Tommy Robinson in Israel

As mentioned here several times last week, Tommy Robinson recent spent ten days in Israel exploring different areas of the Jewish State. Brian of London of London was his guide and driver during the trip, and wrote the following report.

There are also several videos of Tommy in Israel that I haven’t got to yet; I hope to post them later.

Tommy Robinson in Israel
by Brian of London

Tommy Robinson flew back to Luton from Israel: he was immediately asked by the UK Border Agency how he came to be pictured standing on an Israeli Merkava IV tank, holding a loaded M16 automatic rifle in the Israeli Golan heights. There’s pretty much nothing Tommy can do without the UK authorities taking an interest.

I wanted to give Tommy an understanding of what Israel means for Jews. It’s personal. When I moved to Israel eight years ago from the UK, it immediately felt like my home. I wanted him to get a taste for the strength of the Jewish indigenous connection to the land. How the land has shaped Jewish culture and how Jews have brought this land back to vibrant life. I also wanted to give him a view of the real borders of living Zionism.

Tommy has a history of both facing up to militant Islam in his home town of Luton and adamantly rejecting the far-right. This rejection sends the far-right into a rage, who feel he should be their ally in a fight against Islam at home. But Tommy is clearly not anti-immigration (and the EDL in his time never made a big issue of it). He’s against un-assimilating Islamic immigration, and he’s completely colour blind.

Israel is poorly understood by so many. Tommy has been fighting against Islamisation in the UK for so long he already knew hatred of Israel — which almost always included hatred of Jews — was an absolute bedrock feature of the Islamic ideology he sees in Britain today. Anti-Israel demonstrations, including expressions of support for terrorist organisations who deliberately target Israeli citizens, is common and open on British streets. Expressions of support for Palestinians seem more often than not to be straight denunciations of Jewish Israel’s right to exist.

From the other side far-right notions of a global “Zionist control” infect white nationalist groups (and parts of the alt-right). These berate Jews for having returned home, fought against Arabs and the British and displaced what they wrongly see as the “indigenous Palestinians” in 1948 and again in 1967. Even while these groups show intense dislike for Islam and lurch into anti-Muslim bigotry in their own countries, they still align themselves with the Islamic mythology which places Muslim Arabs as indigenous people of Israel despite almost no concrete ties to the land of Israel. In contrast, Jewish ties to the land are to be found at every turn in Israel.

Tommy never followed far-right thinking on Jews. Growing up with many Muslim friends, he knew he’d never been threatened by Jews trying to impose their ways on him; that only came from Islam. He’d always understood the need for Israel as a Jewish state following the Holocaust, but what he took from the trip, as he told me at the end, was the huge depth of attachment that Judaism has to the land of Israel.

The very first day we started in Tel Aviv, drove south and east to the edge of the Judean Dessert near Arad, down to the Dead Sea, then swinging north past Masada, past the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found and eventually on to sleep on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. That drive from south to north took us right along the west bank of the Jordan river, cutting straight through the land liberated from Jordanian occupation in the 1967 Six-Day War.

This gave us a view of the physical limits of Zionism: the almost 100-year-old Balfour Declaration originally had the Jewish State extending all the way out to Amman and encompassing modern Jordan. Very few Zionists today desire anything more than what we hold now, and even that we’d be happy to share with people who didn’t actively seek our destruction and would respect our rights and attachments.

After exploring the Galilee and Golan heights, seeing and hearing the fighting in Syria, we followed back down the biblical Way of the Patriarchs along Israel’s central mountain ridge. To our east the Jordan valley we’d driven up two days before, to our west the costal plains of Israel and the Mediterranean Sea. This is the route of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and every place name along the road is carved deep into Jewish and Christian history. This is the land recaptured from Jordan in 1967, the land the whole world obsesses over. And it’s amazingly unpopulated in many parts.

The trip saw us bouncing off-road across the Judean Dessert before floating in the Dead Sea. Looking right into Gaza and at the modern looking Gaza City before we being spotted by a pickup-truck full of Hamas and then chased away from our viewpoint by friendly IDF forces. They were scrambled to pull us down (they did suggest that Hamas snipers could have shot us).

We crossed back and forth between pre and post 1967 Israel showing passports sometimes, sometimes queuing for a few minutes. The dreaded “checkpoints”. We saw the irrelevance of that old, green, crayon line marking the armistice in 1949.

We watched an illegal camel race with thousands of young Arab men as Jewish families ate picnics in the park a hundred metres away. Throughout Tommy struck up conversations with people from all walks of life: Bedouin Arabs, Israeli Arabs Muslim and Christian, Jews of all colours and hues.

