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Thursday, May 31, 2018

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


National Review          

By 

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.

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"


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.

© 2018 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

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.”

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Islamic Jihad continue jihad


A man holds shrapnel from mortar shells fired from the Gaza Strip that landed near a
kindergarten, in a Kibbutz on the Israeli side of the Israeli-Gaza border, May 29, 2018.  

         
I wish Islamic Jihad continue jihad were the headline in the world papers .  Would it not be the most precise and concise headline?

Instead, we get:

The New York Times

The Washington Post

The Wall Street Journal

Israeli Jets Hit Gaza Targets After Militants Fire Projectiles Over Border

Le Figaro

The key word is "militants".  

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

The hypocrisy and moral decadence of Emily Thornberry, UK Shadow Foreign Secretary







[ In response to Isi Leibler’s  Reviewing a month of hypocrisy and moral decadence ]


I would have just added that the hypocrisy and moral decadence was topped by Emily Thornberry, UK Shadow Foreign Secretary, who on May 15, 2018, said the following in the House of Commons:

“What makes yesterday’s events all the worst is that they did not come as a result of some accidental overreaction to one day’s protest but as the result of a culmination of six weeks, an apparently calculated and deliberate posse to kill and maim unarmed protesters who pose no threat to the forces on the Gaza border.”

This whole incident, according to Emily Thornberry, was calculated by Israel to deliberately kill and maim unarmed Palestinians!? How much more absurd can this be? Shame on the UK Parliament to be discussing such an inversion of reality!

MLADEN ANDRIJASEVIC
Beersheba






Monday, May 28, 2018

Swift Injustice: The Case of Tommy Robinson



Originally published by Gatestone Institute

§  The swiftness with which injustice was meted out to Tommy Robinson is stunning. No, more than that: it is terrifying.
§  Without having access to his own lawyer, Robinson was summarily tried and sentenced to 13 months behind bars. He was then transported to Hull Prison.
§  Meanwhile, the judge who sentenced Robinson also ordered British media not to report on his case. Newspapers that had already posted reports of his arrest quickly took them down. All this happened on the same day.
§  In Britain, rapists enjoy the right to a full and fair trial, the right to the legal representation of their choice, the right to have sufficient time to prepare their cases, and the right to go home on bail between sessions of their trial. No such rights were offered, however, to Tommy Robinson.

The very first time I set foot in London, back in my early twenties, I kicked up into an adrenaline high that lasted for the entire week of my visit. Never, in later years, did any other place ever have such an impact on me -- not Paris, not Rome. Yes, Rome was a cradle of Western civilization, and Paris a hub of Western culture -- but Britain was the place where the values of the Anglosphere, above all a dedication to freedom, had fully taken form. Without Britain, there would have been no U.S. Declaration of Independence, Constitution, or Bill of Rights.

In recent years, alas, Britain has deviated from its commitment to liberty. Foreign critics of Islam, such as the American scholar Robert Spencer, and for a time, even the Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders have been barred from the country. Now, at least one prominent native critic of Islam, Tommy Robinson, has been repeatedly harassed by the police, railroaded by the courts, and left unprotected by prison officials who have allowed Muslim inmates to beat him senseless. Clearly, British authorities view Robinson as a troublemaker and would like nothing more than to see him give up his fight, leave the country (as Ayaan Hirsi Ali left the Netherlands), or get killed by a jihadist (as happened to the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh).


On Friday, as reported here yesterday, the saga of Tommy Robinson entered a new chapter. British police officers pulled him off a street in Leeds, where, in his role as a citizen journalist, he was livestreaming a Facebook video from outside a courthouse. Inside that building, several defendants were on trial for allegedly being part of a so-called "grooming gang" -- a group of men, almost all Muslim, who systematically rape non-Muslim children, in some cases hundreds of them, over a period of years or decades. Some ten thousand Facebook viewers around the world witnessed Robinson's arrest live.




The police promptly dragged Robinson in front of a judge, where, without having access to his own lawyer, he was summarily tried and sentenced to 13 months behind bars. He was then transported to Hull Prison.


Meanwhile, the judge who sentenced him also ordered the British media not to report on his case. Newspapers that had already posted reports of his arrest quickly took them down. Even ordinary citizens who had written about the arrest on social media removed their posts, for fear of sharing Robinson's fate. All this happened on the same day.


A kangaroo court, then a gag order. In the United Kingdom, where rapists enjoy the right to a full and fair trial, the right to the legal representation of their choice, the right to have sufficient time to prepare their cases, and the right to go home on bail between sessions of their trial. No such rights were offered, however, to Tommy Robinson.

The swiftness with which injustice was meted out to Robinson is stunning. No, more than that: it is terrifying. On various occasions over the years, I have been subjected in person to an immediate threat of Islamic violence: I have had a knife pulled on me by a young gang member, and been encircled by a crowd of belligerent men 
in djellabas outside a radical mosque. But that was not frightening. This is frightening -- this utter violation of fundamental British freedoms.

