What do you think laws are for?

In which I respond to Tommy’s left wing critics.
Part V of a series: Who is Tommy Robinson?
by Michael Isenberg.

Dear Left-of-Center Friends: Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your discussions with me about this series on anti-Islam crusader Tommy Robinson, who was jailed last month for livestreaming outside a grooming trial, in violation of British reporting laws. Despite my disagreements with you, some of our exchanges were quite civilized, which was a wonderful change of pace in this not-so-civil political climate in which we find ourselves. I always work hard to make sure I’m not reporting fake news, but your constant insistence on knowing my sources pushed me to dig even deeper than usual for corroborating evidence on the claims Robinson made in his autobiography and Oxford Union speech. And the many links you sent me that captured his less-than-stellar moments definitely had an impact on Part 3 of the series, where I took on the question of whether he’s racist. I love you all. But nevertheless, I feel compelled to call you out on your—how shall I put this nicely?—your inconsistencies.

As I wrote at the conclusion of my previous installment, “Most Shameful Hour,” “I recognize that many on the Left do not share my admiration for Tommy Robinson’s courage in speaking out against crime in his community inspired by the ideology of Islam. They think he’s a vile individual, both in character and ideas. Fine. Reasonable people can disagree. I had hoped, however, that regardless of what they think about Mr. Robinson himself, they would share my alarm at the prospect of a state that can beat down anyone who thinks they can mess with it. Sadly, my left-of-center friends do not see it that way.”

The following tweet from Owen Jones is typical of how they do see it. In his Twitter profile, Mr. Jones describes himself as a socialist and a writer for The Guardian, but I won’t hold those things against him on account of there’s a cat in his cover photo.

When did Leftists such as Mr. Jones suddenly become the champions of law and order? (And please don’t answer, “About the same time the Right stopped.” Tu quoque, besides being a fallacy, is so boring). When did the Left join the “The law’s the law” crowd? Certainly not when rioters were setting fire to the town of Ferguson, MO.

Or when punching Nazis was all the rage. I infer from this tweet that Mr. Jones was more or less in approval of the assault on the vile Richard Spencer:

pic.twitter.com/RNyKc5Uvgr

— Owen Jones🌹 (@OwenJones84) August 15, 2017

Even after his “’Tommy Robinson’” is not a martyr” tweet, Mr. Jones attacked President Trump for enforcing immigration law in the United States:

Hey, I’m with you, Owen, on some of these at least. When the law is unjust, it’s right to speak out. Sometimes it’s even right to defy it. “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,” said Benjamin Franklin, a man who knew a thing or two about rebellion. What’s not right is to turn your back on that sort of principled opposition and suddenly transform into Judge Jeffreys when the victim of an unjust law is wearing the jersey of the opposing team.

The Left’s inconsistency is particularly jarring since this is a freedom of the press case. If some other reporter were jailed for what Mr. Robinson did, but he was a standard bearer for the Left, we would hear howls of outrage from that side of the aisle—inevitably invoking the word “chilling”—and read learned treatises on how unjust reporting laws are.

And I agree. They are unjust.

There’s a key distinction here. Many of my left-of-center friends have lectured me in great detail about exactly what the law says, and how Tommy Robinson ran afoul of it. I get all that. I concede that this is the law of the land. My point is that it shouldn’t be.

Such laws violate freedom of speech and freedom of the press. These aren't just high-sounding words. They're essential ingredients to maintaining a free society. They're embraced by the British Constitution. And yes, I understand that the British Constitution is a patchwork of laws and court decisions, not a single written document like in the United States. That’s not relevant in this context. What is relevant is that it’s nevertheless a thing and that it protects certain freedoms.

Press freedom is especially crucial in the context of trials. Justice needs to take place in full view of the public to prevent the bench from becoming an instrument of tyranny. It is no coincidence that the vilest dictatorships on earth—Iran, for example—regularly conduct trials in secret. Great Britain, where our freedoms originated, does not belong in their company.

Nor do I buy the argument that without strict reporting laws, “trials of alleged rapists would collapse and alleged rapists would walk free.” Other countries routinely hold trials in full view of the public and manage to get convictions. For example, we just convicted a prominent rapist in the United States—Bill Cosby—despite daily play-by-play coverage on CNN.

There’s something else at play here, and there’s an exchange from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged that illustrates it beautifully. In this scene, Dr. Floyd Ferris of the State Science Institute confronts steel executive Hank Rearden for selling a greater quantity of his “Rearden Metal” to a customer than the law allows. Rearden observes,

“You seem to be pleased about it.” “Don’t I have good reason to be?” “But, after all, I did break one of your laws.” “Well, what do you think they're for?” Dr. Ferris did not notice the sudden look on Rearden's face, the look of a man hit by the first vision of that which he had sought to see. Dr. Ferris was past the stage of seeing; he was intent upon delivering the last blows to an animal caught in a trap. “Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against—then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of law-breakers—and then you cash in on guilt. Now, that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.”

