The riots that gripped the UK this August were heavily inspired by anti-Muslim agitator Tommy Robinson. His rise to prominence is largely the product of the North American Zionist lobby, representing a clear break with traditional far-right British activism.
David MILLER
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A wave of anti-Muslim and anti-migrant riots which consumed British society in racist violence this August were fomented almost entirely by a self-proclaimed “counter-Jihad” activist who goes by the moniker Tommy Robinson. This October 26, Robinson will return to the public eye in the UK for a provocative action outside Westminster in London protesting his prosecution for defaming a Syrian refugee in a film he produced.
The riots he helped inspire from abroad shook Britain for almost a week, triggering attacks on police stations and mosques. Though they did not occur in circumstances chosen by Robinson and his street fighting cohort, they perfectly served the agenda set into motion years before by the Israel lobby elements which sponsored his rise to political prominence.
Prominent British leftists have framed the anti-migrant riots led by Robinson as a “classic fascist mobilization,” painting them as an entirely homegrown, organic phenomenon arising from a reactionary lower middle class. Yet a closer look at the history of those involved demonstrates that the violent rampage reflected a notable break with traditional far-right British activism.
This rupture was accomplished through financial backing and political support by an Israel lobby centered largely in Tel Aviv and the United States, which sought to redirect the rage of the downwardly mobile European working class against Muslim immigrants, and in support of Western and Israeli military campaigns.
Indeed, the state of Israel’s international lobbying apparatus is deeply implicated in the crusade to assail Muslims across Europe. The strategy originated during the 1980’s in Benjamin Netanyahu’s marketing of the concept of ”’Islamic terrorism,” and gained popular currency during the so-called war on terror. The Zionist-backed campaign has spawned far-right street groups like the English Defense League, and the broader activist umbrella known as the “Counterjihad” movement.
While millions in pro-Israel astroturf has produced an array of loudmouthed anti-Muslim chaos agents, few have proven as marketable or durable as the agitator who calls himself Tommy Robinson. And none have been more loyal to the cause of Zionism. As Robinson declared in a leaked video, “If there was a war and it kicked off, I would be there on the front line, fighting for Israel.
“If there was a war, I’d fight on the front lines for ISRAEL!”
– Tommy Robinson, a British Patriot who never served a single day in his Majesty’s army
— ADAM (@AdameMedia) August 5, 2024
Who is “Tommy Robinson” and what do his backers want?
Tommy Robinson represents the persona of a half-Irish former aircraft engineering student named Stephen Yaxley-Lennon whose violent tendencies undermined his professional ambitions. In between prison sentences, Yaxley drifted into far-right activism and football hooliganism, adopting a series of aliases, including Wayne King, Andrew McMaster and Paul Harris, to cover up his criminal past. Tommy Robinson was apparently the name with the most populist, authentically English ring to it.
By the time the US invaded Iraq in 2003, Robinson was rising through the ranks of the British National Party (BNP), an overtly Judeophobic political cell whose membership was whites-only until 2010. However, as the BNP’s ranks dwindled, Robinson led an exodus of members into the newfangled English Defense League, or EDL. At EDL rallies, rank-and-file members could be seen with shaven heads, clad in their familiar combat boots and bomber jackets, while waving a new symbol of their movement: the Israeli flag.
In fact, the EDL owed its creation to pro-Israel elements in the US which also helped conceive and fund Europe’s so-called “Counterjihad” movement.
With millions in pro-Israel money, the Islamophobia network forms
It was in April 2007, at the UK and Scandinavia Counterjihad Summit hosted in Denmark by an outfit called the Center for Vigilant Freedom (CVF), that the political outlines of the so-called “Counterjihad” movement – and newly minted street organizations like the EDL – began to cohere. Though based in the US, the CVF established a UK office and announced its role in the conference from an address in Wakefield, in the north of England. The organization appeared to be led by Chris Knowles, a British activist based in Leeds who blogged under the pseudonym, Aeneas Lavinium.
Listed as a director of CVF, Knowles worked alongside another CVF operative known only as Gaia, but who turned out to be a UK-based property investor named Ann Marchini who helped finance the project, as well as the EDL.
On the speaker’s list for the Brussels meeting were David and Gisele Littman, a husband and wife team who had been deployed in Morocco by the Mossad during the 1960s to spearhead a plot codenamed Operation Mural, in which agents absconded Jewish children from their families in Morocco, and took them to “Israel” to become settler colonists. Gisele later gained a reputation as an anti-Muslim propagandist under the pen name, Bat Ye’or. She is best known for popularizing the concept of Eurabia, a term intended to suggest that Arabs/Muslims were taking over Europe.
