[Editor’s note: To help Tommy, visit his website, tommyrobinson.online, and also go to Rebel Media, which has nobly taken up his cause.]
One of Britain’s most prominent human rights activists is being held as a political prisoner for reporting on a brutal Muslim child-rape gang, one of many such “grooming” gang cases that country’s government has been downplaying or outright covering up in recent years.
Authorities in the United Kingdom are notorious for protecting Muslims who rape Britons and for covering up the crimes of Muslim rape rings. Some government officials and journalists suppress news of the sex crimes out of a perverse sense of political correctness; others because they are afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic.
From the 1980s to the 2010s, as many as 1,400 Britons, mostly white girls, were raped largely by Muslim men in Rotherham, England. In recent years Muslim rape gangs have been uncovered in Rochdale, Telford, Aylesbury, Banbury, and in many other British communities.
Not surprisingly, many Britons no longer trust their government to handle such grooming cases fairly.
Some like scrappy English Defence League co-founder Tommy Robinson, a married father of three who has been sounding the alarm about the Islamization of the United Kingdom for years, try to bring transparency to a distrusted legal process.
Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, is an imperfect vehicle for reform. He has had plenty of legal troubles unrelated to his activism – for example, a conviction for mortgage fraud, and at times he seems a bit too eager to use his fists. But he is doing his countrymen a great service by drawing their attention to tremendous evils in his society that go largely unchallenged.
Whatever misdeeds Robinson may have carried out, they are insignificant compared to the crime waves unleashed on the British public by violent, misogynistic Muslim men who refuse to assimilate and adapt to their new homeland.
Unfortunately, Robinson can’t look for relief to weakling Prime Minister Theresa May, who is an Islamist appeaser. Her Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, is a Muslim.
The deck is stacked against those skeptical of Islam. In the United Kingdom the police now monitor statements on social media and jail those who express frowned-upon sentiments. In the U.K., Big Brother is no longer just something from George Orwell’s prophetic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Not surprisingly, Muslim terrorism apologist and Second Amendment-hater Piers Morgan pulled out the usual canards about Islam while attacking Robinson during a recent TV interview.
Based on nothing in particular, Morgan called him a “bigoted lunatic stirring up hatred” as Robinson characterized the Koran as a “violent and cursed book,” adding, “this book is the reason we are in such a mess.”
Piers claimed, “We’re in this mess because people take Islam, they are terrorists and they abuse the nature of Islam and… perpetrate evil.”
Robinson shot back denying Islam is a religion. “Islam is an idea – a bad idea,” he said, echoing ex-Muslim and genital mutilation survivor Ayaan Hirsi Ali who has called Islam “a political theory of conquest that seeks domination by any means it can.”
It was last Friday, May 25, when Robinson was reporting outside Leeds Crown Court in England when he was taken into custody for his most recent act of unauthorized citizen journalism. A tanning salon owner, Robinson filmed on his smartphone the arrival of accused rapists on trial for acts allegedly committed while being part of a so-called Muslim grooming gang. The broadcast consisted of an hour-long Facebook Live stream that within hours had been viewed more than 250,000 times.
The arresting officers informed Robinson he was being taken into custody for suspicion of breaching the peace. Taking footage in a public place of people walking into a courthouse is not in itself a breach of the peace even in the United Kingdom.
But this arrest was for what constituted a second offense under contempt of court laws, and was therefore grounds for Robinson’s probation to be revoked and for a sentence that was previously suspended for the same so-called crime to be carried out. He is now serving a 13-month term in secure custody at Hull Prison.
Because the filming May 25 was of accused persons in an ongoing criminal trial where a publication ban preventing news from being reported had been imposed, the court that day imposed a separate publication ban specifically on reporting what happened to Robinson. As happens in police states, the court ordered the media not to report on Robinson’s case, ostensibly to avoid “a substantial risk of prejudice to the administration of justice in these proceedings” against the rape suspects.
As Leeds Live reported on the events of May 25 days after Robinson’s arrest:
Eventually, the 35-year-old was arrested on suspicion of a breach of the peace and was held in the court cells before being taken up to the courtroom to face the trial judge.
In a rare move, he was arrested, charged and sentenced within five hours. The video footage was played to Judge Geoffrey Marson QC as Robinson sat in the dock.
Contempt of Court legislation largely applies to media publications – but as Tommy Robinson was broadcasting live on Facebook to the 778,280 people who like his page, and his 848,100 followers – he can be deemed a publisher in his own right.
Judge Geoffrey Marson QC told him: “I respect everyone’s right to free speech. That’s one of the most important rights that we have.
“With those rights come responsibilities. The responsibility to exercise that freedom of speech within the law.
“I am not sure you appreciate the potential consequence of what you have done.”
Judge Marson claimed that Robinson waving a single smartphone around outside the courthouse could somehow have led to a mistrial declaration in the prosecution of the accused rapists, a claim that seems laughable on its face.
It is more likely Marson does not appreciate the social value of what Robinson, whom he jailed for the same kind of citizen journalism that got the man in trouble in the first place, did outside his courtroom.
Marson, who almost certainly believes he did the right thing in sending Robinson to prison, is an instrument of a corrupt system defending itself.
The U.K. is a country without anything even remotely comparable to the First Amendment, which still has creepy, frightening blasphemy laws, and where truth is not necessarily a defense to a defamation lawsuit.
The American system, readers need to be reminded, is about liberty – the system in England is about order, which is one of the reasons why American patriots had to overthrow the yoke of English tyranny in 1776. Liberty is frightening to intellectually stunted legal bureaucrats obsessed with order, which helps to explain why the English legal system has treated a heroic figure like Robinson so harshly.
As for Robinson, he seems to have predicted his sudden disappearance from the public scene.
In March, Twitter banned Robinson for the Left’s favorite catch-all thought crime, so-called hate speech. He also posted an ominous video on YouTube on March 2 titled “I won’t be around for much longer.”
I’m not going to be around for much longer. Between the police, the mainstream media and social media giants in Silicon Valley there is a concerted effort to silence and discredit me. Soon enough they will remove me from social media completely.
So far that sinister plan seems to be working.
This article by Matthew Vadum first appeared May 31, 2018, at FrontPageMag.