The excellent Bruce Bawer writes at FrontPage:

In the last few days a new chapter has been added to the storied saga of the 41-year-old British activist, author, and citizen journalist Tommy Robinson. On Friday, upon his return to Britain after several weeks abroad, he was taken into police custody – an event he had expected and discussed publicly before flying back home – and charged with several “offenses.” One of the charges, contempt of court, relates to his documentary Silenced, which premiered in July at a screening in Trafalgar Square and has been viewed on X more than 50 million times. In that documentary, Tommy gathered ample witness testimony showing that Jamal Hijazi, a Syrian refugee portrayed in the British media as the victim of bullying at the school he attended in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, in 2018, was not a victim but was, in fact, himself a bully – and a rather horrible one, at that.

What, then, was Tommy’s crime? He’d been ordered by a judge not to contradict the official narrative about Hijazi – specifically, not to describe him as “aggressive and bullying” or as “threatening,” even if he was aggressive and bullying and threatening. A second contempt-of-court charge was leveled at Tommy for several related “offenses,” such as discussing the Hijazi case in an interview with Jordan Peterson, holding that July screening in Trafalgar Square, and posting Silenced on X and YouTube. In addition to the contempt charges, Tommy was charged under the Terrorism Act for refusing to provide the police with access to the contents of his mobile phone, which include material that would compromise his sources.

On Saturday, supporters of Tommy held a “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London, turning out in such significant numbers that, as the Guardian put it, “the demonstration spilled out from its meeting point around Victoria Station.” The Guardian made sure to point out that the protesters, many of whom were treated to an outdoor screening of his new documentary, Lawfare, were “mostly male, white and middle-aged” (all bad things, of course) and that many of them were waving Union Jacks (that most toxic of items). Meanwhile counter-protesters took part in a rally arranged by a leftist group called Stand Up to Racism.

Aside from his documentaries, Tommy has also written (and self-published) a couple of books. Enemy of the State (2015) is an autobiography that focuses on his demonization by the British government, which finds his determination to expose monstrous Islamic crimes inconvenient, distasteful, and threatening to “community cohesion.” His second book, written with Peter McLoughlin, is entitled Muhammed’s Koran (2017). His newest, Manifesto: Free Speech, Real Democracy, Peaceful Disobedience, also written with McLoughlin, came out on October 4, but when I looked for it on Amazon UK it was identified as being “currently unavailable.” After trying to find some other way of acquiring the book online, I was finally able to secure a copy through the good offices of a friend of mine who is also a chum of Tommy’s. (On October 25, Tommy – or somebody – posted at his X account that orders for the book could be placed at a dedicated website and that new copies would be available this week.)

What to say about Manifesto? Put it this way: the authors show that Tommy’s previous topics – the reality of the Islamic threat and the British government’s determination to crush Islam’s critics – are only two details in a much bigger picture. In the U.S., the MAGA movement is a rebellion against America’s unelected but powerful Deep State, a.k.a. The Swamp, which has its equivalents in pretty much every Western country. And as Tommy and McLoughlin note, it’s been around, at least in the U.K., for a long time. Two centuries ago, the English writer William Cobbett (1763-1835) called it “The Thing”; in America, a century or so later, Jack London (1876-1916), of Call of the Wild fame, coined his own name for it – “The Oligarchy” – in the obscure 1908 novel The Iron Heel. Throughout Manifesto, Tommy and McLoughlin use this term to describe the Deep State of our own day, mostly in the U.K.

To be sure, they do devote a degree of attention to “The Oligarchy” in America and other countries – for example the Netherlands, where Pim Fortuyn, a fierce opponent of the immigration policy of the Dutch establishment, was murdered on May 6, 2002, only days before an election after which he probably would have become prime minister. His killer was routinely identified in the Dutch media as an animal-rights activist, but he also despised Fortuyn’s criticism of Islam, hence the assassination. Shockingly, the killer was released from prison after only twelve years and allowed to take a new name under which he could start a new life. As Tommy and McLoughlin point out, theories about possible Deep State involvement in Fortuyn’s murder – theories not unlike those that have been proffered for decades by researchers into the JFK assassination – are now being served up by Dutch commentators.