Also on hand for the 2007 CVF’s “Counterjihad” event was Aryeh Eldad, then a member of Israel’s Knesset. A fanatical West Bank settler, Eldad was a disciple of the openly fascist Rabbi Meir Kahane, and helped found the so-called Jewish Power party, of which Israel’s current Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, is now the leader. Kahanism is an ideological thread that connects the so-called “Counterjihad” movement to Israel’s contemporary leadership.
After the Counterjihad meeting in Brussels, the CVF turned its attention to encouraging the emergence of a Counterjihad grouping in the UK. This was to become the English Defense League, or EDL.
Marchini was present along with Knowles at the inaugural EDL meeting, where Robinson was appointed as leader. Also on hand was the fanatically pro-Israel Alan Ayling, an evangelical Christian, who also helped bankroll the EDL, and in whose flat the meeting was convened. Overseeing operations was Christine Brim, an American who was running the CVF.
At the time, Brim served as Senior Vice President of the Center for Security Policy, a Washington DC-based neoconservative think tank run at the time by Frank Gaffney, which formed a core element of the Islamophobia network in the US.
Gaffney’s CSP was bankrolled by a network of conservative and pro-Israel foundations. In 2009, the year the EDL was established, the CSP received funds from the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Fund ,which has also doled out cash to the top neoconservative think tank in the UK, the Henry Jackson Society, as well as the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. CSP has even received money from AIPAC.
Upon founding the EDL, the American interlopers continued to effectively run the organization from abroad. Knowles, according to researcher Tash Shifrin of Unite Against Fascism, ran the EDL’s “media operation and is central to its links with European and US far-right groups.” Knowles also ran the CVF website and associated projects, such as the Counterjihad Europa website, at the same time.
In other words, Zionist-funded US think tanks financed and ran key elements of the European “Counterjihad” movement, including the English Defense League. This illustrates how the fostering of the Counterjihad movement was part of a Zionist attempt to transform the far right, to co-opt it to advance the objectives of Greater Israel, and to redirect the resentment of British workers against migrants, whether native born or from the Muslim nations bearing the brunt of the Western “war on terror.”
Early attempts were made to recruit the Front National in France and the British National Party to the Zionist cause. But as the CVF said in 2007, these efforts failed because such parties needed to “specifically state pro-Israel positions, and take real actions opposing anti-semitism and disavowing previous positions.”
The emergence of the counterjihad movement was a significant opportunity for the Israel lobby to pressure EU societies from below with apparently autonomous street armies raising the pressure against Muslims. The agenda was spelled out succinctly by Douglas Murray, the ultra-Zionist British commentator, who called for making life “harder across the board” for Muslims. With this historic break in British right-wing organizing, far-right organizations adopted staunchly Zionist, Islamophobic programs, while replacing Judeophobia with Judeophilia.
The CVF eventually rebranded as the International Civil Liberties Alliance, then spun itself off into an outfit called the International Free Press Society (IFPS). Brim and Ned May of the CVF were principals in IFPS. The new organization also featured a roll call of Zionist Islamophobes including Bat Ye’or, Rachel Ehrenfeld, Brigitte Gabriel, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, and Geert Wilders.
Before he earned notoriety as the founder of the neoconservative news outlet, Rebel Media, a Canadian Zionist named Ezra Levant signed on to the IFPS.
The EDL and JDL join forces, united by ultra-Zionist ideology
While Tommy Robinson claims to have founded the EDL in 2009 to supposedly “stop the rise of radical Islam,” the organization’s true origin story is more complex, and filled with sordid connections to the most extreme appendages of the Zionist movement.
In December 2010, the leader of the UK branch of the Jewish Defence League registered a company called English Defence League Limited.
The original Jewish Defense League was designated as a terrorist group by the FBI in the US after it presided over a campaign of bombings and other attacks in the US in the 1980s, including at least three murders, such as that of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee’s Western Regional Director Alex Odeh.
The director of the company, Roberta Moore, is a follower of Meir Kahane, the fascist rabbi and former FBI informant who founded the original JDL before his assassination in 1990. Moore is a former Israeli occupation soldier, and was photographed on a visit to occupied Palestine, toting a weapon in a JDL t-shirt. 
