The media gag order has been lifted, but the incarceration of Tommy Robinson remains a stain on the reputation of the United Kingdom. We will not rest until Robinson is free!
Nine years ago, I had the “privilege” of being banned from entering the United Kingdom. Though the leader of a major democratically elected political party in the Netherlands, I am also an outspoken critic of Islam.
That is why I am on the death list of several Islamic organizations and have been forced to live under 24/7 police protection for almost fourteen years. And that is also the real reason why the then British government deemed me a danger to public security. The elites all over Western Europe fear the wrath of Islam.
I managed to have the ban overturned in court, but, since then, numerous other Islam critics, such as my courageous American friends Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, both of them indomitable advocates of freedom and democracy, have also been banned from entering Britain.
George Orwell wrote in the preface to Animal Farm that “if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.” In Western Europe, today, cowardly authorities want to deprive people like myself, Robert and Pamela and others, of the right to tell our fellow citizens “what Islam doesn’t want them to hear.”
75 years ago, people all over Europe clandestinely listened to the BBC to hear the voice of Winston Churchill. His voice was the voice of liberty, the voice of courageous resistance against Nazi totalitarianism. Churchill, by the way, had no illusions about Islam, either. He said there exists “no stronger retrograde force in the world” than Islam and called Hitler’s vile anti-Semitic book Mein Kampf a “new Koran of faith and war”.
I know a British citizen, today, who is as staunch a freedom fighter as Winston Churchill was, who holds the same opinion on Islam and is not afraid to say so. His name is Tommy Robinson.
Tommy Robinson was arrested on 25 May outside Leeds Crown Court after using social media to broadcast details of an ongoing trial which was subject to reporting restrictions. He was arrested, brought before a judge, and sentenced within five hours. The judge ordered a media ban on his arrest and imprisonment, even forcing British publications to delete their articles about the case.
Such measures are common practice in North Korea and Saudi Arabia. It is sad to see how Britain, the cradle of Western democracy and the rule of law, is fast descending into tyranny.
Following massive protests on social media, demonstrations in Whitehall, a legal challenge by two publishers, and huge international attention for the case, the British authorities lifted the media ban. But Tommy Robinson has remained imprisoned, despite over half a million people signing a petition for his release.
Even those who do not defend Robinson’s actions are appalled by the hypocrisy surrounding the case. Robinson was arrested for “breaching of the peace” and convicted for “contempt of court,” because he was reporting about an Islamic grooming gang of 29 suspects, who are suspected of dozens of rapes, including of children. The case is similar to an earlier case in Rotherham where Pakistani and Afghani gangs abused more than 1,400 children and girls, but the authorities ignored the victims because of what a damning official report later called “misplaced political correctness.”
Maajid Nawaz, founder of the think tank Quilliam and a former member of the radical Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, dryly commented to Robinson’s arrest and swift conviction: “I just wished those young girls [victims of predominantly Pakistani-Muslim grooming gangs] had seen justice served for them as fast as the judge served Tommy Robinson justice in this case.”
Author and former Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam, who was raised as a Muslim, warns of the “police state” that Britain was rapidly becoming. “The stakes for [the elite] are pretty high, but for us they are immeasurable. We don’t have anything to lose. They’ve taken everything from us already. They’ve stripped us of our rights, they’ve stripped us of our dignity, and they strip us our money. Now, they seek to strip us of the last thing we have to fight them: our words. Our speech.”
Tommy Robinson is a working-class man, who can no longer stand how the original population of England is oppressed by Islam. The latter enjoys the protection from the multiculturalist politically-correct Islamophile ruling class. Tommy Robinson wants to break the taboos this class imposes on society, and he was punished for it.
But Tommy embodies the hope of many, whose voices are not heard. That is why I stand with him. Tommy is a hero. It is a disgrace that he is still in jail. I have been invited to a major protest demonstration in London next week, and I will be coming. Free Tommy now!
Geert Wilders MP is the leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), the second largest party in the Dutch Parliament
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