Embracing death foils M.A.D.

Jerusalem Post, Letters to the Editor, June 18, 2018

“Iran Isn’t North Korea” (June 15) misses a key point. The most fundamental difference between North Korea and Iran is that the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine still works with North Korea, but it would not work with Iran.

As Bernard Lewis points out, “In this context, the deterrent that worked so well during the Cold War, namely M.A.D. (Mutual Assured Destruction), would have no meaning. At the End of Time, there will be general destruction anyway. What will matter is the final destination of the dead – hell for the infidels and the delights of heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, M.A.D. is not a constraint; it is an inducement...”

MLADEN ANDRIJASEVIC
Beersheba

The UN General Assembly Vote of Shame

Vote Name: Item 5 Draft resolution A/ES-10/L.23 Protection of the Palestinian civilian population 

When Winston Churchill and FDR met at Placenta Bay in August 1941, they issued a joint declaration called The Atlantic Charter in which they affirmed "certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they based their hopes for a better future for the world." 

I have no doubt that the two leaders did not intend that the United Nations formed on these common principals to 77 years later turn out to be protecting people whose organization is called Islamic Jihad and who are waging jihad while waving flags with swastikas and flying terror kites with swastikas.

The UN has become an abomination and a disgrace and should be abolished. 

The vote. In red are the countries which should be particularly ashamed.

120 Yes:

Afghanistan, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina,  Botswana, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cabo Verde, Cambodia, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Comoros, Costa Rica, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Djibouti , Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Finland, France, Gambia, Georgia, Greece, Grenada, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Iraq, Ireland, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s  Democratic Republic, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liechtenstein, Luxemburg, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Mauritius, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique,  Namibia, Nepal, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Peru, Portugal, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, Somalia,  South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Sweden, Switzerland, Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Thailand, Timor-Leste,  Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United Republic of Tanzania, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

  

45 Abstained:

Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Austria, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Fiji, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Italy, Kenya, Latvia, Liberia, Lithuania, Malawi, Mexico, Monaco, Netherlands, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Philippines, Poland, Republic of Korea, Romania, Rwanda, Saint Lucia, Samoa, San Marino, Singapore, Slovakia, South Sudan, The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Tuvalu, United Kingdom, Vanuatu. 

8 No:

Australia, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia (Federated States of), Nauru, Solomon Islands, Togo, United States.

 

20 Did not vote:

Central African Republic, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Dominica, eSwatini , Gabon , Haiti, Kiribati, Libya, Madagascar, Mongolia, Myanmar, Palau, Republic of Moldova, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Sao Tome and Principe,  Seychelles, Tonga, Turkmenistan, Ukraine

https://papersmart.unmeetings.org/media2/19344152/vr-4.pdf           

We had thousands of rockets fired at us too

IT IS NOT THE ECONOMY, STUPID

The Jerusalem Post

So long as Gaza continues to be governed by Hamas’s rule of the jungle, no Palestinian civil society, let alone a viable state, can develop.

BY EFRAIM KARSH

No cliché has dominated the discourse on the Gaza situation more than the perception of Palestinian violence as a corollary of the Strip’s dire economic condition. No sooner had Hamas and Israel been locked in yet another armed confrontation over the past weeks than the media, foreign policy experts and politicians throughout the world urged the immediate rehabilitation of Gaza as panacea to its endemic propensity for violence. Even senior members of the Israel Defense Forces opined that a “nonmilitary process” of humanitarian aid could produce a major change in the Gaza situation.

While there is no denying the argument’s widespread appeal, there is also no way around the fact that it is not only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth. For it is not Gaza’s economic malaise that has precipitated Palestinian violence; rather, it is the endemic violence that has caused the Strip’s humanitarian crisis.

For one thing, countless nations and groups in today’s world endure far harsher socioeconomic or political conditions than the Palestinians, yet none have embraced violence and terrorism against their neighbors with such alacrity and on such a massive scale.

