OPINION: Claims that ‘Zionists’ are UK’s behind riots makes zero sense
Acclaimed investigative journalist refutes claims on social media about backing for the far-right activist Tommy Robinson and the riots that have torn through the country
The word “weird” is the weapon of choice the Democrats are targeting at Donald Trump.
They hope it will persuade Americans in November that Trump is so far outside the mainstream, he’ll imperil the rules-based order of government if he’s re-elected President.
The Democrats calculate that “weird” is better than calling Trump “dangerous” because it connotes a collective “eh???!!” thought-bubble over the gibberish Trump often spouts – for example, his 45 most incoherent lines from a rambling speech in the Rose Garden in 2020.
“Weird” also captures the muddled-headed, evidence-free, ramblings of some pro-Palestinian academics and journalists who leapt onto last Wednesday’s counter protest bandwagon to suggest Israel was behind the far-right riots.
So desperately do they want this to be true, that they’ve created for themselves an Alice and Wonderland world of imaginary links.
Here’s Dr Anas Altikriti, a passionate advocate of Hamas “resistance” and co-founder of the Muslim Vote Campaign that returned four Independent MPs to the British parliament on the single issue of Gaza 2,230 miles away:
“Tommy Robinson and those who finance him and those who have planned this… these are organisations, capitalists, individuals, corporations that are directly linked to the Zionist state of Israel (applause). This is their payback for Gaza. This is the payback for our demonstrations, for our stands, for our solidarity, for our opposition to the genocide. This is how they threaten to pay us back. This is their retribution.”
In other words, Robinson is a puppet on a string pulled by unnamed Zionists who orchestrated last’s weeks mayhem and bigotry against British Muslims as payback for the pro-Palestinian protests over Gaza.
As a measure of Altikriti’s fragile relationship to facts and evidence, he’s also insisted that the allegation that Hamas massacred Israeli citizens at a music festival on 7 October is a “lie” despite Hamas’s own head-cam footage showing that’s exactly what they did.
The Chair of the London based ‘Islamic Human Rights Commission’ – oxymoronically named since it avoids addressing the hideous mass abuse of human rights in Iran – also has a conspiratorial take on the root causes of the riots.
Massoud Shadjareh has told the Home Secretary by letter:
“Enabled by their Zionist financiers abroad, far right elements have weaponised the tragic murder of three young girls in Southport to incite the country into pogroms against Muslims and people of colour.”
No names. Just…….er…….” Zionist financiers” somewhere beyond our shores. “Primitive antisemitism” responded 50 peers, amongst them prominent Jews. The rebuke didn’t deter the Palestinian activist Yvonne Ridley at a weekend anti-racist demonstration in Newcastle from wading straight into this racist cess pit. She suggested that Tommy Robinson – “Israel’s poster boy” – had a “mission to bring chaos and riots to the Uk so that Gaza could be knocked off the front pages”.
The irony is that anti-imperialists allies are sometimes in good company with the far right.
On 3 August, the American white supremacist and antisemite Nicholas Fuentes posted that the “Zionist Tommy Robinson” triggered a “nationwide civil unrest” after holding a “massive rally” following the new Labour government’s “secret arms embargo against Israel” and dropping its “opposition to the ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu.”
“Excellent point” responded Altikriti’s fellow academic David Miller, to another X post making the same connection. “As I have been saying, ‘Tommy Robinson’ is a Zionist asset” opined the ex-sociology professor, fired from Bristol University in 2021 after a slew of provocative statements in which he branded Jewish students as “political pawns [of] a violent, racist, foreign regime engaged in ethnic cleansing”.
In fact, Miller says Robinson actually instigated the riots because he’s been “working for the State of Israel since 2009.”
The rapper Lowkey (aka Kareem Dennis) has also floated the idea that “racist attacks and pogroms in Britain” are part of “Robinson’s very clear material relationship with the Zionist movement.”
What “very clear material?” Even the London based Middle East Monitor (MEMO)- closely aligned to the Muslim Brotherhood – has acknowledged that the UK Zionist Federation wanted nothing to do with Robinson.
The Iranian government-controlled Press TV has also alleged that Tommy Robinson is a “Zionist Asset” as has another pro-Palestinian outlet, Middle East Eye (MEE), although in the latter’s case this is posed as a question.
It soon becomes clear from the MEE’s answer that their question is entirely rhetorical.
First, the MEE rolls the pitch by quoting Robinson fulminating that “Hamas was allowed to overtake London, overtake our capital every weekend…the Police did nothing.”
Then it highlights Robinson’s anti-Muslim bigotry whilst recalling that in 2018 a right-wing pro-Zionist US based think-tank gave him £47,000 towards his legal defence against charges of contempt of court.
Then it asks: “But what can Zionists and pro-Israel entities gain from supporting Robinson?”
It’s such a weird question because the answer is so screamingly obvious: absolutely nothing, unless Israel is actively seeking even greater pariah status than it already has from the Gaza war and thinks that fomenting civil unrest here and undermining the UK as a key western ally is somehow in its interest?
The logic is so off the wall, but not to the MEE. The “gain” is apparently obvious: they quote Robinson saying “If they killed all the Jews, if they won the war and took Israel, they’re not stopping there. They’re coming straight through Europe. They’re already in Europe.” You see, Robinson is a “Zionist asset” because he promotes Israel as the defender of the civilising West against Islam’s uncivilising influence in Europe.
This sort of conspiratorial journalism completely ignores the fact that not a single “pro-Israel entity” in the UK wants anything to do with Tommy Robinson. The reverse in fact, and the MEE know this because these “entities” have gone out of their way to emphasise the fact.
Every mainstream UK Jewish organisation here has unequivocally condemned both Robinson personally and last week’s far-right violence with its naked anti-Muslim bigotry.
The Board of Deputies has slammed “the lawlessness and thuggery” and “attacks on Muslims and Black people, members of other minorities.”
The Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis has spoken of the “stain on our national moral conscience” from the “targeting of mosques; asylum seekers and refugees.”
The Jewish Leadership Council has referred to “these shameful attacks on mosques, hotels housing migrants, and homes of migrant families.” It has welcomed efforts to “protect the security of Muslim and other communities under attack. Now is the time for us to stand together and reject this vile hatred.”
The Jewish charity CST has offered its support and cooperation to the Muslim charity Tell Mama which protects Muslims from anti-Islamic hate, and which CST helped create in the first place. “The targeting of Muslims and other minorities is appalling” said the CST last week.
It is patently obvious that Robinson supports Israel first and foremost as a way of weaponizing his bigotry against Muslims and that when it comes to Jews, the far-right virus about malign Jewish power still lingers in his system. Here’s a sample of his thoughts on Jewish influence in 2022: endorsing Kayne West’s diatribes about Jewish influence in Hollywood, under the heading “Tommy’s statement: The Jewish Question” Robinson wrote that it “should be able to discuss this elephant in the room now that Kanye has opened the door” and so he did: “There are powerful Jewish people, claiming to be Zionists, who have their fingers on buttons of power in the entertainment industry, in big tech, in mainstream media, in the music industry, in Hollywood and in governments.”
Robinson is desperate for the approbation of Jews, as seen from how he’s sought to insert himself into pro-Israel marches. Jews have refused to give it. Why would they? They don’t like his politics, his anti-Muslim bigotry and for obvious historical reasons, they instinctively recoil from the Far Right. As if to underline that reality, last week the CST found that some far-right groups encouraged their supporters to target synagogues as well as mosques.
The Chief Rabbi says British Jews are “feeling trapped between the anvil of the hateful far right and the hammer of the conspiratorial extreme left.”
It was ever thus.
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