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Online Pablo de Fleurs

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Tommy Robinson
« on: June 01, 2018, 12:00:47 PM »
A good piece on the Tommy Robinson saga.

Tommy Robinson Drew Attention to ‘Grooming Gangs.’ Britain Has Persecuted Him.
By Douglas Murray | May 31, 2018 2:30 PM

Far-right group English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson attends a demonstration outside the Central Criminal Court during the sentencing of six Islamic extremists in London, June 6, 2013.

The latest controversy is maddening for many reasons.

Tommy Robinson is a British political activist and “citizen journalist” who came to prominence in Britain almost a decade ago when he founded the English Defence League. The EDL was a street-protest movement in Britain whose aims could probably best be summarized as “anti-Islamization.” It emerged in the town of Luton after a group of local Islamists barracked the homecoming parade of a local regiment returning from service in Afghanistan.

From their earliest protests the EDL’s members sought to highlight issues including sharia law, Islam’s attitudes toward minorities, and the phenomenon that would become euphemistically known as “grooming gangs.” In reality these protests often descended into hooliganism and low-level violence (naturally helped along by self-described “anti-fascists”). The authorities did everything they could to stop the EDL, and the media did everything possible to demonize them. In a foretaste of things to come, very few people made any effort to understand them. And nobody paid any price for (indeed many people benefited from) claiming that the EDL was simply a fascist organization and that anybody who even tried to understand them must be a fascist too. The usual prohibition against sweeping generalizations doesn’t seem to apply if the generalization tilts in that direction.

I interviewed Tommy Robinson five years ago, after he had left the EDL (having by his own admission failed to keep extremists including actual neo-Nazis away from the movement). As he said then, one of the problems of everyone insisting that a particular movement is campaigning for the Fourth Reich is that the few people who think that sounds like a great idea will show up. Whatever his other faults, there is no evidence that Robinson thinks that way. Indeed he was once charged with assault for head-butting a Nazi sympathizer who wouldn’t leave an EDL protest. Not many people bothered with those details. The assault got reported, but not the cause. So the fact that Robinson had head-butted a Nazi became yet more evidence that he himself must be some kind of Nazi.

Anyhow — Robinson wised up slightly, and eventually began to plow his energies into a type of citizen journalism/activism. Some of this has been remarkably brave, some of it remarkably wrong (such as a video he made after last year’s Manchester Arena attack, in which he seemed to furiously suggest that everyone living around a particular mosque in the area must be some type of enemy combatant), and some remarkably ill-advised — not least because it has allowed him to be presented in the worst possible light.

For example, a couple of months ago Robinson went to Italy. In May of last year an Italian television crew reporting on migrants in Rome had been attacked by some migrants near a local train station. The female presenter was assaulted, and the whole thing became big news in Italy. But in the normal modern European fashion, after much tut-tutting everybody went back to the safe semantic discussions we like to have. Such as whether or not the term “no-go zone” is exactly appropriate to describe an area where a female journalist cannot go without being physically assaulted. So round and round we go.

Robinson took another view and turned up a while later at the same spot with his own camera crew to find that nothing had changed. The area was still dominated by migrants, and a number swiftly demanded that he leave. One of them then got into a tense stand-off with Robinson, and at one point, as Robinson turned his back on him, this man raised his hands over Robinson and said something like “I can kill you.” At which point Robinson promptly turned around and punched the man in the face. As so often it was a gift to his critics. This episode was reported in the Daily Mail Online under the headline “Far-right thug Tommy Robinson punches a migrant in Rome while filming in an apparent ‘no-go zone.’” The decision over where to put the scare quotes in that headline (and where not to) tells its own story about modern European mores.

The controversy around him continued. In March, Robinson was suspended from Twitter, where he had almost half a million followers. The social-media site (which merrily allows terrorist groups like Lashkar e-Taiba to keep accounts) decided that Robinson should be suspended for tweeting out a statistic about Muslim rape gangs that itself originated from the Muslim-run Quilliam foundation. And it is on this matter that the latest episode in the Robinson drama started — and has now drawn worldwide attention.

Ten years ago, when the EDL was founded, the U.K. was even less willing than it is now to confront the issue of what are euphemistically described as “Asian grooming gangs” (euphemistic because no Chinese or Koreans are involved and what is happening is not grooming but mass rape). At the time, only a couple of such cases had been recognized. Ten years on, every month brings news of another town in which gangs of men (almost always of Pakistani origin) have been found to have raped young, often underage, white girls. The facts of this reality — which, it cannot be denied, sounds like something from the fantasies of the most lurid racist — have now been confirmed multiple times by judges during sentencing and also by the most mainstream investigative journalists in the country.