But Tommy and McLoughlin’s major emphasis is on The Oligarchy in Britain. One fact of which many Americans have become aware since the beginning of the Trump era is that our own Swamp creatures aren’t exclusively Democrats; on the contrary, Deep State operatives – whether they work on Capitol Hill, or for a think tank, or at the FBI or CIA or DoD or IRS, or as lobbyists, or in the legacy media or military-industrial complex – can be found in both major parties. The same is true in Britain, where the Tories held power from 2010 to 2024 without doing anything significant to reform the scandalously mediocre NHS, to reduce the country’s sky-high immigration levels, to address the Muslim “grooming [i.e. child rape] gangs” that can be found in cities all over England, or to protect critics of Islam from arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment.

Things were, as Tommy and McLoughlin observe, scarcely different a century ago. The playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), revered, then as now, by Britain’s cultural elite, was nominally a socialist; the politician Oswald Mosley (1896-1980), reviled, then as now, by the same cultural elite, was nominally a fascist. But there was really little in the way of an ideological gap between them. Both admired Hitler and Mussolini; both looked kindly upon the idea of eugenics-based extermination (in 1938, GBS published a newspaper article entitled “Heil Hitler”); both advocated for a welfare state that limited individual rights. In fact both GBS and Mosley were Fabians – members of the organization, established in 1884, that called for a gradual transformation of the U.K. into a hard-core socialist state and that, not incidentally, founded the London School of Economics (LSE).

In other words, both Shaw and Mosley, whether you want to call them fascists or socialists, were at the big-government end of the political spectrum – the spectrum, that is, on which the important distinction lies – and were therefore the ideological forebears of the likes of Tony Blair, who in 2006 unveiled a window at the LSE that openly celebrated the Fabians, including the Hitler–loving GBS. At the other end of that spectrum were people like the brilliant politician and scholar Enoch Powell (1912-1998) – whose brave, prophetic dissent from The Oligarchy’s mass- immigration policy in his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech led to his immediate expulsion from the political elite and his labeling as a “fascist.” In reality, Powell was no more a fascist than Donald Trump is – on the contrary, he was, like Trump, a patriot and a populist who was deeply concerned about the deleterious impact of Deep State policies on the native inhabitants of his own country.

Also at the small-government end of the spectrum, needless to say, was Margaret Thatcher, who, Tommy and McLoughlin suggest, was expelled from the prime ministership because she’d started to challenge the growing power of the EU. They also speculate that if Thatcher had managed to triumph over the coup that removed her from power, she might well, within the next few years, have acted upon Powell’s warnings and restricted immigration dramatically – an action that would have made today’s Britain a very different country indeed from the one that is, thanks to The Oligarchy, well on its way to having a minority British population.

Granted, the overall message of Manifesto – about the perils of rule by a globalist, authoritarian elite and the drastic need for a democratic, populist shake-up – will hardly be new to readers of this website. And the voice throughout most of the book, if it matters to you, sounds less like that of Tommy, a plainspoken working-class bloke, and more like that of a historical scholar – in this instance, McLoughlin, who has an academic background and has written a book about Oliver Cromwell and another entitled The Pattern of History and Fate of Humanity. No matter who wrote what in Manifesto, however, the value of this book lies not in its main argument but in its many illuminating specifics – from its perceptive account of the enduring significance of Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) to the long, highly detailed chapter pondering the relevance of the gold standard, cryptocurrencies, and other economic phenomena to the mechanisms by which the Deep State exercises its control.

But, alas, some of the branches of The Oligarchy – in this case, the publishing houses that refused to put out Manifesto and the bookstores that refuse to stock it – are doing their best to make it difficult for you to get a copy of it. Meanwhile, other branches – namely the police and judiciary – are intent on barring you from being able to hear Tommy. On Monday morning, a court hearing was held to determine whether Tommy – who has previously served long, hellish terms behind bars after “trials” that were models of injustice, and who was most recently arrested this past June in Canada after giving a speech in Calgary – would yet again be sent to prison.

