RUTHFULLY YOURS

“What we cannot complain is that Tommy Robinson is being detained illegally,” asserts British journalist James Delingpole in a Monday article for Breitbart.

Now, Delingpole is supposed to be one of the good guys when it comes to this sort of thing. In the same article, in fact, he maintains that he is friendly with Robinson, who on May 25 was arrested while streaming live on Facebook from outside Leeds Criminal Court, where several Muslims were being tried for mass child rape. Tommy was then brought before a judge who sent him straight to prison for having violated the terms under which he was released by another judge last year. Delingpole says he admires Tommy and considers him brave. At the same time, alas, Delingpole charges that Tommy is “an adrenaline junkie who sometimes pushes it that bit too far.”

First, anent “adrenaline junkie”: I’d suggest that a lot of the great men and women of history were probably adrenaline junkies. I think Trump is one. Thomas Edison barely slept. Neither did Nikola Tesla. Or Leonardo da Vinci.

“Pushing too far”? Tommy’s “offense” last year was trying to videotape alleged Muslim pedophiles outside a courthouse in Canterbury.

On that occasion, he was brought before a female judge who, when asked about the very real danger of him being beaten up — or worse — if sentenced to prison, said: “So what?” Yes, that’s what she actually said. Every day, in the same courts, they treat accused mass rapists with more respect.

So I ask: how far is “too far” when you’re sounding the alarm about a nationwide child-rape epidemic that authorities up and down the line have conspired to cover up, that is still going on, that is (although one is not allowed to say so) a byproduct of Islamic theology, and that the mainstream media, even after they’ve finally been forced to face up to the reality of it, prefer to treat as if it were a series of parking violations?

As for Robinson being “detained illegally”: I, for one, certainly wouldn’t say that his detention is illegal. No, it’s entirely legal. That’s precisely the problem.

British law itself — the whole process of deciding what’s legal and what’s illegal — is no longer what it used to be, and hence no longer worth respecting. It’s been twisted into a tool of those who wish to protect Muslim criminals and troublemakers (and their apologists and defenders) and to punish those who blow the whistle on Muslim crime and tell the truth about Islamic ideology.

Tommy’s thirteen-month sentence, Delingpole reminds us, “was a consequence of an incident in May last year when he had been found guilty of contempt of court while filming defendants outside a Muslim rape gang trial in Canterbury, Kent. The judge was perfectly clear to Robinson as to what would happen if he did this again.”

Yes, the judge who ruled on Robinson’s case last year effectively told him to stay home and shut up. He refused to do so, out of principle. That doesn’t make her right and him wrong. It means that those in charge of administering justice in Britain are now doing something very different indeed from administering justice. A friend of mine who is a criminal lawyer in Canada, and who has studied last year’s ruling, calls it “petulant, vague and injudicious.”

Disappointingly, Nigel Farage has taken much the same position as Delingpole. Denying on his Saturday radio show that Britain is becoming a “police state,” Farage pointed out that “Tommy Robinson was under a court order not to interfere with the judicial process in any way at all,” but added that “for reasons of self-publicity, and not to benefit anything that would help society, he chose wilfully to breach that. He was warned that he was in breach of that. … Frankly, the judge had almost no choice but to give him a jail sentence … He was out there asking for trouble.” In short, Robinson is “not heroic in any way at all.”

I must say that I have long admired Farage for his role in the Brexit campaign. I have also, however, noticed his careful refusal to ever say anything critical about Islam. Ever. Anything. He won’t go there. Robinson does. That makes Robinson, in my book, the braver man. Farage’s remark about “self-publicity” rubbed me, to put it mildly, the wrong way — especially coming, as it did, from one of the great self-promoters of our time. In any event, to my American ears, Farage’s comments to the effect that Robison was “asking for trouble” and that he should not have “interfere[d] with the judicial process in any way at all” — as if standing outside a courthouse and talking into a camera amounted to interference! — make no sense at all. No, not in a supposedly free country.

Then there is Daniel Hannan, a Conservative Member of the European Parliament whose cogent opposition to the EU, criticism of the NHS, and friendliness to the U.S. I have been much impressed by over the years. So I was disappointed to see him suggesting, in the Washington Examiner, in an article headlined “The real story, and why Tommy Robinson belongs in prison,” that Tommy, by doing that report from outside the Leeds courthouse, “was seeking to provoke a criminal conviction that would turn him into a ‘free speech martyr’ and — let’s not beat about the bush — boost his earnings on the American speaker circuit.” What is it with this eagerness to impute base motives — especially to people who are risking their lives to expose criminals who have committed the basest of atrocities?