussed history.
‘During World War I/World War II Australia detained 20,000 people.
‘Without trial, without them knowing their ‘crime’.’
No mention was made about how the Japanese captured 60,000 Allied prisoners of war in 1942 and used them as slave labour to build the Thai-Burma railway, which led to the deaths of 2,815 Australians.
‘The Japanese/German ‘enemy aliens’ were jailed to ‘appease public opinion’,’ Hizb ut-Tahrir said.