The glorious cause
The Trump administration thinks Britain is being most unfair to that nice racist agitator Tommy Robinson.
Sam Brownback, the U.S. Ambassador for International Religious Freedom, complained to the British ambassador in Washington D.C. about the treatment of an English right-wing activist who is in jail for disrupting a trial, according to three sources familiar with the discussion.
Brownback raised the case of the activist known as Tommy Robinson in a June meeting with Sir Kim Darroch, Britain’s Ambassador to the United States, according to a British official and two sources close to the organizers of a pro-Robinson demonstration planned for London on Saturday.
Robinson founded the English Defense League, whose hobby is organizing violent demonstrations against Muslim immigrants in the UK. He got busted in Leeds a few weeks ago for making videos about a trial related to child molestation, violating English law that restricts publicity during criminal trials.
Brownback told Darroch that if Britain did not treat Robinson more sympathetically, the Trump administration might be compelled to criticize Britain’s handling of the case, according to the two sources in contact with organizers of the planned pro-Robinson demonstration.
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Reuters was unable to determine why the top U.S. official responsible for defending religious freedom would try to intervene with the British government on behalf of an activist who has expressed ant-Islamic views.
We’re not Reuters, so we’re free to speculate. My speculation: they don’t want Muslim-hating agitators to be punished, and they want to throw their weight around on the subject.
A spokesman for Hope Not Hate, a British anti-racism group, said, “In the week President Trump comes to the UK, his hand-picked diplomat allying himself with a far-right convicted fraudster perhaps shouldn’t be too much of a shock.”
Would you like a cup of tea?
Wait…back up to that first sentence. We have an “Ambassador for International Religious Freedom”? And it’s Sam Brownback, destroyer of Kansas? WTF, when did this happen?
I think I posted something about it…possibly…
Maybe not; I don’t find it under “Brownback.” “Religious freedom” would find too many entries to be useful.
I did read it somewhere; I thought it was here. Maybe from FFRF or AU?
I read that sentence to my husband as a classic example of irony, and he about lost it…he didn’t know that, either, and he loves Brownback about as much as I do.
Well maybe I did but without mentioning Brownback.
I didn’t really know anything about Tommy Robinson until this prompted me to read his Wikipedia page. He started out really bad with the EDL, etc., but then apparently got to know some Muslims as people and became less bad, quitting the EDL and apologizing for some of what he’d done in the past. Basically switched from “Muslim are evil” to “OK, some Muslims are cool, but a lot are terrorists, so we should keep them out”. So still bad.
Allegedly there are predominantly Muslim gangs in the UK that target, groom, and rape underage children. Robinson was livestreaming from outside a court hearing such a case and the police picked him up, whisked him off, and sentenced him to 13 months. They wouldn’t say why and wouldn’t allow the media to report on it, which apparently fanned the flames among his supporters.
This is par for the course in the UK, which has more press restrictions than the US. The case he was reporting on wasn’t allowed to be reported on, which is what got him in trouble. Then because his case was related, they didn’t allow reporting on that even after he was sentenced (they’ve since lifted the embargo).
On the surface it almost sounds like something you’d hear about in a dictatorship, where someone is picked up by the police and disappears without a word, but it’s just how the UK does things to help ensure people get fair trials not influenced by possibly inflammatory press coverage.
And, yeah, a stupid thing for Trump to focus on. No doubt heard a skewed version of it in right-wing media. He should have better things to do.
Robinson was also under a restraining order for precisely that behaviour, as I recall, meaning that he’d been arrested and tried and given a relatively light punishment for the activity that ultimately landed him in prison (most recently, anyhow). Less dictatorish and more a bureaucracy getting tired of being challenged after already going easy on an agitator.
His activities almost led to a mistrial. He did it twice, and it is the second which got him sentenced for Contempt of Court. He and his supporters are peddling the line that there’s a cover-up going on, but in reality there’s as much to that as the Pizza restaurant allegations in the US. The man is an out and out racist and the EDL are in the same vein as the Blackshirts – minus the uniforms which would be illegal in the UK – and use similar tactics.
A good summary of what is really going on here:
https://thesecretbarrister.com/2018/05/25/what-has-happened-to-poor-tommy-robinson/