But the whole subject is so ugly and uncomfortable that very few people care to linger over it. Robinson is an exception. For him — as he said in a 2011 interview with the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman — the “grooming gangs” issue isn’t something that afflicts some far-off towns but people in the working-class communities that he knows. And while there are journalists (notably the Times’ Andrew Norfolk) who have spent considerable time and energy bringing this appalling phenomenon to light, most of British society has turned away in a combination of embarrassment, disgust, and uncertainty about how to even talk about this. Anyone who thinks Britain is much further along with dealing with the taboo of “grooming gangs” should remember that only last year the Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, had to leave the shadow cabinet because she accurately identified the phenomenon.

Which brings me to last Friday. That was when Robinson was filming outside Leeds Crown Court, where the latest grooming-gang case was going on. I have to be slightly careful here, because although National Review is based in the U.S., I am not, and there are reporting restrictions on the ongoing case. Anyhow, Robinson was outside the court and appeared (from the full livestream) to be filming the accused and accosting them with questions on their way in. He also appeared to exercise some caution, trying to ensure he was not on court property.

    It isn’t the worst thing in the world (it isn’t child rape, for instance), but it is an offense to which Robinson understandably pleaded guilty.

But clearly he did not exercise enough caution, a strange fact given that last year Robinson had been found guilty of “contempt of court” for filming outside another rape-gang trial, one involving four Muslim men at Canterbury Crown Court. On that occasion Robinson was given a three-month prison sentence, which was suspended for a period of 18 months. Which meant he would be free so long as he did not repeat the offense.

Although Robinson appeared to be careful at Leeds Crown Court last Friday, to dance along the line of exactly what he could or could not livestream outside an ongoing trial with a suspended sentence hanging over his head was extraordinarily unwise. What happened next went around the world: The police turned up in a van and swiftly arrested Robinson for “breach of the peace.” Within hours Robinson had been put before one Judge Geoffrey Marson, who in under five minutes tried, convicted, and sentenced Robinson to 13 months. He was immediately taken to prison.

From that moment it was not just Robinson but the U.K. that entered a minefield of legal problems. In addition to the usual reporting restrictions on the ongoing trial, a reporting ban was put on any mention of Robinson’s arrest, swift trial, and conviction, meaning that for days people in the blogosphere and the international media got free rein to claim that Tommy Robinson had been arrested for no reason, that his arrest was a demonstration of a totalitarian state cracking down on free speech, and even (and this one is remarkably clueless as well as careless) that the recent appointment to the position of home secretary of Sajid Javid — who was born to Muslim parents — is the direct cause of Robinson’s recent arrest.

The facts are both more prosaic and depressing. Robinson would not now be in jail if he had not once again accosted defendants in an ongoing trial outside the courthouse. He had been told by a judge last May not to do this and yet he did this again. It isn’t the worst thing in the world (it isn’t child rape, for instance), but it is an offense to which Robinson understandably pleaded guilty. More important, the trial that was coming to a close last Friday is just one part of a trial involving multiple other defendants. It is certainly possible that Robinson’s breaking of reporting restrictions at the Leeds trial could have prejudiced those trials. To have caused the collapse of such a trial would have been more than a blunder; it would have been an additional blow to victims who deserve justice.

Some supporters of Robinson have been pointing out that there have been reporters outside the trials of celebrities accused of child abuse (Rolf Harris, for instance). But the comparison isn’t exact. It is exceptionally difficult to put reporting restrictions on the trial of a household name, and difficult to select jurors with no views on the defendants. The fact that this legal complexity exists in some cases does not mean that an additional layer of difficulty ought to be overlaid on the already-difficult-enough attempts to bring to justice gangs of otherwise unknown men. In any case, accosting a celebrity on their way into court would also be an offense.

The whole affair is in many ways maddening. Maddening that Robinson stepped over a line that had been very clearly drawn for him. Maddening that he gave the police and courts a legitimate reason to arrest him. And maddening because, as he must have known (and as I have said a number of times over the years, including during a speech at the Danish Parliament three years ago), it is by now abundantly clear that every arm of the British state has been out to get Tommy Robinson from the moment he emerged on the scene in Luton a decade ago.

