An Israeli perspective on Tommy Robinson

by Brian of London

Tommy Robinson interviews an activist at Brexit rally

“It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of a good name, must find Tommy Robinson to be a neo-Nazi, racist, Muslim hating, Jew hating thug.”

In the UK today, for a Jew to support Tommy Robinson is a crime almost as severe as simply being Tommy Robinson. Last week I was hit with both barrels from the two biggest guns in the Jewish far-left media world: Ha’aretz and the UK’s Jewish Chronicle.

Ha’aretz’s Opinion Editor, Esther Solomon,¹ chose to quote me saying that Israel is surrounded by hostile Islamic Arab nations (I’m not sure that’s a disputable or unique viewpoint). David Aaronovitch, writing in the Jewish Chronicle, said Jews should be able to instinctively recognise Tommy Robinson as a racist, Jew hater, without reference to anything like evidence and that a Jew, such as myself, who can’t see how horrible Tommy is, must be an idiot.

Ha’aretz hit hard right from the sub-head: “Jews who think the far right is offering them authentic ‘friendship’ are clearly capable of particularly delusional thinking”. It didn’t let up with the first line: “It’s a thrilling time to be a racist nationalist”. After a slanted rendition of the circumstances of Tommy’s latest incarceration, they focus on me, Brian of London, one of the most vocal supporters of Tommy in Israel going back almost to the beginning of the EDL.

I’ve answered the Ha’aretz piece with a simple explanation (much as you’d give to the child too young to ask at the Passover Seder) of my friendship and knowledge of Tommy Robinson. However the Jewish Chronicle’s latest attack is altogether another degree of awful.

Discredited commentator, David Aaronovitch,² taking time out from giving Hamas cover and excuses for blowing up my friend’s child in suicide bombings (more on that later), chose to focus on my guilt for having brought Tommy Robinson to Israel to see what the country looks like for himself. Because we all know what happens to people who learn everything they know about Israel from the BBC, or worse, confused Jews in the Jewish Chronicle.

Aaronovitch’s piece is dripping with pejorative terms for Tommy; “head-banger”, “anti-Muslim activist”. However it is this paragraph taken from my rebuttal to a previous Jewish Chronicle hit piece,³ that really occupies a significant place in Aaronovitch’s head:

[Brian] published a long account of how he escorted Mr Robinson round Israel. Brian, who is now an Israeli citizen and one of those aliyahites who has a fine contempt for the community he has left behind, was a big fan of the convicted former football hooligan. Tommy, “saw Jewish and Christian history and our obvious, deep love for our land. He saw the stunning country we built out of the diseased ruin it had become under a succession of emperors, sultans, caliphs and Imperial British troops.”

It is important to thoroughly deconstruct what the selection of that paragraph from my article reveals about the mens rea of Mr Aaronovitch. We can learn from his next paragraph:

I know, I know, there’s someone’s history missing there, but let’s press on. “Since his earliest days opposing supremacist Islam on the streets of Luton”, continued Brian, skipping the bit about also opposing the fans of Newport County, ”Tommy knew most of what he heard about Israel in the mainstream press was distorted.”

This little snide, sideswipe is highly revealing: “there’s someone’s history missing there”. He obviously means I didn’t mention the P-word. I chose to omit that well known section of history when Arabs, calling themselves “Palestinians” and distinct from all other Muslims and/or Arabs, built a great and thriving civilisation, ran it on Islamic principles and lovingly developed the land we now know as Israel, building new towns and cities, giving them unique Arabic names and caring for the vast history and archeology of what was there before. It is a great crime of mine that I didn’t talk about this great Palestinian civilisation and nation and demonstrate it to Tommy Robinson.

I’m guilty of not acknowledging a fictional Palestinian identity with which David Aaronovitch and his ilk have become fixated. Or of helping turn that fiction into a new, modern, Islamic State on land a few seconds mortar flight from the one and only Jewish, indigenous homeland. That’s my crime: I clearly do not believe in the Two State Solution, unicorns or the sainthood of Barack Obama. For god’s sake, I probably voted Brexit (guilty and I won money betting Trump would win).

Obviously I find it hard to talk about the glorious history of the nation of Palestine because I can’t find any evidence of it existing at any time (or even a movement to create it). I’ve looked amongst the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire and the illegal occupation of Judea & Samaria by the newly minted British creation of “Jordan” or the Egyptian occupation of Gaza. It seems the only push to create a Palestinian State come after Jews regained sovereignty living on their indigenous lands.