For another thing, there is no causal relationship between economic hardship and mass violence. On the contrary, in the modern world it is not the poor and the oppressed who have carried out the worst acts of terrorism and violence but, rather, the militant vanguards from among the better educated and more moneyed circles of society, be they homegrown terrorist groups in the West or their Middle Eastern counterparts.

Yasser Arafat, for instance, was an engineer, and his fellow arch terrorist George Habash – the pioneer of aircraft hijacking – a physician. Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was a schoolteacher, while his erstwhile successor, Sayyid Qutb, whose zealous brand of Islam fired generations of terrorists, including the group behind the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, was a literary critic and essayist. The 9/11 terrorists, let alone their multimillionaire paymaster, Osama bin Laden, as well as the terrorists who massacred their British compatriots in July 2005 and those slaughtering their coreligionists in Algeria and Iraq, were not impoverished peasants or workers driven by hopelessness and desperation but educated fanatics motivated by hatred and extreme religious and political ideals.

Nor has Hamas been an exception to this rule. Not only has its leadership been highly educated, but it has gone to great lengths to educate its followers, notably through the takeover of the Islamic University in Gaza and its transformation into a hothouse for indoctrinating generations of militants and terrorists. Hamas founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, studied at the al-Azhar University in Cairo, probably the Islamic world’s most prestigious institution of higher religious learning, while his successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, was a physician, as is Hamas cofounder Mahmoud Zahar. The group’s current leader, Ismail Haniyeh, and Muhammad Def, head of Hamas’s military wing, are graduates of the Islamic University of Gaza, while Khaled Mashaal studied physics in Kuwait, where he resided until 1990. Hardly the products of deprivation and despair.

This propensity for violence among the educated and moneyed classes of Palestinian society was starkly reflected in the identity of the 156 men and eight women who detonated themselves in Israel’s towns and cities during the first five years of the “al-Aqsa Intifada,” murdering 525 people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. A mere 9% of the perpetrators had basic education, while 22% were university graduates and 34% were high school graduates. Likewise, a comprehensive study of Hamas and Islamic Jihad suicide terrorists from the late 1980s to 2003 found that only 13% came from a poor background, compared with 32% of the Palestinian population in general. More than half of suicide bombers had entered further education, compared with just 15% of the general population.

By contrast, successive public opinion polls among the Palestinian residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the 1990s revealed far stronger support for the nascent peace process with Israel, and opposition to terrorism, among the poorer and less educated parts of society – representing the vast majority of the population. Thus, for example, 82% of people with a low education supported the Interim Agreement of September 1995, providing for Israel’s withdrawal from the populated Palestinian areas of the West Bank, and 80% opposed terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, compared to 55% and 65%, respectively, among university graduates.

In short, it is not socioeconomic despair but the total rejection of Israel’s right to exist, inculcated by the PLO and Hamas in their hapless West Bank and Gaza subjects over the past 25 years, which underlies the relentless anti-Israel violence emanating from these territories and its attendant economic stagnation and decline.

At the time of the September 1993 signing of the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles, conditions in the territories were far better than in most Arab states – despite the steep economic decline caused by the intifada of 1987-93. But within six months of Arafat’s arrival in Gaza (in July 1994), the standard of living in the Strip fell by 25%, and more than half of the area’s residents claimed to have been happier under Israel. Even so, at the time Arafat launched his war of terrorism in September 2000, Palestinian income per capita was nearly double Syria’s, more than four times Yemen’s, and 10% higher than Jordan’s – one of the better-off Arab states. Only the oilrich Gulf states and Lebanon were more affluent.

By the time of Arafat’s death, in November 2004, his terrorism war had slashed this income to a fraction of its earlier levels, with real GDP per capita some 35% below the pre-September 2000 level, unemployment more than doubling, and numerous Palestinians reduced to poverty and despondency. And while Israel’s suppression of the terrorism war generated a steady recovery, with the years 2007-11 even recording an average yearly growth above 8%, by mid-2014 a fully blown recession had taken hold, especially in the Gaza Strip.

