The Traitor Within

Tim Stanley writes:

An interesting spot by Political Scrapbook that says a lot about the politics of the English Defence League. This morning Tommy Robinson (or Stephen Yaxley-Lennon or Andrew McCaster or Flimbo the Amazing Clown or whatever his name really is) tweeted a link complaining about mass immigration under Labour – and it turns out that the link was to an anti-Semitic website.

It's called The Traitor Within (never a good sign) and after detailing New Labour's nefarious plan to flood the country with good plumbers, it concludes with a paragraph claiming that the ministers involved in its immigration policy "are all Jewish".

Turns out the website is a classic example of Far Right lunacy, with articles about the BBC being run by "homosexuals and foreigners" (and I thought the EDL was pro-gay?), the "vast conspiracy against the honest people of Britain", "ENOCH WAS RIGHT" (about what, dear? The tyranny of seat belts?) and how Jews make the best spies (on Robert Maxwell: "Yep, if you’re Jewish you can be suspected of spying for Mossad and the Soviets, become a Labour MP, be a media moghul, plunder the pension fund of your employees and issue injunction after injunction to ensure you never get prosecuted, all at the same time.")

So why did Tommy link to it? Well, he immediately said on Twitter that he had "never seen the website before", that it popped up his timeline and that he didn't read the anti-Semitic bit before pressing tweet. Fair enough – we've all linked to things we didn't properly read.

The difference between most of us and Tommy, however, is that we don't obsess about immigration and angrily tweet about the Muslim takeover of Britain all day – so we don't tend to encounter those sorts of ugly websites. Unless we're looking for a laugh and want to know what the tinfoil-hat-wearing Looney Tunes madmen of Britain's far Right think about the Eurotunnel (a Popish plot, no doubt).

The EDL constantly says that while it despises Islam, it's cool with Jewish and gay people. Maybe some of its individual members really are. But when you drink from the far-Right-wing puddle, you drink with a coalition of Nazis, homophobes, anti-Semites, anti-Catholics and anti-women fruitcakes who think the Earth's flat and Hitler's living in the Antarctic waiting for the call to fly his UFO back to Europe and restore order.

Maybe Tommy isn't anti-Semitic, but I have no doubt that he keeps anti-Semitic company on his marches through irritated town centres. What more would you expect from a former member of the BNP?

"We've got your back," Brian Kilmeade of Fox News assured "great guy" Tommy Robinson in June. Tommy Robinson is a violent convict. And now, this. 

@kilmeade then tweeted the following: "Englishdefenseleague.org  check out Tommy Robinson and his mission to rid brit ian of muslim extremists @foxandfriends". Rather amusingly, his use of the American spelling of "defence" means that his link does not work.

Fox News ought never to have been granted a British broadcasting licence. And it is owned by a man whom no civilised country would permit to hold any media interest whatever, but who effectively controls even such remaining corners of the British media as he does not formally own.

There is now more than enough pretext to rectify the first. Leading, sooner rather than later, to the rectification of the second.  

Some of us have been pointing out for years the ties binding the EDL, the Tea Party, the racist secular Far Right in Israel, the London neoconservative think tank circuit (with its array of parliamentary passes, of columns and blogs for nominally non-Murdoch titles, and so on), and Rupert Murdoch.  

This was no conspiracy. It has always been entirely out in the open. It still is. It ought to be unbelievable, but of course it is not, that the Minister with direct responsibility for broadcasting is Ed Vaizey of the Henry Jackson Society.  

Then there is the role of his HJS comrade, Michael Gove, as Murdoch's man in the Cabinet. On Gove's coming down from Oxford, the Conservative Research Department rejected him for employment on the grounds that it could find no evidence that he was political at all, still less a committed Conservative. Yet look at him now.  

Oh, and then there is Jeremy Hunt. Not to mention David Cameron himself, who brought Andy Coulson into the heart of government, and who "even rode the horse" of Rebekah Brooks.

After the Kilmeade incident, I emailed tv.licensing@ofcom.org.uk to demand that Fox News be stripped of its British licence. It has not been. Time for us all to get back on the case, I feel. Spread the word against The Traitor Within.