And this is not a unique pattern for the discredited commentator, Aaronovitch. As alluded to earlier we come to the reason I award him the title “discredited”. Writing in the The Times last week, Aaronovitch tried to provide his version of context for Hamas’s terrorist atrocities:

In February 1994 a far-right Israeli extremist called Baruch Goldstein, who loathed the Oslo process, massacred 29 Palestinians at a shrine near Hebron. The first Hamas suicide bombing, of a school bus, was supposedly in retaliation for this attack.

UK Media Watch⁴ responded pointing out this was not only wrong, but amounts to a modern blood libel. The first Hamas suicide bomb attack took place 10 months before and there can be no doubt, upon reading the Hamas charter, littered with Koranic versus and Haditha, and examining their behaviour, they themselves are following their prophet’s entreaties to “fight all men until they say there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet”.

All Aaronovitch does when giving credence to lies like “supposedly in retaliation” is bolster the Jew hatred born of blood libels and the belief (a foundational belief of the real far-right) that Jews always do something to deserve the genocidal hatred thrown at them for centuries. UK Media Watch even has a category⁵ for him and his failures when it comes to talking about Israel.

And this is where his mis-categorisation of Tommy Robinson is so brutally at odds with reality. One of the favourite canards of the far-right is to ask you to consider how many countries Jews have been thrown out of. The list, like my Johnson, is long and distinguished.

The far-right reasoning (and there are books devoted to this) goes like this: if Jews had been thrown out of or persecuted in one or two times and places, perhaps the persecutors were just bigoted. But persecution of Jews seems to happen whenever and wherever Jews settle. The far-right or alt-right explanation is that Jews are so insidiously working against the cultures they live within that eventually the natives spot what we Jews are up to and turn against us.

This is part of the so called “Jewish Question” or JQ as they call it. To me the only difference between alt-right and the classic far-right is the new former are crypto-Nazis. There’s no doubt in my mind that the alt-right has got really smart people on board. That’s something almost no jew-hating group has had since the 1930’s. Perhaps the major difference is the alt-right are prepared to admit Jews are smarter (almost by design), and that they hate them for this and the failure of the West to adopt the same design.

Which is why, as soon as you accuse Tommy Robinson of being far-right or alt-right you reveal your brain to be devoid of intellect and your motives malign. For Tommy has never once shown any affinity for this defining feature of the far-right. In contrast, as Douglas Murray points out in National Review⁶, based on his interview of Tommy Robinson in 2013⁷:

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.

Against this and my own personal experience of years of interaction with Tommy Robinson, Aaronovitch (who I’m sure has never even shared a room with the man) presumes to know that he is a “far-right British head banger.”⁸

At the risk of labouring this vital point, following Tommy’s trip to Israel and tour of the country with me, the former leader of the British National Party, Nick Griffin, a proper racist, featured Tommy and myself quite prominently in his “Alt Right? Not Right!”⁹ publication. Here is Griffin’s first paragraph about Tommy (trigger warning – homophobia ahead):

Tommy Robinson’s new book, Muhammed’s Koran – why Muslims kill for Islam, provides a good illustration of how the Counter-Jihad street movement is intimately linked with a pro-homosexual agenda and promoted with the enormous resources of hard core Zionists.

Apparently, and this would be news to my long suffering wife who’s eagerly awaiting my first Zionist Conspiracy™ Pay Cheque, I’m one of the “hard core Zionists” with “enormous resources”:

Another regular New English Review writer who has helped promote Robinson is Brian Thomas, aka Brian of London. Brian emigrated from England to Israel in 1989. There he became a key figure in the Hasbara campaign to promote Israel and demonise its critics online initiative.

My Aliyah to Israel was in 2009 (as numerous sources will confirm) so I’m not sure how Griffin comes to be 20 years out but small detail. Indulge me as I quote a little more of Griffin’s fiction:

He also blogs on Israellycool, one of the largest English-language blogs in the country. This was described in The Electronic Intifada as a “prominent blog which has close ties to the Israeli army and functions as an outlet for its anti-Palestinian propaganda”.

This allegation is borne out by the fact that ‘Brian’ was able to take Tommy into the military zone in the Golan Heights. The Israeli military are normally very nervous of visitors with cameras in that occupied part of Syria, given the controversial nature of their collaboration with the Islamist rebels just across the border.

Hence the fact that Tommy was not only allowed to get his picture taken on a tank holding an assault rifle, but was also free to tweet it to 140,000 followers suggests that the claim that his host Brian has close links to the Israeli military is indeed true.

This section relates to a picture I took of Tommy Robinson standing on a tank at the foot of the Golan heights (right as they start to rise up from the norther edge of the Sea of Galilee). We drove by, saw a tank unit sitting idle in a field, parked, walked over and asked if we could take tourist pictures[ Brian Thomas 03/06/2018, 13:06. The commander said yes.