Indeed, apart from reflecting the West Bank’s basic socioeconomic superiority vis-à-vis Gaza, the widening gap between the two areas during the Oslo years (the difference in per capita income shot up from 14% to 141%) was a direct corollary of Hamas’s transformation of the Strip into an unreconstructed terrorism entity, in contrast to the West Bank’s relative tranquility in the post-al-Aqsa Intifada years.

This, in turn, means that so long as Gaza continues to be governed by Hamas’s rule of the jungle, no Palestinian civil society, let alone a viable state, can develop. Just as the creation of free and democratic societies in Germany and Japan after World War II necessitated a comprehensive sociopolitical and educational transformation, so, too, it is only when the local population sweeps its oppressive rulers from power, eradicates the endemic violence from political and social life, and teaches the virtues of coexistence with Israel that Gaza can look forward to a better future.

The writer is director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King’s College London, and editor of the Middle East Quarterly.

Douglas Murray: Tommy Robinson Drew Attention to ‘Grooming Gangs.’ Britain Has Persecuted Him.

National Review          

By DOUGLAS MURRAY

Tommy Robinson is a British political activist and “citizen journalist” who came to prominence in Britain almost a decade ago when he founded the English Defence League. The EDL was a street-protest movement in Britain whose aims could probably best be summarized as “anti-Islamization.” It emerged in the town of Luton after a group of local Islamists barracked the homecoming parade of a local regiment returning from service in Afghanistan.

From their earliest protests the EDL’s members sought to highlight issues including sharia law, Islam’s attitudes toward minorities, and the phenomenon that would become euphemistically known as “grooming gangs.” In reality these protests often descended into hooliganism and low-level violence (naturally helped along by self-described “anti-fascists”). The authorities did everything they could to stop the EDL, and the media did everything possible to demonize them. In a foretaste of things to come, very few people made any effort to understand them. And nobody paid any price for (indeed many people benefited from) claiming that the EDL was simply a fascist organization and that anybody who even tried to understand them must be a fascist too. The usual prohibition against sweeping generalizations doesn’t seem to apply if the generalization tilts in that direction.

I interviewed Tommy Robinson five years ago, after he had left the EDL (having by his own admission failed to keep extremists including actual neo-Nazis away from the movement). As he said then, one of the problems of everyone insisting that a particular movement is campaigning for the Fourth Reich is that the few people who think that sounds like a great idea will show up. Whatever his other faults, there is no evidence that Robinson thinks that way. Indeed he was once charged with assault for head-butting a Nazi sympathizer who wouldn’t leave an EDL protest. Not many people bothered with those details. The assault got reported, but not the cause. So the fact that Robinson had head-butted a Nazi became yet more evidence that he himself must be some kind of Nazi.

Anyhow — Robinson wised up slightly, and eventually began to plough his energies into a type of citizen journalism/activism. Some of this has been remarkably brave, some of it remarkably wrong (such as a video he made after last year’s Manchester Arena attack, in which he seemed to furiously suggest that everyone living around a particular mosque in the area must be some type of enemy combatant), and some remarkably ill-advised — not least because it has allowed him to be presented in the worst possible light.

For example, a couple of months ago Robinson went to Italy. In May of last year an Italian television crew reporting on migrants in Rome had been attacked by some migrants near a local train station. The female presenter was assaulted, and the whole thing became big news in Italy. But in the normal modern European fashion, after much tut-tutting everybody went back to the safe semantic discussions we like to have. Such as whether or not the term “no-go zone” is exactly appropriate to describe an area where a female journalist cannot go without being physically assaulted. So round and round we go.