Asked by the Israeli paper Haaretz if the Zionists in the EDL were not being exploited by the far right, Moore replied, “They think the League is exploiting us, while it is really we who initiated the Jewish Division. If anything, we are exploiting them.”
After three years, Moore changed the name of her company to the Jewish Defense League UK Limited. Moore served as the head of the so-called Jewish Division of the EDL, until her involvement proved too embarrassing. This was after she was involved, along with Paul Ray, in announcing a partnership with the Jewish Task Force, another US Kahanist group whose leader, Victor Vancier, was a convicted JDL terrorist who carried out 18 firebombing attacks during his heyday.
The association with terrorist elements proved too much for some members of the EDL. A rival corporate form for the EDL was created by Robinson’s personal assistant Helen Gower in June 2011 with the name “(EDL) English Defence League Limited.” Gower was reportedly involved in personality clashes with Moore and was denounced as an anti-semite by some after she called on the EDL to expel Moore. But the Zionist connection was not a matter of contention. After a month the name of the rival EDL registered at Companies house was changed to the “English and Jewish Defence League (EDL) Limited.”
Moore was eased out as head of the Jewish Division of the EDL and replaced by James Cohen, an activist with the Canadian branch of the IFPS, run by Christine Brim. At first, Cohen proposed to run the Jewish Division remotely from Canada. His appointment emphasizes the influence which the CSP/ICLA/IFPS grouping exercised over the internal affairs of the EDL.
Unsurprisingly, an array of connections exist between the EDL and the state of Israel.
Meir Kahane’s driver chauffeurs the EDL
A prominent early supporter and regular speaker for the Tommy Robinson-led EDL was the so-called “Surfing Rabbi,” Nachum Shifren. Shifren was prone to blood curdling diatribes about the threat from Islam.
In October 2010 the rabbi addressed an EDL rally outside the Israeli embassy. Among other things, he referred to Muslims as eating “each other alive, like the dogs that they are…”
“We shall prevail, we will not let them take over our countries,” Shifren intoned. “We will never surrender to the sword of Islam“
Shifren had once worked as the driver for Meir Kahane in the US. He was also an adherent of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect. Chabad is a sort of evangelical ultra-Orthodox Jewish group which is closely associated with the most messianic elements of Israel’s settler movement.
So close was the bond between Tommy Robinson’s EDL and the Israeli right that the BBC reported in 2011 that the League began receiving propaganda material on “Islam” from Israel. One of the “brains of the EDL”, based in Nottingham, showed BBC Newsnight the new intel he claimed to have received from “his researcher in Israel.” This was a delivery of “quotes from the Qur’an,” he said. According to the EDL operative, it was “everything that’s warmongering about Islam, and how jihad is the main goal for any Muslim”.
The BBC reveals intelligence on the Qur’an sent to the EDL from Israel. 1 February 2011.
NEW SECTION
The EDL folded in 2013 after a series of bizarre meetings between Robinson and leaders of the British state-created Muslim think tank, Quilliam, which purported to specialize in “de-radicalization.” Suddenly renouncing his years of anti-Muslim agitation and pledging to assist police investigations into the EDL, Robinson claimed to be a changed man. But his turning over a new leaf was soon revealed as another grift, as Robinson revealed he was paid 2000 pounds a month to credit Quilliam with his deprogramming.
Within a year, Robinson had reinvented himself as a journalist with no shortage of support from Counterjihad-connected think tanks and their millionaire financial backers. Lucy Brown, a former colleague of Robinson’s, told the British media his new act as an investigative reporter was just another fundraising ploy. “I used to think, foolishly, that when he went home he was doing his research and putting case files together,” Brown said. “He doesn’t, he just goes home and eats crisps and looks himself up on Twitter.”
In 2016, a London-based online Zionist fanatic known as “Brian of London” (real name: Brian Thomas) took Robinson on his first trip to Israel-occupied territories. In the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, Robinson donned an IDF t-shirt and posed with an Israeli service weapon atop a Merkava tank.
A year later, the tech billionaire and Likudnik sugar daddy Robert Shilman began to lavish Robinson with funding. Shillman is a hardline Zionist who sits on the board of the Friends of the IDF, which raises money from wealthy Westerners for the Israeli army, and is a top funder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, named for the American neoconservative propagandist.