At the hearing, which took place at Woolrich Crown Court in London, the prosecution maintained that this case wasn’t about Tommy’s politics or “even directly a case about freedom of expression,” but rather “about the disobedience to a court order, and the undermining of the rule of law that goes with that” – never mind that the court order itself was preposterous. When the judge [Sir Jeremy Charles Johnson, 53] issued his ruling, he read it, noted Ezra Levant of Rebel News, who was tweeting from the courtroom, “from his computer,” leading Levant to wonder: “How can he do that, given that there was literally no pause at all after the submissions by the lawyers? Did he pre-write this? How does that work?” Good questions.

And what was the ruling? No surprise: Tommy was sentenced to 18 months in prison, of which he will serve half – probably in solitary confinement, given that British prisons are dominated and controlled by Muslim gangsters, who would tear him to bits otherwise. In short, in a country that is scared to properly punish the Muslim rapists he’s exposed, Tommy is essentially being sentenced once again to the Hotel Graybar for telling a truth of which The Oligarchy disapproves. As Levant put it, “In the U.K., the government is now the arbiter of truth.” Of course George Orwell, whom Tommy and McLoughlin discuss in Manifesto, saw all of this coming in 1984, in which the role of Oceania’s Ministry of Truth is to disseminate lies and suppress facts.

Oh, well. Yet another disgraceful day for British justice – and the beginning of yet another season in hell for Tommy Robinson. What can you do? If you haven’t done it already, start by watching Silenced online – and thank Elon Musk for not having taken it down. And what else can you do? Ponder what my friend Valerie Price of Act for Canada wrote to me about Tommy the other day: “He is my personal hero and yet it must be said that all he has done to become heroic is something that we all can do, should do, and must do: he has spoken the truth.”

The leader of the Hamas savages who invaded Israel and perpetrated the atrocities of October 7, 2023, has been killed by Israeli forces. 

Joel B. Pollak writes at Breitbart:

The IDF suspected that Sinwar may have been inadvertently killed after soldiers directed tank fire at a building in which three terrorists had been spotted. Afterwards, infantry soldiers discovered, to their surprise, a body that resembled Sinwar.

The body was taken to Israel for further examination, including dental, DNA, and fingerprint verification. It is unclear how many of these checks were completed before Israeli officials concluded that the dead body was indeed Sinwar’s.

According to Israel’s Army Radio, Sinwar was found with passports on his body, as well as a quantity of cash. He was apparently trying to flee Gaza to Egypt, leaving Hamas and the Palestinian people behind as he attempted to escape.

Sinwar was once thought to have surrounded himself with hostages to prevent Israel from killing him in an airstrike. On Thursday it was revealed that those hostages were the ones executed in a tunnel in late August, including U.S. citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, as Israeli soldiers closed in. Sinwar had evidently been on the run ever since.

His body was found next to those of senior Hamas commanders known to be close to him.

The Biden-Harris administration had, just days earlier, threatened Israel with an arms embargo unless it did more to “surge” aid into Gaza and trimmed its military operations there. Harris had also pushed for a ceasefire earlier in the war, even before the release of hostages had been achieved. Other nations, such as France, had called for an arms embargo to stop the war.

Sinwar was killed near the Philadelphi corridor in southern Gaza, on the Gaza-Egypt border, an area from which the Biden-Harris administration had been urging Israel to withdraw for a ceasefire deal.

Israelis are now hoping Sinwar’s death can bring about the release of the remaining 101 hostages, more than half of whom may still be alive. There are also hopes for an end to the war in Gaza.

Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant declared: “Israel today closed an account of many years’ standing with Yahya Sinwar. The IDF will pursue everyone who harms our people and our forces, and will settle accounts with him.”

One year and ten days after his hellish invasion, the fiend of (secular) SIN and WAR has been killed by Israelis.

A day to celebrate. Annually. 

*

Noah Pollak writes at X:

If you are celebrating the elimination of Sinwar, you should also be celebrating the premiership of Bibi Netanyahu. No other Israeli leader would have stayed in the fight this long and achieved this victory. Since weeks after 10/7, the pressure on Israel from the Democratic Party, Europe, the UN, the media, the western foreign policy and political establishment, etc, to cut a deal, to agree to a “ceasefire,” to surrender, has been unrelenting and enormous. And for a full year, the leader of a tiny and vulnerable country has resisted and outmaneuvered the pressure to stop fighting. It’s a remarkable achievement, and it’s the real reason Sinwar is dead.