Robinson took another view and turned up a while later at the same spot with his own camera crew to find that nothing had changed. The area was still dominated by migrants, and a number swiftly demanded that he leave. One of them then got into a tense stand-off with Robinson, and at one point, as Robinson turned his back on him, this man raised his hands over Robinson and said something like “I can kill you.” At which point Robinson promptly turned around and punched the man in the face. As so often it was a gift to his critics. This episode was reported in the Daily Mail Online under the headline “Far-right thug Tommy Robinson punches a migrant in Rome while filming in an apparent ‘no-go zone.’” The decision over where to put the scare quotes in that headline (and where not to) tells its own story about modern European mores.

The controversy around him continued. In March, Robinson was suspended from Twitter, where he had almost half a million followers. The social-media site (which merrily allows terrorist groups like Lashkar e-Taiba to keep accounts) decided that Robinson should be suspended for tweeting out a statistic about Muslim rape gangs that itself originated from the Muslim-run Quilliam foundation. And it is on this matter that the latest episode in the Robinson drama started — and has now drawn worldwide attention.

Ten years ago, when the EDL was founded, the U.K. was even less willing than it is now to confront the issue of what are euphemistically described as “Asian grooming gangs” (euphemistic because no Chinese or Koreans are involved and what is happening is not grooming but mass rape). At the time, only a couple of such cases had been recognized. Ten years on, every month brings news of another town in which gangs of men (almost always of Pakistani origin) have been found to have raped young, often underage, white girls. The facts of this reality — which, it cannot be denied, sounds like something from the fantasies of the most lurid racist — have now been confirmed multiple times by judges during sentencing and also by the most mainstream investigative journalists in the country.

But the whole subject is so ugly and uncomfortable that very few people care to linger over it. Robinson is an exception. For him — as he said in a 2011 interview with the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman — the “grooming gangs” issue isn’t something that afflicts some far-off towns but people in the working-class communities that he knows. And while there are journalists (notably the Times’ Andrew Norfolk) who have spent considerable time and energy bringing this appalling phenomenon to light, most of British society has turned away in a combination of embarrassment, disgust, and uncertainty about how to even talk about this. Anyone who thinks Britain is much further along with dealing with the taboo of “grooming gangs” should remember that only last year the Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, had to leave the shadow cabinet because she accurately identified the phenomenon.

Which brings me to last Friday. That was when Robinson was filming outside Leeds Crown Court, where the latest grooming-gang case was going on. I have to be slightly careful here, because although National Review is based in the U.S., I am not, and there are reporting restrictions on the ongoing case. Anyhow, Robinson was outside the court and appeared (from the full livestream) to be filming the accused and accosting them with questions on their way in. He also appeared to exercise some caution, trying to ensure he was not on court property.

But clearly he did not exercise enough caution, a strange fact given that last year Robinson had been found guilty of “contempt of court” for filming outside another rape-gang trial, one involving four Muslim men at Canterbury Crown Court. On that occasion Robinson was given a three-month prison sentence, which was suspended for a period of 18 months. Which meant he would be free so long as he did not repeat the offense.

Although Robinson appeared to be careful at Leeds Crown Court last Friday, to dance along the line of exactly what he could or could not livestream outside an ongoing trial with a suspended sentence hanging over his head was extraordinarily unwise. What happened next went around the world: The police turned up in a van and swiftly arrested Robinson for “breach of the peace.” Within hours Robinson had been put before one Judge Geoffrey Marson, who in under five minutes tried, convicted, and sentenced Robinson to 13 months. He was immediately taken to prison.

From that moment it was not just Robinson but the U.K. that entered a minefield of legal problems. In addition to the usual reporting restrictions on the ongoing trial, a reporting ban was put on any mention of Robinson’s arrest, swift trial, and conviction, meaning that for days people in the blogosphere and the international media got free rein to claim that Tommy Robinson had been arrested for no reason, that his arrest was a demonstration of a totalitarian state cracking down on free speech, and even (and this one is remarkably clueless as well as careless) that the recent appointment to the position of home secretary of Sajid Javid — who was born to Muslim parents — is the direct cause of Robinson’s recent arrest.