This is exactly what happened to Tommy Robinson, not just in his present incarceration, but throughout his long persecution at the hands of Her Majesty’s Government. The grooming crisis, the evil practice of creating an emotional connection with young girls—often by addicting them to drugs—in order to turn them into sex slaves, was out of control. Tommy Robinson—who had a victim in his own family—had the temerity to shine the disinfectant of sunlight on it. Because he claimed the perpetrators were disproportionately Muslim, he was called racist and fascist and every other name under the sun. But this was not some feverish anti-Muslim propaganda. Events vindicated Mr. Robinson completely as reports came out that thousands of girls were victimized; public officials conceded that they had been slow to prosecute, in part because the girls were poor and white, in part because they were afraid of being accused of racism; eventually prosecutions were conducted and convictions obtained. Tommy Robinson had done the state some service and they knew’t. And that couldn’t stand. He had embarrassed them; he had to be destroyed. But what do you think laws are for? It's a tribute to Mr. Robinson's honesty, that in an age of proliferating laws, the prosecutors had to work as hard as they did to come up with the mortgage fraud charge against him.

I implore my left-of-center friends, who pride themselves on standing up to authority, and speaking truth to power, to look beyond Mr. Robinson’s team jersey and take heed. A State powerful enough to destroy your opponents today is powerful enough to destroy you tomorrow.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com

Most Shameful Hour

Britain’s Vendetta against Tommy Robinson.
Part IV of a series: Who is Tommy Robinson?
by Michael Isenberg.

Tommy is still on 23.5-hour solitary confinement. The prison is refusing to post his letters to his wife and children quoting that they may be shared on line. I would have thought it is the choice of the recipient to decide if they would like to share a letter they have received. He is also only allowed out of his cell for a shower and phone call at 1-1.30pm each day which means he cannot speak to his children as they are at school. Being treated worse than a terrorist.

That update appeared on Tommy Robinson’s Facebook page yesterday and is just the latest chapter in Her Majesty’s Government’s despicable persecution of the English Defense League founder and anti-Islamization activist.

In Part I of this series, I provided a short bio of Mr. Robinson: his upbringing in Luton, his young adult years as a soccer hooligan, and how he was drawn into activism by the growing racial tensions and rising crime in a town where everyone knew everyone else. In Parts 2 and 3 I took on the most common accusations that Mr. Robinson’s opponents level against him, that he’s a fascist (ludicrous) and a racist (it’s complicated).

In this installment, I’ll cover the British government’s response to Mr. Robinson, which can only be described as a vendetta. His current imprisonment, for exercising freedom of the press (or as the police called it, “disturbing the peace”), was merely one in a long chain of abuses and usurpations directed at Mr. Robinson. “The moment we started the EDL,” he writes in his autobiography Enemy of the State,

with me as the nominal head, the British state declared war on Tommy Robinson. Whether it was the police using arrest and detention as a way to either piss me off or disrupt EDL activities, whether it was taking apart my working life going back to the Year Dot, or whether it was prison governors and screws physically throwing me to the lions by putting me on an open wing amongst violent Muslim extremists, I’ve had the lot thrown at me. The goal? To grind me down. To shut me up. That’s all I can fathom. To make the point that the state can beat down anyone who thinks they can mess with it.

Many of his arrests were little more than harassment. On one occasion he was taken in for burglary—even though eyewitnesses described the suspects as a black man and a 6’1” blonde. Clearly neither were the 5’6” Robinson. But even after being cleared, such harassment does its harm: “The headline would do all the damage required, and I’d seen this so many times, with different charges, different incidents. Accused of this, suspected of that, arrested on this and that … and then the charges are dropped, but the damage is already done.”

Another arrest, this one from 2013, was caught on video. It’s clear that in this case, Mr. Robinson wasn’t doing anything at all other than taking a walk with his EDL co-founder Kevin Carroll, who was the victim of an assault:

Mr. Robinson writes,

I was charged with obstructing a police officer in course of his duty and in what I consider—from some experience—to be one of the British judiciary’s finest moments, the judge threw a wobbler. She was raging, completely pissed off with the police and what they were playing at. ‘I’m not limiting this man’s freedoms,’ she said. And I was free to go.

