by Bruce Bawer
The backbone of Britain.
The last time we heard from Tommy Robinson was early last year. In a revealing documentary called The Rape of Britain, he took us to the town of Telford, England (population 142,000), where Muslim gang members had raped innumerable white girls while local police had refused not only to arrest the perpetrators but also to protect the victims. Now he’s back with an equally illuminating documentary entitled Silenced.
It begins with a minor incident that took place in 2018 on the playground of the Almondbury School in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. According to the mainstream media version, Bailey McLaren, a racist white boy in his early teens, had “waterboarded” Jamal Hijazi, an innocent refugee from Syria of about the same age, and had acted utterly without provocation.
The story spread quickly around the globe. There was just one problem: it wasn’t remotely true. Bailey hadn’t waterboarded Jamal. He’d thrown a cup of water at him. It was on video. It wasn’t about race, and it certainly wasn’t unprovoked. In fact, Jamal had threatened to rape Bailey’s sisters. And, as Tommy discovered by doing the kind of footwork on the case that no other reporter bothered to do, Jamal had done much else besides. He’d knocked one classmate unconscious. He’d caused a boy to bleed by sticking him in the leg with a compass (presumably the kind used in math classes, not in navigation).
He’d threatened to stab a boy. He’d beaten up girls. He hit one girl with a hockey stick and bit another one so viciously that it caused a horrible wound. He routinely called female teachers “bitches.” He’d been caught carrying a knife and screwdriver at school. Adults who’d worked there described him as rude, nasty, a “little bastard,” a “horrible boy” with “no respect for women at all.” “He started on everyone,” recalled one school worker.
And they denied that Jamal was the victim of racism on anybody’s part. There’d been several other Syrian kids in the school at the same time, and none of them had experienced – or caused – any problems. Much was made by the media of a photo of Jamal with his arm in a cast; though the injury was blamed on Bailey, it turned out to be the result of another incident in which Jamal attacked a much younger boy only to be pulled forcefully off the child by a kid his own age.
As for Bailey, school staff agreed he was no bully. And no racist, either. “He had two half-caste sisters,” one of them pointed out. The man who’d been head teacher at the time of the incident said that Bailey was a “very articulate lad” who, if he hadn’t ended up at the center of this international firestorm, would likely have been looking forward to a “great future…I could see him being a lawyer or something.” He was also a decent kid who “would stand up for his peers.” Another school staffer agreed: “The way they treated poor Bailey was disgusting.” The audio of the playground incident makes it clear that when Bailey threw water at Jamal, he didn’t say anything racist; he said something like: “What are you going to say now?” In short, he was responding to something Jamal had said – namely, Jamal’s threat to rape Bailey’s sisters.
But nobody in the mainstream media reported any of this. Commentators around the world spoke about Bailey as if he was a monster and about Jamal – well, they spoke about Jamal in pretty much the same way that millions of ideologues spoke about George Floyd in the summer of 2020, or, if you prefer, in the way they’re now speaking about New York subway criminal-turned-martyr Jordan Neely. The execrable Piers Morgan, who likes to posture from time to time as a brave opponent of political correctness but who’s always prepared to virtue-signal about Islam, was quick to refer to Bailey as a “thug,” as a “lowlife,” and as “vermin,” and even to call for “severe retribution” against the child. (“Never,” notes Tommy in Silencing, “have I labeled Muslim children as vermin or called for violence against them.”)
Piers must’ve been pleased by what happened next. Bailey received thousands of online messages – threats to kill him, to firebomb his family’s home, to shoot his mother, to rape his sisters. Gangs prowled the streets of Huddersfield looking for him. Savages wandered the corridors of his school with machetes, ready to slice him up. Police drove Bailey and his family to what was supposedly meant as a safe place – a shabby little pay-by-the-hour fleabag hotel owned by Muslims and within spitting distance of three mosques. Rejecting this insulting offer, Bailey’s mother took matters into her own hands and quickly found a better hiding place for herself and her kids.
(In order to show us what differential treatment looks like at its most extreme, Tommy takes us in Silenced to an absolutely breathtaking five-star hotel in the Huddersfield area where about two hundred illegal immigrants, almost all of them adult Muslim males, were being housed at taxpayer expense, with free meals and free, full-time medical service.)
While Bailey was being demonized worldwide, Jamal, as Tommy puts it, was being “put on a pedestal” by politicians, media, and celebrities. Public donations to his GoFundMe page exceeded £160,000. Tommy reveals that soon after the media spread the fake news about Bailey and Jamal, he, Tommy, received plenty of messages from Huddersfield locals telling him the facts. Surely, surmises Tommy, Piers Morgan and other major media figures must have received such messages, too. But none of them have issued corrections or apologies.