The problem — as I said in 2015 — is that any challenge Robinson presents is all a secondary issue. The primary issue is that for years the British state allowed gangs of men to rape thousands of young girls across Britain. For years the police, politicians, Crown Prosecution Service, and every other arm of the state ostensibly dedicated to protecting these girls failed them. As a number of government inquires have concluded, they turned their face away from these girls because they were terrified of the accusations of racism that would come their way if they did address them. They decided it wasn’t worth the aggravation.

By contrast, Tommy Robinson thought it was worth the aggravation, even if that meant having his whole life turned upside down. Some years ago, after crawling over all of his personal affairs and the affairs of all his immediate family, the police found an irregularity on a mortgage application, prosecuted Robinson, convicted him, and sent him to prison on that charge. In prison he was assaulted and almost killed by Muslim inmates.

    Tommy Robinson will be in prison for another year. And all those people happy with the status quo will breathe a sigh of relief.

What can be said with absolute certainty is that Tommy Robinson has been treated with greater suspicion and a greater presumption of guilt by the United Kingdom than any Islamic extremist or mass rapist ever has been. That should be — yet is not — a national scandal. If even one mullah or sheikh had been treated with the presumption of guilt that Robinson has received, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the rest of them would be all over the U.K. authorities. But different standards apply to Robinson.

And on it goes. On Sunday there was a protest in London in support of him. The legal blogger “The Secret Barrister” might have spoken for a whole nose-holding class when he dismissed this protest as “a Nazi-themed march.” Look at the video he links to and you will see a lot of people with their arms in the air chanting “Oh Tommy Robinson.” If our eminent legal correspondent thinks this is Nazi-themed, he can never have been to a football match or, come to that, a Jeremy Corbyn rally.

So it will continue. Tommy Robinson will be in prison for another year. And all those people happy with the status quo will breathe a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness that troublemaker has gone away.” Yet their real problem has not gone away. There is no chance of their real problem going away. Because they have no plan for making it go away.

They have a vague hope, of course, which is that at some point soon in the coming generations this will all simmer down and the incoming communities will develop similar views about the status of women as the rest of society. And perhaps we will get there someday. But it is telling that the apparently tolerable roadkill en route includes one young man from Luton — and thousands of raped girls.
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Online Pandora

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Re: Tommy Robinson
« Reply #1 on: June 01, 2018, 02:43:01 PM »
This write-up is typical National Review cucking.  "Oooo, Tommy didn't play by the rules and so is rightly punished".  Sickening.  The man wasn't breaching the peace, he was exposing the extent of the muslim depravity and the perfidy of the British authorities.
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Offline Alphabet Soup

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Re: Tommy Robinson
« Reply #2 on: June 01, 2018, 03:29:45 PM »
Robinson is a knucklehead, but a knucklehead that I have empathy for. At the end he at least will be able to hold his head up and say that he did something to try to save Great Britain. Something that damned few Brits can claim.

Within the next 4-5 years I fully expect to read of deaths in the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of Brits at the hands of their "migrant" population (codespeak for muzzies). It brings me no pleasure and would rather it not happen, but I fully expect it.

We're next...

Online patentlymn

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Re: Tommy Robinson
« Reply #3 on: June 01, 2018, 05:29:46 PM »
I posted elsewhere (another site)  on this. Forgive me for obsessing on this story.  Sometimes I get carried away.  i am still waiting for the transcript of the recent court hearing where Tommy got sentenced.

Most of the 'news' stories on this apparently have not read the original court transcript or listened to Tommy's hour long video.  They write about 'the law' but never cite anything written.  if I am wrong I stand corrected. It is the MSM the upsets me, then the power mad judge in second place.

It seems that the judge in the first hearing is not limiting Tommy's speech about the defendants in particular but about Muslims in general. ???

The judge in the recent hearing said (according to Tommy's camera man) that he based his 13 month sentence on what Tommy did outside his court house, not on anything he did earlier or the suspended sentence, referenced below.