Alas, not all of Mr. Robinson’s arrests ended as happily, and not all the judges were as concerned with protecting the freedom of British citizens. In 2012 he began a ten month sentence for entering the United States with someone else’s passport (although how that’s a violation of British law mystifies me). Upon his release in March 2013, he faced another charge, this time for giving his brother-in-law a £20,000 loan for a down payment on a house. According to the Crown, that constituted “mortgage fraud,” to which Mr. Robinson entered a guilty plea. The BBC duly reported his sentencing, including the judge’s statement that, “I am satisfied you took part in a thoroughly dishonest course of conduct." But despite the BBC's stated values, which according to its website include being “independent, impartial and honest,” the article neglected to impartially report the details of the loan. Nor did it report Mr. Robinson’s reason for pleading guilty to this charge, which came out of the government's minute examination of of every financial transaction Mr. Robinson had ever made in an attempt to bring him down the same way the US brought down Al Capone—tax evasion:

The police must have spent hundreds of thousands trying to build the tax case against me, then seen their 30 or so charges all whittled away one by one, until finally they played their trump card. They were going to nail my wife over the taxes, a woman who knew nothing about our finances — unless I took the blame on everyone’s behalf. They were going to get Tommy Robinson once and for all, through a blameless woman. Put her face and name in the public domain, destroy any hope my family had of living a normal life. They’d poured all those resources into trying to nail me, and they had to have something to show for it. My wife and kids? Collateral damage, nothing more.

Mr. Robinson was imprisoned in HMP Woodhill, which the British government designates a Category A facility, “for prisoners whose escape would be considered highly dangerous to the public or a threat to national security.” Typically it holds the most dangerous criminals—murderers, rapists, drug dealers, terrorists, and so on. Why Mr. Robinson, who was convicted of a white collar crime, would be locked up in such a place is unclear, but the consequences of doing so are plain enough. Woodhill has a large Muslim population, which obviously posed a danger to an anti-Islam activist such as Mr. Robinson. Not long after he arrived, he says,

I was taken to a holding room with large windows and I could see there were a few prisoners in there, but three of them were bearded Muslims including [this] big white guy. The screw put me inside — they knew what they were doing — locked the door and calmly walked away. The room had bench seating all round but I never sat down because I knew what was coming next. I kept my chin down but my eyes up, and my back to the corner. The big white bearded bloke charged and laid into me immediately the screw had disappeared. I got hold of him with one hand because I couldn’t afford to go down on the floor, and I was lashing away with the other, as the other two Muslims came wading in… By the time the screws came and broke it up my teeth were gone, my skull was gashed open and my eye swollen shut. I was lucky I guess in that it wasn’t fatal. There was a camera up in the corner warning prisoners that they were being watched. The prison told my lawyers that unfortunately it wasn’t working that day.

The camera wasn’t working?

Even after his parole, his problems weren’t over. In late 2014, he received a tweet from someone called “1488Hitler,” who said he “was going to rape my mum, find out where I lived and kill me.” Robinson replied that he’d be outside his probation office the following morning, come get him. In the eyes of the authorities, that was a “threat” that constituted a probation violation. Back to jail with you, Tommy. Twenty-eight days in Bedford nick. He says he was placed in the wing “where the most radical and violent Muslims were.”

On the very first day, Mr. Robinson got into a brawl in the canteen:

This white geezer, McDonald, said ‘I’m a fucking Muslim bruv.’ And the way he said it, well that was it. We ended up fighting across the servery and I battered him…The fight had the desired effect from my point of view. They came and took me to see the governor who said that he was putting me down the block—in solitary—for my own safety.

Because of the stay in Bedford, Mr. Robinson had to cancel a high-profile talk he was scheduled to give to the Oxford Union.

It was subsequently rescheduled for March 2015 and is worth watching in its entirety.

Enemy of the State contains numerous other examples of the oppression that Mr. Robinson suffered at the hands of the Crown—far more than there’s space to catalog in a blog entry. As we’re seeing with his latest incarceration, it’s still going on. Mr. Robinson believes that his legal woes have been orchestrated at the highest levels of Her Majesty’s Government:

[A]fter the Breivik slaughter in Norway [July 2011], [Muslim activist] Mo Ansar wrote to the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Crime and Security, James Brokenshire MP, calling for him to outlaw the EDL. Brokenshire replied, ‘We can’t proscribe them but we are working with a wide range of agencies to address the driver of the EDL.’

(A request to Mr. Ansar for verification and comment had not been replied to by press time.) Regardless of whether there was an organized conspiracy, or merely a series of police, prosecutors, and prison governors acting independently, the persecution of Tommy Robinson for doing little more than exercising his freedom of speech has no place in a free society. If the Battle of Britain was, in Churchill’s words, Britain’s finest hour, then this is its most shameful.

I recognize that many on the Left do not share my admiration for Tommy Robinson’s courage in speaking out against crime in his community inspired by the ideology of Islam. They think he’s a vile individual, both in character and ideas. Fine. Reasonable people can disagree. I had hoped, however, that regardless of what they think about Mr. Robinson himself, they would share my alarm at the prospect of a state that can beat down anyone who thinks they can mess with it. Sadly, my left-of-center friends do not see it that way—as they’ve been telling me in no uncertain terms on Twitter ever since I started on this topic. What they’re saying about Mr. Robinson’s rap sheet, and my response to them, will be the subject of the next (and I’m sure you all hope final) chapter in this series: Part V—What do you think laws are for?

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com