Gerard Baker writes at the Wall Street Journal, of which he is an Editor-at-Large:

How will we ever repay the debt we owe Israel?

What the Jewish state has done in the past year—for its own defense, but in the process and not coincidentally for the security of all of us—will rank among the most important contributions to the defense of Western civilization in the past three-quarters of a century.

Having been hit with a devastating attack on its people, beyond the fetid imagining of some of the vilest antisemites, Israel has in 12 months done nothing less than redraw the balance of global security, not just in the region, but in the wider world.

It has eliminated thousands of the terrorists whose commitment to a savage theocratic ideology has claimed so many lives across the region and the world for decades. It has, with extraordinary tactical accuracy, dispatched some of the masterminds of the worst evil on the planet, including most recently Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader in Lebanon. It has repelled and then reversed the previously inexorably advancing power of one of the world’s most terrifying autocracies, the Islamic Republic of Iran. It has demonstrated to all the West’s foes, including Iran’s allies in Moscow and Beijing, that our system of free markets and free people, and the voluntary alliance network we have constructed to defend it, generates resources and capabilities of vast technical superiority. Above all, it has provided an unexpected but crucial reminder to our enemies that there are at least some willing and able to pursue and defeat them whatever the risk to our own lives and resources.

The only appropriate responses to Israel’s gallantry, fortitude and skill from us—its nominal allies, especially in the U.S.—are “thank you” and “how can we help?”

Instead, time and again Israel’s supposed friends, including the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, have, while expressing sympathy over the outrage of Oct. 7 and uttering the usual support for “Israel’s right to defend itself”, repeatedly tried to restrain it from doing just that. Their early, valuable support has been steadily diminished by the way they have too often connived with the anti-Israel extremists in their own party.

Before Israel had even buried its dead last October and as Hamas was busy murdering its hostages, there were calls for Israel to cease fire. For a year we have heard our leaders’ “balanced” condemnations of Hamas and its terror masters on the one hand and the Jewish state on the other, a false equivalence that says more about the moral disorder in our own politics than about Israel’s motives and actions.

In Europe, they have gone even further, as usual, rewarding Hamas and Hezbollah by nominally recognizing a nonexistent Palestinian state and prosecuting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on bogus war-crimes charges.

Do they not get that in the end we have to make a choice: our ally, on the front lines of defense against barbarism or our enemies, those who literally want to see us all buried?

Fortunately for all of us, it seems Israel is prevailing despite the chorus of hecklers.

Perhaps all this sounds too blithe for skeptical readers; or at least premature given the rising expectation of a much wider conflict to come. And it is true that there has been awful loss of innocent lives in Gaza, Lebanon and elsewhere that undoubtedly fuels the ire of the enemy across the world [for which Israel is NOT to blame – ed.]

What if Mr. Netanyahu and his government’s aggressive prosecution proves a Pyrrhic victory?

But that wider conflict was perhaps always inevitable, given Iran’s stated objectives and its consistent efforts to achieve them. We can say two things tentatively about that long-feared wider confrontation. First, the strategic tactical, intelligence and technological genius Israel has demonstrated over the past year might have done so much damage to Iran’s proxy armies and their military and political leaders that they will be ill-prepared and equipped for the bigger struggle to come, and Israel—and, let’s hope, reliable allies—better placed to defeat its enemies. Second, having observed this Israeli superiority over that time and eagerness not to bring the destruction on itself a wide war would surely bring, perhaps Iran will be deterred.

Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few, Winston Churchill said of the men of the Royal Air Force after they had repelled Hitler’s Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain. 

We should echo those words today as we watch in awe what a country smaller in area than New Jersey, with a population less than North Carolina’s and an economy smaller than that of Washington state, has done for all of us.

As Israelis solemnly mark a year since Oct. 7, we should not only redouble our expressions of sympathy and solidarity. We should show them our gratitude, and if we are willing to be really honest, acknowledge a little of our own shame.