This is the trasncript of the earlier court proceeding. It seems that Tommy was not filming defendants  then only himself but 'tried' to film defendants?  The 'ban' may have been on reporting on any cases while saying bad things about Muslims? i do not know how that works in the UK. The rush to jail him seems inapropriate, given the inability to defend himself in the second matter.

https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/coc-yaxley-lennon-20170522.pdf
...

 is one of three months' imprisonment which
will be suspended for a period of 18 months. That
will be suspended. There will be no conditions that
need to be attached to that suspended sentence, but
you should be under no illusions that if you commit
any further offence of any kind, and that would
include, I would have thought a further contempt of
court by similar actions, then that sentence of three
months would be activated, and that would be on top of

anything else that you were given by any other court.
In short, Mr. Yaxley-Lennon, turn up at another court,
refer to people as "Muslim paedophiles, Muslim
rapists" and so on and so forth while trials are
ongoing and before there has been a finding by a jury
that that is what they are, and you will find yourself
inside.
Do you understand? Thank you very much.


[In the transcript above the judge notes that Tommy had been given conflicting instructions by court personnel about what was permissible.  That may have been a reason for the suspended sentence.]


The starting point, as we have discussed in the
course of this case, has been section 41 of the
Criminal Justice Act 1925, which makes it an offence
to take any photograph in court.

...
 and there appears to me to be at
least grounds for supposing that it is correct that it
is an offence under section 41 "to take or attempt to
take in any court" by which that means not only the
courtroom but also the building and the precincts,
any
photograph, irrespective of who that is a photograph
of,
...
It seems to me, therefore, that on a reading of
section 41 that you have committed an offence under
that section. But, whether you have or have not, and
even if I am wrong that you have, there are the wider
summary powers of the court to deal with contempts
which are in the face of the court as that has been
defined in its wider sense.

...
I find that this was the commission of an
offence under section 41 of the Criminal Justice Act
1925, but even if I am wrong about that I do find
clear evidence of contempt of court in this case, for
the reasons that I have given.

When the law becomes a ruse, lawlessness becomes legitimate. -unknown

Online patentlymn

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Re: Tommy Robinson
« Reply #4 on: June 01, 2018, 05:33:46 PM »
Here is the long video of Tommy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbNWJZMyJz4

OK, I know I get dragged down into details. I watched the longer video above so you don't have to.
I did that because I was reading that Tommy was prejudicing their right to a fair trial, apparently now from people who don't know the details.  I thought I would see theother side of this issue. I am madder now than before I learned the details.

In the video he catches a few defendants on video. He does so on the street, not on court property. A few make sexual comments about his mother and wife.  He uses the word 'alleged" lots  just like the press does in the US. A few times he says they might not be guilty and are presumed innocent. The trial is broken into three parts because of the large number of defendants. This is part 2. Tommy does not report on the verdict of part 1 because he cannot. He says he will not report on the verdict of part 2 either.

Around 49:20 he notes that when he went to court the court house outside was  filled with photographers and press.  I guess the court had no problem with that or try to throw all the press photographers in prison, likely becuase that is not the law in the UK.

Around 52:00 - 55:00 he describes the previous case where the judge gave him the 3 month suspended sentence.

My summary.
1. In the previous case the judge used all sorts of weasel words I underlined above to say what the statute might mean and then said it did not matter because the courts jurisdiction for contempt of court extended to the entire precinct of the court.  The judge did not cite any case law to support contempt for photographing people on the street.

2. The previous court did not say he could not photograph defendants any where outside the court.

3. The previous court did say what he could not do and Tommy did not do any of those things, unless the judge was saying Tommy could not say bad things about Muslim rapists anywhere, period, until the trial was over. 

4. The judge is power mad and did it because he could.
« Last Edit: June 01, 2018, 05:43:30 PM by patentlymn »
When the law becomes a ruse, lawlessness becomes legitimate. -unknown

Online Pandora

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Re: Tommy Robinson
« Reply #5 on: June 01, 2018, 05:38:10 PM »
TPTB want Robinson shut up about muslims and their raping tendencies and the judge has done what he could to shut him up.
"Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." - Mark Twain

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Online patentlymn

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Re: Tommy Robinson
« Reply #6 on: June 01, 2018, 05:41:55 PM »
The original contempt hearing and suspended sentence was because Tommy did something the judge did not like, not because the judge told Tommy not to do something and Tommy did it.

Judges issue gag orders to parties to a case in the US but they are in writing and specific.

What bothers me most about this case is the reporting and comments indicate we are entering a post literate and post analytical age. I could be wrong in my opinions but I keep searching for anything IN WRITING to see what Tommy did wrong and cannot find much, except as noted above. Commentators mention 'the law' without citing or quoting the law and cite the previous court rulng without quoting that.

on edit:
if there was a previous written ban on reporting on the grooming cases I wish the media would cite to that or quote it.