From one perspective, to be sure, Robinson's lightning-fast arrest, trial, and imprisonment should not have come as a surprise. "There has been a campaign to 'get Tommy' -- or what looks remarkably like it -- for some time," a source in the UK, whom I will call "L", told me late early Saturday morning.

The apparent justification for Robinson's arrest is that he was on a suspended sentence. In May of last year, he was taken into custody while reporting from outside a courthouse in Kent, where another group of Muslim defendants was being tried, also on "grooming" charges. That arrest was also unjustified. At least, however, Robinson was given a suspended sentence. This time, presumably, it was determined that the mere act of reporting yet again from outside another courthouse amounted to a violation of the terms of his suspended sentence.

The official cynicism here is obvious. L made a vital point: that often, when one of these "grooming gang" trials is being held, the extended families and friends of the defendants stand outside the courthouse and "heckle and intimidate" the rape victims as well as their families and supporters. "I've had reports of children as young as five throwing stones at victims' families," L said. 

"This intimidation by extended community groups also involves going around to houses and harassing people." She has even heard of witnesses for the prosecution who have needed police protection to use a rest room inside a courthouse. Needless to say, this heckling and harassment is rarely reported on and never punished.

One potentially positive aspect of this ugly turn of events is that it turned heads that should have been turned long ago. L noted that many of her Twitter contacts "were tweeting that they didn't necessarily support Tommy in general but were appalled that someone reporting these [grooming] crimes was arrested." Some of her acquaintances, she said, "are stunned and in despair." On Saturday, thousands of Robinson's supporters rallied in Westminster. But will such public protests make any difference? One British ex-policeman reacted to Robinson's incarceration with a video urging his fellow countrymen not just to march or rally but to join Ann Marie Waters' party For Britain and do for freedom of speech in Britain what UKIP did to get British out of the EU.

L had more interesting information to offer. While Robinson is being punished for drawing attention to Muslim rape gangs, the Sikh Awareness Society, which has also reported on these "grooming" trials, is left alone. "They are a godsend," said L, "because they pull no punches yet don't seem to get the intimidation that people like Tommy get." Of course -- British police would not dare arrest a bearded man in a turban. L also mentioned an imam who was arrested recently, only to be let go by police after "a large group of supporters demanded his release." At least one police officer acknowledged that the imam had been freed because otherwise "they would have been facing riots all around the country." L summed up British authorities' current approach to the Islamic situation as follows: "they have lost control... and are simply going for those who they think will make the least fuss. The classroom bully has terrorised the teacher into punishing the kids who are bullied."

One assumes that the officials think that perpetrating this kind of injustice will somehow keep the peace. If I were one of their number, I would not be so certain. The people at that Westminster rally on Saturday were angry. How many other British subjects share their anger? L expressed concern that this summer in Britain may turn out to be quite restive. Well, maybe that is all for the good.

For my part, I cannot for the life of me fathom why not a single prominent or powerful individual in all of the United Kingdom has come forward to challenge the mistreatment of Tommy Robinson – and thereby stand up for freedom of speech.

Is the whole British establishment a bunch of cowards? I suppose we will know the answer to that question soon enough, if we do not know it already.

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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Geert Wilders's statement in solidarity with Tommy Robinson


Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Dry Bones: America’s Demands



1. Iran must declare to the IAEA a full account of the prior military dimensions of its nuclear program, and permanently and verifiably abandon such work in perpetuity.
 2. Iran must stop enrichment and never pursue plutonium reprocessing. This includes closing its heavy water reactor.
 3. Iran must also provide the IAEA with unqualified access to all sites throughout the entire country.
 4. Iran must end its proliferation of ballistic missiles and halt further launching or development of nuclear-capable missile systems.
 5. Iran must release all US citizens, as well as citizens of our partners and allies, each of them detained on spurious charges.
 6. Iran must end support to Middle East terrorist groups, including Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
 7. Iran must respect the sovereignty of the Iraqi government and permit the disarming, demobilization, and reintegration of Shia militias.
 8. Iran must also end its military support for the Houthi militia and work towards a peaceful political settlement in Yemen.
 9. Iran must withdraw all forces under Iranian command throughout the entirety of Syria.
 10. Iran, too, must end support for the Taliban and other terrorists in Afghanistan and the region, and cease harboring senior al-Qaeda leaders.
 11. Iran, too, must end the IRG Qods Force’s support for terrorists and militant partners around the world.
 12. Iran must end its threatening behavior against its neighbors — many of whom are US allies. This certainly includes its threats to destroy Israel, and its firing of missiles into Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It also includes threats to international shipping and destructive — and destructive cyberattacks.