The facts are both more prosaic and depressing. Robinson would not now be in jail if he had not once again accosted defendants in an ongoing trial outside the courthouse. He had been told by a judge last May not to do this and yet he did this again. It isn’t the worst thing in the world (it isn’t child rape, for instance), but it is an offense to which Robinson understandably pleaded guilty. More important, the trial that was coming to a close last Friday is just one part of a trial involving multiple other defendants. It is certainly possible that Robinson’s breaking of reporting restrictions at the Leeds trial could have prejudiced those trials. To have caused the collapse of such a trial would have been more than a blunder; it would have been an additional blow to victims who deserve justice.

Some supporters of Robinson have been pointing out that there have been reporters outside the trials of celebrities accused of child abuse (Rolf Harris, for instance). But the comparison isn’t exact. It is exceptionally difficult to put reporting restrictions on the trial of a household name, and difficult to select jurors with no views on the defendants. The fact that this legal complexity exists in some cases does not mean that an additional layer of difficulty ought to be overlaid on the already-difficult-enough attempts to bring to justice gangs of otherwise unknown men. In any case, accosting a celebrity on their way into court would also be an offense

The whole affair is in many ways maddening. Maddening that Robinson stepped over a line that had been very clearly drawn for him. Maddening that he gave the police and courts a legitimate reason to arrest him. And maddening because, as he must have known (and as I have said a number of times over the years, including during a speech at the Danish Parliament three years ago), it is by now abundantly clear that every arm of the British state has been out to get Tommy Robinson from the moment he emerged on the scene in Luton a decade ago.

The problem — as I said in 2015 — is that any challenge Robinson presents is all a secondary issue. The primary issue is that for years the British state allowed gangs of men to rape thousands of young girls across Britain. For years the police, politicians, Crown Prosecution Service, and every other arm of the state ostensibly dedicated to protecting these girls failed them. As a number of government inquires have concluded, they turned their face away from these girls because they were terrified of the accusations of racism that would come their way if they did address them. They decided it wasn’t worth the aggravation.

By contrast, Tommy Robinson thought it was worth the aggravation, even if that meant having his whole life turned upside down. Some years ago, after crawling over all of his personal affairs and the affairs of all his immediate family, the police found an irregularity on a mortgage application, prosecuted Robinson, convicted him, and sent him to prison on that charge. In prison he was assaulted and almost killed by Muslim inmates.

What can be said with absolute certainty is that Tommy Robinson has been treated with greater suspicion and a greater presumption of guilt by the United Kingdom than any Islamic extremist or mass rapist ever has been. That should be — yet is not — a national scandal. If even one mullah or sheikh had been treated with the presumption of guilt that Robinson has received, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the rest of them would be all over the U.K. authorities. But different standards apply to Robinson.

And on it goes. On Sunday there was a protest in London in support of him. The legal blogger “The Secret Barrister” might have spoken for a whole nose-holding class when he dismissed this protest as “a Nazi-themed march.” Look at the video he links to and you will see a lot of people with their arms in the air chanting “Oh Tommy Robinson.” If our eminent legal correspondent thinks this is Nazi-themed, he can never have been to a football match or, come to that, a Jeremy Corbyn rally.

So it will continue. Tommy Robinson will be in prison for another year. And all those people happy with the status quo will breathe a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness that troublemaker has gone away.” Yet their real problem has not gone away. There is no chance of their real problem going away. Because they have no plan for making it go away.

They have a vague hope, of course, which is that at some point soon in the coming generations this will all simmer down and the incoming communities will develop similar views about the status of women as the rest of society. And perhaps we will get there someday. But it is telling that the apparently tolerable roadkill en route includes one young man from Luton — and thousands of raped girls.

UK "Justice": "Silencing the Silencing"

by Bruce Bawer

Originally published by Gatestone Institute 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12417/uk-justice

• The charge against Robinson declared by the police at the time of arrest, "breach of peace," was changed to "contempt of court." Apparently, the former offense would not constitute a violation of the terms of Robinson's suspended sentence from last year and thereby justify immediate imprisonment. But by declaring Robinson guilty of "contempt of court," the judge was able to ship him straightaway to prison.

