Tommy Robinson is, one could say speaking loosely, being turned into a non-person. Oh, he still lives and breathes and walks and talks; though when he talks now, fewer hear him. He surely can still mount a soapbox and opine on a street corner — until the hate-speech cops haul him away. Mind you, it wouldn’t be the first time he was hauled away.
Who is Tommy Robinson? He’s a British anti-Islamization crusader and founder of the anti-immigration English Defense League who the enemedia love dubbing “far right.” He also recently coauthored an Islam-critical book entitled Mohammed’s Koran, which was selling so well on Amazon that the company requested it be put in special sales programs. Then they did give it special status.
Amazon banned it completely.
In fact, even second-hand versions now cannot be sold via its service.
And given that Barnes and Noble already wasn’t carrying the work and eBay has stopped selling it as well — and that the three companies together have almost a monopoly on book sales — it essentially means Mohammed’s Koran has been “disappeared.”
Robinson himself is also increasingly being airbrushed from history (or at least current events). Prior to Amazon’s move, the 36-year-old activist had already been banned from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (meanwhile, Facebook has tolerated child pornography and both it and Twitter have allowed terrorists to use their platforms).
Why would Amazon ban a profitable book? Because when your profit comes from criticizing Islam’s “prophet,” it’s not hard to prophesy that you’re wearing a bull’s eye.
Jihad Watch proprietor Robert Spencer elaborated on this Tuesday. Writing at PJ Media, he stated that he’d pointed out on January 7 that Amazon removed “doormats featuring Qur’an verses from sale because the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) found them offensive.” He also asked how long it would be “before Hamas-linked CAIR starts demanding that books that criticize jihad terror … be dropped by Amazon?”
“The answer,” he now writes, “turned out to be 51 days.”
Spencer opines that it likely was the U.K. government and the BBC, not CAIR, that instigated Amazon’s move against Robinson. So it’s another example of how Koran-verse doormats are out, and the West acting as a doormat is in.
That is to say, politically correct, spirit-of-treason censorship is today’s norm. In fact, Robinson had become a “Free Speech Martyr,” as the American Spectator put it, after he was arrested and jailed for using video to try to publicize a Muslim-rape-gang trial (leftist, immigrationist authorities do their utmost in Britain to try to obscure the reality of Muslim crime).
As for the Mohammed’s Koran censorship, it’s justified based on a “hate speech” pretext. But Robinson’s coauthor, Peter McLoughlin, pointed out this claim’s hypocrisy.
“This is the twenty-first century equivalent of the Nazis taking out the books from university libraries and burning them,” he wrote. “Can you think of another scholarly book on Islam that has been banned by Amazon? Mein Kampf is for sale on Amazon. As are books like the terrorist manual called The Anarchist Cookbook.”
Note that so are anti-Christian books; in fact, they’re available everywhere and no one bats an eye. (Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson made this point, among others, in the Wednesday evening segment of his show below.)
Then there’s the BBC. Why, as Spencer suggests, would that entity want to destroy Robinson? His sin was that in a masterful turning of the tables and sting operation, he exposed Panorama (a documentary program airing on the BBC) reporter John Sweeney for being an underhanded, deceitful, propagandizing media rat, to put it delicately.
You can read the whole delicious story here. In a nutshell, though, Robinson was able to capture video of Sweeney plying an ex-Robinson colleague with alcohol and coaching her to lie in preparation for an on-camera interview designed to disparage the activist.
But while disparaging patriots is okay, you mustn’t even tell damning truths about Western powers that be — or Islamists — two groups increasingly joined at the hip. So the Western traitor class, in government and big business (including standard and social media), are ratcheting up the censorship and making sharia compliance a growing part of it.
Opining on this, Spencer writes, “Those who object to my labeling Leftist totalitarians ‘fascists’ should take careful note of this story. What group is most famous for burning books? That’s right. And what group is doing it now? Right again.”
Moreover, “If they are now going to ban books that are critical of Islam and opposed to jihad terror and Sharia oppression … then an Islam-critical perspective will be almost impossible to find anywhere,” he later states. “If the motivating ideology of jihad terrorists cannot be criticized or even discussed openly, jihad terrorists will have an absolutely free hand. They will act with impunity, secure in the knowledge that any criticism of their activities will be shut down the same way Tommy Robinson was shut down.”
And Westerners will be sheep led to the slaughter; after all, people can’t solve a problem if they aren’t aware of it, and they won’t be aware of it if you can’t talk about it.
Spencer concludes by pointing out that those who should be guardians of free speech stand silent as Robinson is silenced; I’ll add that many of them actually cheer, as they did when commentator Alex Jones and provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos were “deplatformed” and conservatives in general (such as me) are censored. But these are the canaries in the coal mine. They drop today — the miasma reaches you tomorrow.
These applauding spectators ought to investigate the origin and meaning of the term “useful idiots.”
Photo of Tommy Robinson: Shayan Barjesteh van Waalwijk van Doorn via wikimedia