In the most challenging part we entered Bethlehem and were guided through UNRWA’s Dheisheh refugee camp by an exiled Gaza Christian Arab and a local secular Muslim. The anger toward the Palestinian Authority and external agencies which support it was clear. Tommy kicked a football about with kids who grow up venerating terrorist portraits on every wall. He wants to help: he sees how these kids are a tool of enrichment for the leadership, and he’s furious. We learned the true horror of offering cash salaries to terrorists or their surviving families for carrying out attacks on Israelis. The combination of an impoverished present and an Islamic promise means these kids will turn to terrorism.

At the very end of the trip we went up to Judaism’s holiest site: The Temple Mount. Presently occupied by the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque. Tommy and his friend were turned back: their arms are covered with tattoos. He would have covered them but he refused to buy a covering cloth: he saw it as Jizya. He didn’t miss a great deal: he’s seen plenty of mosques. I guess he could have joined in the football game going on up on the “third holiest site” in Islam.

Tommy and his friends bought their own tickets and paid for the whole trip: this wasn’t financed by the mythical “Zionist lobby”, despite the accusations hurled at Tommy’s twitter account on an hourly basis. I put in my time and my wife’s car for the week.

In the video wrap-up you’ll hear how Tommy gained a much greater appreciation of why this land is so deep in the Jewish soul. I know he also understood the purely political motivation of keeping millions in refugee camp squalor as a weapon. He also understood the broad security measures Israelis live with all the time, and he fears these will be increasingly necessary in Europe.

Until — like Tommy — you have walked this land, seen this land, listened to this land, tasted this land and breathed this land and its people, it’s hard to appreciate just how beautiful this country is and understand its past, present and future significance.

21 thoughts on “Tommy Robinson in Israel

  1. “he was immediately asked by the UK Border Agency how he came to be pictured standing on an Israeli Merkava IV tank, holding a loaded M16 automatic rifle”

    And they knew it was loaded exactly how?

      • Fair question, though the interrogators apparently didn’t assume the tank was loaded as they did with the rifle. I was referring to the rifle. I like rifles. I like tanks too, but I don’t have any.

  2. The orange plastic plug located on the side of the rifle, it blocks the firing mechanism, easily stripped away the gun becomes active. No soldier in the field carries a weapon the isn’t fully loaded. I held the same gun in my hand on the that wonderful day.

  3. The Border Farce in the UK is too busy questioning Tommy Robinson to bother about the returning jihadists, or the hundreds of illegal migrants who may also be jihadists or, at the very least, freeloaders.

  4. Tommy has long been a supporter of the state of Israel. Even back in the early days of the EDL when the media described it as “Far Right”, Israeli flags would be seen along with the Cross of St George at demos. Tommy spoke out against Nazis and made it clear they were not welcome in the EDL. I’m not at all surprised he went to Israel.

    • Anti-Jewish neo-nazis only hinder attempts to resist Islamification, I wish they would just convert to Islam and get it over with.
      There are Jewish figures and post-war ideas that don’t help of course; Barbara Spectre and George Soros spring to mind, Coudenh0ve-Kalergi who has spawned a cottage industry of conspiracy theories or even Yoram Dinstein who is drafting for the ECJ, what could be reasonably described as Islamic blasphemy law, under the auspices of pan-European ‘hate-speech’ laws, that in his opinion the “sorts of caricatures disparaging the Prophet Muhammad in the satiric magazine Charlie Hebdo should be outlawed.”
      http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/EJC-president-Islamic-extremists-are-the-new-Nazis-389076
      But that’s not so much anything to do with Jewishness, rather liberal appeasement and feeding the crocodile.
      Because in the end it’s a numbers game, it’s not millions of Jews coming across European borders.

      1 Jewish state, around 14 million Jews worldwide.
      56 Muslim countries, subjugated under the sword and 1.4 Billion Muslims.

      I start to wonder just how many of the ‘it’s the Jooz’ crowd act from indoctrinate hatred or are propagandists trying to subvert resistance to Islamification- by tainting the counter-jihad with association to neo-nazi thugs and imbeciles- because it certainly feels like that sometimes.

      Meanwhile power to you Tommy.

      • I had a discussion about this with MC, a contributor from Israel. He called those liberals of jewish descent “godless” who found another religion: (Cultural) Marxism. There are surprisingly large number of them in Liberal parties and in the media very visible and overrepresented which fuels the jewish conspiracy theory.