 I watched the entire video AND read the previous court transcript. Tommy did nothing proscribed in the previous court hearing. There were no conditions on his suspended setence as the previous judge SAID there were no conditions. If the judge had said Tommy shall not report on the trials until all three parts were finalized then Tommy would have been in contempt, right or wrong. If the judge had said Tommy shall not photograph any defendant anywhere on the street then Tommy would be in contempt, right or wrong. The Judge did not say these things. The statute cited does not say these things. People are photographed outside courthouses every day.

In the home of English common law Tommy ran afoul of some secret unwritten law he was not aware of.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/tommy_robinson_and_the_british_press.html
June 1, 2018
[size=150]Tommy Robinson and the British press[/size]
By Anne-Christine Hoff
Unlike the judge who delivered his 13-month sentence, I watched Tommy Robinson's entire Facebook Live stream on the Muslim grooming gangs trial outside Leeds Crown Court.  It is a little over an hour long and very enlightening.
...

Caelan Robertson, the cameraman for Tommy Robinson, was interviewed by InfoWars.  He is now legally allowed to talk about the court ruling.  There are many astounding aspects to Robinson's court ruling, but to me, the most disturbing of them all is that the judge admitted that he had not watched Robinson's Facebook [full] livestream video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G3O7kSS2e4
When the law becomes a ruse, lawlessness becomes legitimate. -unknown

Offline Libertas

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Re: Tommy Robinson
« Reply #7 on: June 04, 2018, 07:11:34 AM »
Frankly I don't give a damn about Tommy's faults because the official government Star Chamber decision to bring Islamic Invaders in and cover up their vicious crimes that include rape, assualt and murder and to blame it all on anyone who points it out or merely thinks the truth about Islam negates ANY moral authority any asshole of The State thinks they have.  Short of civil war nothing can save Britain from becoming part of the European Caliphate...same for the rest of Western Europe or Sweden.

And Pan is right about NR Cuck's!
We are now where The Founders were when they faced despotism.

Online Pablo de Fleurs

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Re: Tommy Robinson
« Reply #8 on: June 04, 2018, 09:39:35 AM »
Frankly I don't give a damn about Tommy's faults because the official government Star Chamber decision to bring Islamic Invaders in and cover up their vicious crimes that include rape, assualt and murder and to blame it all on anyone who points it out or merely thinks the truth about Islam negates ANY moral authority any asshole of The State thinks they have.  Short of civil war nothing can save Britain from becoming part of the European Caliphate...same for the rest of Western Europe or Sweden.

And Pan is right about NR Cuck's!

I don't read their articles - I didn't have time to dig deep & this one, which I came across via Twitter, gave me the summary I wanted to be able to better understand this issue - which sort of weirds me out what with the refusal of governments to call Islam what it is.
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Offline Libertas

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Re: Tommy Robinson
« Reply #9 on: June 04, 2018, 09:48:29 AM »
Frankly I don't give a damn about Tommy's faults because the official government Star Chamber decision to bring Islamic Invaders in and cover up their vicious crimes that include rape, assualt and murder and to blame it all on anyone who points it out or merely thinks the truth about Islam negates ANY moral authority any asshole of The State thinks they have.  Short of civil war nothing can save Britain from becoming part of the European Caliphate...same for the rest of Western Europe or Sweden.

And Pan is right about NR Cuck's!

I don't read their articles - I didn't have time to dig deep & this one, which I came across via Twitter, gave me the summary I wanted to be able to better understand this issue - which sort of weirds me out what with the refusal of governments to call Islam what it is.

The government has put the noose around everybody's neck and handed the pulling end to the Islaminals and is persecuting any who bitch about it... beyond weird...is full-on Evil!!!
We are now where The Founders were when they faced despotism.

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Re: Tommy Robinson
« Reply #10 on: June 05, 2018, 07:49:06 PM »
Is it that no one there can see that they're heading towards a cliff?

Is it that everyone there is so busy virtue signaling that they can't see past their own mirrors?

Or, is the group think so slow in reacting that they can't change course?

Or is it the sheeple have absolute faith in their leftist elites and the elites can't admit to being wrong?

Offline Libertas

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Re: Tommy Robinson
« Reply #11 on: June 05, 2018, 08:24:25 PM »


We are now where The Founders were when they faced despotism.