• In fact, it is clear to people all over Britain what is really going on here. Their country is being steadily Islamized, and their government is abetting this process. Muslims commit outrageous crimes, and police treat them respectfully -- then turn around and arrest ordinary British citizens for daring to complain.

• "Judicial power never been used before to silence a journalist in Britain and then to silence the silencing.... This lie came directly from Theresa May's government.... and it was planned to the last detail. A courtroom and a judge were waiting to immediately sentence him. A prison cell was booked in his name.... This combined is the action of a totalitarian state, in all its brutal horror." — Paul Weston, Pegida UK.

First the good news: on Wednesday, at about noon London time, Tommy Robinson's former lawyer, Helen Gower, reported on Twitter that "Tommy has just rung me and is well." He had been receiving e-mails of support and was humbled by them. "He did inform me of some of the things that happened on Friday," Gower wrote, "but I don't want to put anything out and I will leave that to his Solicitor."

Well, there it stands: the media gag order on the Tommy Robinson case has been lifted, but Robinson himself remains in Hull Prison, having been arrested on the street in Leeds, hauled into a kangaroo court, and then sent off to jail. Incidentally, in a YouTube video, Canadian activist Lauren Southern and a member of Robinson's team have provided a plausible explanation of why the charge against Robinson declared by the police at the time of arrest, "breach of peace," was changed to "contempt of court." Apparently, the former offense would not constitute a violation of the terms of Robinson's suspended sentence from last year and thereby justify immediate imprisonment. But by declaring Robinson guilty of "contempt of court," the judge was able to ship him straightaway to prison.

But this is all a bunch of judicial mumbo-jumbo -- a cagey use of legal technicalities to betray the very spirit of the law. In fact, it is clear to people all over Britain what is really going on here. Their country is being steadily Islamized, and their government is abetting this process. Muslims commit outrageous crimes, and police treat them respectfully -- then turn around and arrest ordinary British citizens for daring to complain. Of all those ordinary citizens, Robinson is the most prominent. More than anyone else in Britain, he has risked his own safety and freedom to awaken the dormant patriotism and sense of responsibility in the hearts of his fellow British subjects -- and to keep the reprehensible reality of mass child rape by Muslim gangs in the public eye. For these transgressions, the British establishment must see him punished.

Videos and commentaries that have been posted online in recent days by ordinary British citizens give the distinct impression that millions of his countrymen deeply respect Robinson for saying and doing things that they themselves dare not say or do. They are greatly upset by his arrest, trial, and imprisonment -- all of which took place within what must be a record-setting time of four hours -- and are genuinely alarmed by the seemingly unprecedented and unjust way in which the whole thing was pulled off. Thanks to Islam, Britain has been becoming more and more unrecognizable to them -- more and more dangerous, undemocratic, unequal, and unjust -- and this episode appears to have brought that process to a crisis point, and brought many Britons' anger to a boil.

One of those Britons is a friend of my British source "L." Concerned about Robinson's imprisonment, she wrote a polite e-mail to her Member of Parliament, a recently elected Labourite who is an ally of Labour honcho Jeremy Corbyn and who, according to Wikipedia, is gay. The MP's hostile reply to his constituent provides a stark insight into the mentality of at least some of the UK's governing elites. It begins:

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, is not a martyr of free speech.

He is a convicted fraudster and former football hooligan....

This is nonsense. Yes, Robinson is a working-class boy from Luton. If part of young Muslim male culture is forming "grooming gangs" and raping children, part of young male culture in working-class English places like Luton is what is known as "laddish behavior" at soccer matches. Sometimes it shades over into violence; usually it is just a matter of being loud and boisterous outside stadiums and at nearby pubs. In any event, Robinson has written candidly about this aspect of his youth in his book Enemy of the State. To some readers, the MP's description of Robinson as a "former football hooligan" may seem to reek of class condescension. There has, in fact, been good reason throughout Robinson's career as a public figure to wonder how much of the British authorities' shabby treatment of him can be ascribed to his working-class status. Would an Islam critic with an Oxbridge background, a job at a respected London think tank, and an upper-class accent ever be treated the way Robinson is?

