By Douglas Murray
Thursday, May 31, 2018
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.
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