This famous picture of Tommy on a Merkava IV tank and gingerly holding an M-16 assault rifle showed up in the UK, first because a Muslim hate site posted¹⁰ that Tommy was a “fully fledged armed radical extremist” who was “posing with a gun on an Israeli tank in the occupied Golan Heights”. It was picked up by the London Evening Standard¹¹ (who ran the Muslim site’s story almost as an unedited press-release).

By the time this tall tale reaches Nick Griffin’s fevered imagination, I’m, therefore, an ultra well connected Zionist agent, able to open up the “military zone in the Golan Heights” to allow Tommy to probably direct tank fire on innocent Muslims for his edification! As he writes the “Israeli military are normally very nervous of visitors with cameras in that occupied part of Syria”. I did actually reach out to a friend who was in the IDF Spokesperson’s office at the time, privately, to ask if there was a problem with the fall out from this picture, this was the full response:
I think we’ll survive it.

Tommy Robinson isn’t far-right or alt-right and both of those¹² (in as far as they’re different) tend to hate Tommy Robinson almost as fervently as David Aaronovitch thinks all UK Jews should.

But wait, there’s much more wrong with Aaronovitch’s screed than mis-categorising Tommy.

Robinson regards it at his crusade to open the eyes of a docile and over-tolerant majority to the demographic disaster happening all around them. That’s why he visits courts during ongoing trials to make films there, that’s why he used to tweet every single negative story that featured a Muslim in it (while leaving alone any other people’s infractions). The result is propaganda not dissimilar to what would happen if you took every bad story about Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Britain and then generalised from them. You want to talk about gender segregation? Gay rights? Weird inward-looking schools? That’s Jews for you.

Now here we have Aaronovitch doing the work of the Jew haters for them. He is comparing the insular and inward looking conservative religious beliefs and practices of a small Ultra-Orthodox UK Jewish community with the the kinds of problems Tommy does draw attention to when they emerge from Islamic communities.

For all their real faults, I can’t find any evidence that the UK’s Ultra-Orthodox Jews routinely abuse non-Jewish young girls and specifically hang around outside schools in fancy cars to lure school girls into a life of sex slavery. I’ve yet to find doctrinal evidence of Ultra-Orthodox Jewish desires for the genocide of other groups. To the best of my knowledge that community’s books don’t advocate genocide either. They probably have less than liberal ideas toward gay marriage or transgender people, but as far as I know they don’t carry out much in the way of actually violence toward those groups.

By bringing up a false equivalence like this, Aaronovitch is quoting directly from the far-right’s playbook of casting Jews as being the outsiders who all others should shun and hopefully eject. His comparison of some Jews to the now much larger and more assertive Islamic communities in the UK shows the same pattern as his desire in The Times to promote the idea that the almost sole example of a heinous Jewish terrorist (who is almost universally reviled) gunning down innocents in Hebron is in any way equivalent to the thousands of Muslim terrorists who have their portraits painted on every wall in “Palestine” and whose names grace most of the schools.

Aaronovitch is often wrong on Israel. He’s even less well informed as to who and what Tommy Robinson is.

¹ https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-israeli-fanboys-boost-a-uk-far-right-anti-muslim-activist-s-campaign-1.6132882

² https://www.thejc.com/comment/columnists/tommy-robinson-hananya-naftali-david-aaronovitch-1.464885

³ http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/tommy-robinson-visited-israel-a-response-to-the-jewish-chronicles-attack/

⁴ https://ukmediawatch.org/2018/05/21/ukmw-prompts-times-of-london-correction-to-claim-1st-hamas-suicide-bombing-was-retaliation-for-hebron-massacre/

⁵ https://ukmediawatch.org/tag/david-aaronovitch/

⁶ https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/tommy-robinson-grooming-gangs-britain-persecutes-journalist/

⁷ https://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/10/extreme-measures-2/

⁸ https://www.thejc.com/comment/columnists/tommy-robinson-hananya-naftali-david-aaronovitch-1.464885

⁹ https://web.archive.org/web/20180603095352/http://altrightnotright.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/AltRight-NotRight171130.compressed.pdf

¹⁰ https://web.archive.org/web/20180603101306/http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/armed-british-far-right-activist-poses-israeli-tank-golan-heights-1097631243

¹¹https://web.archive.org/web/20180603102020/https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/former-edl-leader-tommy-robinson-pictured-holding-gun-on-israeli-tank-near-syrian-border-a3393256.html

¹²https://web.archive.org/web/20180603110932/http://www.europeanfreedom.com/2018/06/03/think-twice-about-turning-tommy-robinson-into-a-national-hero