The post you are reporting:
Courtesy of the Times.
After Tommy Robinson was released from prison this week, his cheerleader Raheem Kassam was interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme. Martha Kearney raised Robinson’s violent criminal record, his insidious “warning”, as English Defence League leader, to all Muslims after terrorist attacks. With facts and tough questions, Kearney sought to unpick the persona of “citizen journalist” Honest Tommy. Yet many have argued that the BBC should not host Kassam at all. To interview him or Robinson or Steve Bannon, with whom both are working to build a trans-European far-right movement, is to legitimise hatred, normalise fascism and draw Islamophobia into the mainstream.
It would be great never to see again the veneered smile of Robinson: the girlfriend-beating football thug and mortgage fraudster, too thick or arrogant to grasp contempt laws understood by any free-sheet trainee, who risked derailing complex trials and denying alleged rape victims justice. Cast him out to the nutty fringes, no-platform and ignore him, keep his views off our airwaves, cut the publicity oxygen pipe and hope he chokes. Except I don’t think we have this choice. Such volatile times. Reason, like the ocean before a tsunami, has been sucked out of public discourse and we await a destructive wave. Trump’s wisest words, that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still not lose votes, now applies at both ends of the spectrum. Jeremy Corbyn could deny the Holocaust live on Press TV, and some acolytes would claim he’d been taken out of context or was a victim of Zionist distortion and still post Moonie-esqe Twitter memes under #WeAreCorbyn.
Likewise Robinson’s supporters do not care about his crimes, that their diamond geezer hero is really called Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and ran a sunbed shop. He could throttle an imam on Luton high street and his YouTube hits — already between 400,000 and a million views per video — would only soar, his martyr myth burn brighter. This is a cunning media operator. Watch Robinson’s return-from-prison video as he talks wet-eyed about his traumatised kids, then opens a door so they rush sobbing into his arms. Daddy’s home! A perfect reality TV “reveal”. Or the shaky camera livestream outside Leeds crown court as he berates defendants, ending in his noble arrest. “You’ve all watched this!” he cries to his viewer. It is intimate, conspiratorial and amateurish, which implies an authenticity lacked by dishonest professional journalists.