It was left to Tommy to find out – and report – the truth. In March 2021, several people in the know told him the facts off the record, but were too scared to speak on camera or testify in court. So Tommy broke out the hidden cameras. Simply for reporting what they told him, he was charged by a judge with libeling Jamal. (Needless to say, nobody has ever been charged with libeling Bailey.) Tommy was also sued on Jamal’s behalf by the same Muslim lawyer who represented ISIS member Shamima Begun and the jihadists who butchered Lee Rigby in 2013.
And there’s even more, all of it sounding like something out of the Book of Job. Two Muslim lawyers hired an Antifa extremist to videotape Tommy’s home, the point being to make his family’s address public. The Antifa member laughed on video: “Tommy, I am gonna mince your kids, mate!” That man has never been arrested by the police or even called in for a chat. On the contrary, when Tom Watson, then Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, brought the matter up in the House of Commons, he made Tommy the heavy.
And when the case of Bailey and Jamal was adjudicated, the judge – ignoring all evidence on Bailey’s behalf, and overlooking the fact that not a single person from the Almondbury School would testify on Jamal’s behalf – ruled for Jamal. But then, how could a cowardly tool of a compromised system do otherwise? The narrative, after all, was already well-established; to upend it – and thereby risk being targeted, like Bailey, by machete-wielding savages – would take courage of the sort that few British subjects other than Tommy Robinson seem to have these days.
The online release of Silenced is a curious situation. Tommy, as he writes in a May 27 email, “was banned by a High Court judge from releasing this documentary, an injunction which I have abided by for years.” He adds that the film has been posted online by an American company because it is “out of my hands, out of my control,” and that he is “currently out of the UK” because he knows that its government will try to prosecute him for the release of Silenced even though, as he claims, he’s had nothing to do with its release.
I don’t know exactly what to make of any of this; I’ve never had any direct contact with Tommy. All I know is this. On April 1, Silenced had its world premiere at Copenhagen’s Christiansborg Palace under the auspices of Denmark’s Free Press Society and the Danish People’s Party (DF). At the event, DF leader Morten Messerschmidt observed, quite correctly, that it was appropriate for Silenced to have its premiere in Denmark, given the country’s history of Nazi-era resistance and its staunch support of free speech about Islam. Aia Fog, chairman of the Free Press Society, referred to Tommy as “the backbone of Britain,” praised his “profound love for his country,” and noted that while “working-class England is seldom allowed to speak,” Tommy gives it a voice, “to the extent that he is allowed to.”
It was moving to see Tommy accorded such a respectful reception in Denmark. In his own nation, even people who should be his allies shun him. I’m a frequent viewer of the Triggernometry podcast, whose hosts, British comedians Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin, boast of their political incorrectness; but while they’re proud of their friendship with Douglas Murray, whose view of Islam barely differs from Tommy’s, they consider Tommy anathema. (On one recent Triggernometry broadcast, the guest – I don’t remember who it was – suggested that they interview Tommy; the uneasy looks on their faces, and the awkward way in which they ignored the suggestion and moved on, spoke volumes.)
I was also disappointed to learn from Tommy’s Q. & A. in Copenhagen that Elon Musk gave him back his Twitter account – only to withdraw it shortly thereafter.
But Tommy ain’t done yet. In Copenhagen, he seemed more impressive than ever. He’s become a first-class public speaker. In answering questions, he was nothing less than eloquent. Even though his involvement in the Huddersfield case has led him into divorce and bankruptcy – divorce because his wife, to whom he remains close, fears (rightly) for their children’s safety, and bankruptcy because he keeps being dragged before judges, found guilty, and charged with massive sums in court costs – he seems more driven than ever to win this fight.
One member of the Copenhagen audience suggested that the struggle against the Islamization of Europe was already lost. Tommy disagreed firmly and inspiringly. If we’d thought that way a few decades ago, he said, “we’d be speaking German.” It’s a matter, he said, of people waking up. And if the deaths of all those children and teenagers at the Ariane Grande concert in Manchester in May 2017 didn’t wake Britain up, then “we’ve got lots more bloodshed to come.” But eventually, he insisted, people will wake up. And when it happens, it’ll happen fast. And it’ll be decisive.
Let’s hope he’s right. In any event, one thing’s for sure: as Aia Fog put it, Tommy is the backbone of Britain. In the year 2023, indeed, he’s the closest thing that his country has to Winston Churchill. When will the moral pygmies who run his country, and who consider themselves his betters, recognize it?
Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/three-cheers-for-tommy-robinson-2/
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