As for Robinson being a "fraudster," this charge, as "L" puts it, "stems from a time when it did appear as if the police were scrutinising him and his family for everything they could find. They took away loads of documents and scrutinised his wife's tax affairs, for instance." Eventually he was arrested for lending his brother-in-law £20,000 to help him qualify for a housing loan. A year later, the brother-in-law sold the house for £30,000 and repaid Robinson. As "L" says, "it was a completely victimless crime." Robinson "pleaded guilty for what his lawyer (somewhat understandably) thought would be a non-custodial sentence" and, according to Robinson, on the promise by police had "that if he pleaded guilty they would not go after him financially." Instead, they sent him to prison for eighteen months and was made to pay £125,000. "There are thousands and thousands of people who technically commit mortgage fraud all the time -- e.g. parents who lend deposits to their children and then later get the deposit paid back," says "L." The difference is that Robinson was punished severely for it.

Back to the MP's e-mail. Robinson, he charges,

broke strict reporting rules which exist in court cases for a very good reason: if they are broken, that can lead to the collapse of trials of those alleged to have committed serious crimes such as rape or murder, meaning alleged rapists would walk free.

He was by his actions allowing rapists to get off and this is unacceptable!

More nonsense. Robinson did not break any reporting rules. No rapists got off.

If you believe Tommy Robinson shouldn't be arrested, you are saying the law shouldn't apply to him because you agree with his obsessive anti-Muslim hatred.

On the contrary, Robinson has repeatedly made it clear that he doesn't hate Muslims -- his problem is with Islam. Every brave, halfway intelligent Briton who sees what Islam is doing to his country feels the same way. Note, incidentally, that the MP, in this reply to one of his own constituents -- one of his employers -- is essentially calling her a bigot. This, even though he does not know her at all, and all she did was to express her concern about what, by any measure, was an exceedingly irregular arrest, trial, conviction, and imprisonment.

The MP concludes his reply as follows:

I didn't see [Robinson] trying to break reporting restrictions around the trial of a senior English Defence League member who groomed a 10 year old girl, did you? That's because his agenda is bigotry and hatred, and nothing more.

Once again, ridiculous. A single isolated case of rape by a non-Muslim has nothing whatsoever to do with the almost exclusively Muslim phenomenon of "grooming gangs," which involve sexual abuse by gangs of men of large stables of girls over a period of years. The contempt for infidels and disrespect for females that make these atrocities possible are part and parcel of the perpetrators' culture and religion.

Yes, of course non-Muslims in Britain kill and rape, too -- and if the police find out about it, they arrest the suspect and put him on trial. Robinson's whole point is that for decades Muslim rapists have not been treated in the same way. All too many British police officers and judges will use any excuse to let a Muslim rapist go. In 2014, for example, an imam who had sexually abused an eleven-year-old girl was given a suspended sentence because his six children "were so dependent on him" and because he had "kidney problems." To explain why his presence at home was so urgent, the imam's lawyer said that the imam's wife "doesn't work and speaks very little English." But to criticize any of this, in the eyes of that Labour MP, is to have an "agenda" of "bigotry and hatred."

Notably, the MP's full support for the way in which the police and court handled the Robinson case is not shared by the editors of the Independent -- the British broadsheet that, along with Leeds Live, spearheaded the media campaign against the gag order. In an editorial on Tuesday, the day that order was lifted, the editors accepted the absurd proposition that Robinson was guilty of "contempt of court" and pronounced his thirteen-month sentence "justified and proportionate." That much is predictable enough from a newspaper that is every bit as left-wing as the Guardian. The surprising part is the Independent's acknowledgment that whatever one thinks of Robinson,

It cannot be right, whatever else, that a British citizen can be deprived of their liberty "in the dark," the very fact of their whereabouts made a secret. It feels wrong, and, in spirit at least, partly in breach of the ancient principle of habeas corpus.