While raking in funding from the Horowitz Freedom Center, Robinson was appointed a “Shillman fellow” at the Canadian based right-wing outlet, Rebel News. Ezra Levant, the chief executive at Rebel News and former IFPS member, said the fellowship covered Robinson’s salary at the outlet.
According to later disclosures by one of his assistants, Robinson was initially paid as much as £8,000 a month, and £100,000 over the course of a year. His three assistants were reportedly paid up to £2,500 a month each, totalling £90,000 a year.
At around the same time he found a benefactor in the ultra-Zionist money man Robert Shillman, Robinson linked up with Daniel Pipes, the rabidly anti-Muslim academic who runs the Philadelphia-based think tank, Middle East Forum. Pipes was so impressed with Robinson, his group shelled out $60,000 to defend him against new criminal charges stemming from his illegal recording of Muslims on trial for sexual assault.
Another key backer of Robinson was one of the most prolific funders of the transnational anti-Muslim movement, Nina Rosenwald. A self described “ardent Zionist,” Rosenwald is a major financial supporter of Pipes’ Middle East Forum and of the Gatestone Institute, which has published a raft of online editorials supporting Robinson.
Today, Robinson maintains a close and mutually beneficial relationship with Rebel News, the ultra-Zionist Canadian outlet, which launched a campaign to supposedly pay for Robinson’s legal fees after he was arrested on his way to a Rebel-sponsored event in Alberta this June.
Later, on August 6 of this year, Robinson granted an interview to Rebel News correspondent Avi Yemeni, a right-wing Zionist personality who previously spent three years as a uniformed soldier of the Israeli army’s Golani Brigade.
Pushing the riot button in the UK
Despite having disbanded the English Defense League, Robinson saw a new opportunity for sowing chaos after the Hamas-led attack on Israeli military bases and kibbutzim on October 7, 2023. It was on that day that he called for a new EDL, asking his followers “which city shall we hit?” and proclaiming, “We are coming back with a bang!” He posted his rant on Twitter/X through his media venture, Urban Scoop, because he was still suspended from the platform at this point.
Robinson’s Twitter account was restored on November 6, 2023, just days before Twitter/X owner Elon Musk made his highly publicized visit to Israel, where Netanyahu hosted him for a tour of atrocities in a southern kibbutz which turned out to have been staged. By mid November, Robinson was posting videos on social media boosting the key Israeli talking point that “Hamas are ISIS.”
Throughout the summer of 2024, Robinson helped orchestrate some of the largest far-right demos in five years, culminating with a July 27, 2024 rally in London which brought several thousand to Trafalgar Square – far less than the 100,000 claimed by Robinson. As he barked warnings about dispatching “an army of patriots to Manchester/Rochdale,” the site of a videotaped tussle between police and Muslim men, it was clear the chaos agent was spoiling for action.
Finally, on July 29, the spark Robinson had been seeking arrived. But it was not exactly as he and his supporters hoped it would be, as the perpetrator of a lethal triple stabbing attack on young girls at a Taylor Swift dance class in the town of Southport 20 miles north of Liverpool, turned out to be a native Briton from a family of Christian African immigrants.
Robinson was among those who helped magnify misinformation claiming the perpetrator was a Muslim migrant, triggering violent clashes between far-right hooligans and police, as well as an attack on a mosque and attempts to burn down hotels housing migrants.
Over the coming days, as the riots spread across the country, Robinson was seen sunning himself at a 4 star hotel in Cyprus, where he had fled to avoid contempt of court hearings in a criminal libel case.
From his luxury hotel, Robinson made it clear that Palestine was at the root of his current resentments: “Why are people angry? I’ll tell you why they’re angry. Cos’ Hamas were allowed to overtake London. Over take our capital city. Every week flying ISIS flags, Hamas flags. Calling for Jihad. The police did nothing. Nothing. Instead they arrested me.“
In a separate statement at this time, he called for the government to “ban Islam” and warned that Hamas was coming to town: “What we have witnessed since October 7 is the trailer of the movie. The movie ain’t even started yet.”
In an interview with Israel’s Channel 13 on August 4, Robinson again emphasized his support for Israel, and Israel’s inextricable tie to the movement he led in the UK: “Nobody believes the media. If Israel loses, they will come for Europe.”
As rioters around the country chanted Robinson’s name, it became clear that his leadership was kindling the flames of chaos. And behind him stood a vast, heavily financed lobbying apparatus rallying around the flag of Greater Israel.
Original article: The Grayzone