        • Behind Marxism is Satanism for which communism/socialism is an acceptable front. Judeo-Christianity when based upon the bible as in the ‘back to the bible’ movements that have occurred from the time of the reformation, have produced a wonderful civilization of which the USA particularly has been the best example.
          Satan hates Jews, and so he targets them particularly, and ‘arrogant’ Jews are particularly at risk of being suborned. The bible teaches humility before Yah, He is the Creator, He knows how it all works. But Yah has no room for those who would change His message; adding to or taking away from his Torah. So the godless Jews are particularly good at twisting and perverting the message of Yah, and wielding it as a powerful but perverted message which pretends to be “healing and beneficial” but is, in reality, lethal.

          Communism is totally dependant upon the Judeo-Christian memes; of one Law for all (the sheeple that is), but it turns the idea of “love your neighbour” on its head and turns it into an idea of love fellow travellers, but hate (and enslave) non-Communists (unbelievers that is).

          Communism is a fashionable ‘religion’ with as much, if not more influence as Roman Catholicism (especially now with the Pope being a fellow traveller). But like most ‘religions’ (including many Judaic sects) it is a horrible man-made hoax.

          • Depends on one’s beliefs, MC. I’d argue that all religions are a man-made hoax, while admitting that there may be a kernel of truth behind some of them.

  5. Clearly state intimidation of Tommy – following his twitter account, noting the tank and rifle photo, and questioning him about it at the UK border.

  6. Uhhh… am I the only one who thinks that that cute bag Tommy is holding in the last photograph does not become him? Or, at least less than that M-16?

    • Well..it kind of goes with the baby blue swim trunks with the drawstring untied and out, and the conspicuous neck pillow he’s wearing. If those are his travel clothes at least he looks comfortable. AND, if that’s what he wears to travel – gotta love the shirt.

      At least the bag looks like a shopping bag and not a man-purse.

      • That cute bag was a present for his kids he bought in the Jerusalem Shuk that morning. Hadn’t noticed how silly it looked.

        We saw the shirt hanging but without F*** ISIS on it. We went into the shop and the (Arab) shopkeeper was happy to use his Windows computer with all the menus in Arabic to add F*** ISIS under the Trump picture!

  7. I was just talking to an old shipmate of my dad’s yesterday, who had just been on a trip to Israel. That is definitely on my list of things to do, no question about it.

  8. I am grateful Barron posted this. I found this to be a thought-provoking statement (what else it may provoke, I’m not sure :~):

    The combination of an impoverished present and an Islamic promise means these kids will turn to terrorism.

    My question is how much of the terrorist impulse can be ascribed to an impoverished present and how much to an Islamic promise?

    • It’s hard to separate. Though Tommy (and I) were somewhat surprised to find out that in that camp there are only 3 mosques for 17,000 people. It’s not a very strongly Islamic camp. But Islam is the underlying value system. Nothing can be separated from that and all the language surrounding the “martyrs” is Islamic through and through.

      I will say that the poverty is absolutely nothing like as bad as India or Africa even in a camp like that. The kids all have shoes and proper clothes. There’s electricity and clean water and probably access to better healthcare than many in the US have without paying.

  9. I personally would prefer that Israel exist not because people are drawn to be excited by her, but because of her right to exist as an independent country. I prefer for the support for Israel to be rational, rather than emotional.

    So far, Israel represents an important barrier to Islamic communications in the Middle East. Israel also develops the technology of self-defense and national self-identity. Israel shows the exploding economic and social success of the Western model of government and the concept of man, as opposed to the Muslim or third-world primitive socialist. If Israel falls, it will set a precedent for the rest of the Western countries. So, how can the existence of Israel not be important to the West?

    It’s amazing to see the President of the US and the Secretary of State act like penny aldermen in a neighborhood dispute when they make an international affair of building a few apartments or moving a gang of illegal, squatter goat-herders.

    The place to really protect Israel is in the bully international organizations, constantly trying to isolate, boycott, and economically damage Israel. Other than that, I say, Israel can stand on its own feet and do away with the co-dependent relationship of the countries of the West, which is not going to last long in any case.

    • There is scope for all the reasons for Israel to exist from spiritual to factual to realistic and necessary. They’re not exclusionary and I find them to be additive: a rational understanding of Israel sometimes leads to looking at a site like Shilo where the Ark of the Covenant was first placed in Israel and comparing the excavated site to the bible gives one goose bumps. There is something Jewish about that place and that (for a Jew like me) is emotional and rational.

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