The answer to the question "Where's Tommy?" cannot be: "We know but we cannot tell you because a court says so."

Well, that's something, anyway. But millions of Britons reject entirely the Independent's assurances that Robinson has received justice. One of them is Paul Weston of Pegida, who, in a new video, maintains that "judicial power never been used before to silence a journalist in Britain and then to silence the silencing." That police and the Luton court to have taken such an action so quickly, Weston theorized, proves that this was not the work of some rank-and-file cop or some mid-level constabulary paper-pusher. "This lie came directly from Theresa May's government," charged Weston.

"This lie came from the very top down and it was planned to the last detail. A courtroom and a judge were waiting to immediately sentence him. A prison cell was booked in his name.... This combined is the action of a totalitarian state, in all its brutal horror."

Given the swiftness with which Robinson was snatched up off the street, transported to a courtroom, tried without his own counsel present, and then taken to a waiting prison cell -- a brazen series of events that it is hard to imagine anyone below the highest of levels having the power or the nerve to orchestrate -- it is hard to challenge Weston's suggestion that Theresa May herself is behind this travesty of justice. If that is what happened, then it certainly helps to clarify just what Britain, and the Free World, are up against.

Bruce Bawer is the author of the new novel The Alhambra (Swamp Fox Editions). His book While Europe Slept (2006) was a New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His other books include A Place at the Table (1993), Stealing Jesus (1997), Surrender (2009), and The Victims' Revolution (2012). A native New Yorker, he has lived in Europe since 1998.

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FORMER MOSSAD CHIEF: IN 2011, NETANYAHU ORDERED 2-WEEK IRAN ATTACK PLAN

The Jerusalem Post

The former Mossad chief decided to examine whether the prime minister was even authorized to issue a directive that could drag Israel into the war.

BY MAARIV ONLINE

Former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo revealed Wednesday evening on Channel 12 news that he considered to resign during his term, following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's 2011 decision to order the army to prepare for a possible attack on Iran with only a 15-day notice.

Pardo then approached the attorney general to examine the legality of the order. "When someone tells you, 'Establish a countdown process,' you realize that he is not playing games with you," Pardo stated.

According to the former Mossad chief, Israel was closer than ever to attacking Iran in 2011. This is when Netanyahu instructed Mossad chief Pardo and then-chief of staff Benny Gantz to prepare for the P15+ plan, which meant improving Israel's defense so that it would be prepared to attack Iran within 15 days of the order.

When asked whether he believed the attack would take place, the former head of the Mossad replied: "Such a plan is not something that you just order for practice. If this is ordered, it is done for one of two reasons: either because you really intend for such a thing to take place or because you want to send a signal to someone out there."

Pardo, who had just taken up the post at the time, decided in an unusual move to examine whether the prime minister was even authorized to issue a directive that could drag Israel into the war. 

"I made countless inquiries about every possible course of action. I checked with former heads of Mossad, I talked to legal advisers, I consulted with anyone I could consult with to understand who was authorized to give instructions on any subject connected to starting a war," Pardo explained.

"In the end, if I receive an order, even if it comes from the prime minister, I have to be certain that if something goes wrong and the operation fails, there will be no situation in which I committed an illegal operation."

When asked whether he believes that an attack on Iran is like a decision to start a war, the former intelligence chief replied: "Of course." 

Due to the opposition of Mossad chief Pardo and then-chief of staff Benny Gantz, the prime minister withdrew the order.

Translated by Juliane Helmhold.

My comment:

We can judge where Tamir Pardo stands with this reaction to president Trump's withdrawal from the Iran deal

Shortly before Trump’s announcement, the former head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency said Iran is “fully complying with the nuclear deal.” Tamir Pardo told a security conference in the coastal town of Herzliya there “still will be a need for some kind of deal at the end of the day.”