Lies, Damned Lies and Tommy Robinson

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Twitter erupted last night with the enraged tears of the far right as high profile hater convicted fraudster Stephen Yaxley-Lennon was relocated from his current incarceration in Hull to a jail in the Midlands.

Although initial leaked info suggested Tommy had been moved to Leicester jail, the current (as yet unconfirmed) belief is that he is is Onley jail.

Moving prisoners is a normal part of prison life. Over 1500 prisoners a week are relocated within the system.   This can be for a number of reasons, including:

  • Their security category has changed
  • So that they can serve the final weeks of their sentence in a prison nearer their home
  • The prisoner’s sentence plan requires them to complete a course which is not available at the prison they are in
  • They are behaving in a disruptive way
  • Category A prisoners are routinely moved from time to time for security reasons
  • For their own safety if they are being bullied
  • If their main visitor has a medical problem making visits impossible.

Source Offenders Family Helpline

Notable in its absence from the above list is the suggestion that the Home Office moveIslamophobic prisoners to high Muslim population jails in the hope that this will result in the death of the prisoner. Yet this is precisely the conclusion that the far right jumped to when the news of Tommy’s relocation broke yesterday.

The idiocy started with Caolin Robertson who confirms he is in regular contact with Robinson. Robertson took the news to American far right fake news site Infowars who posted this video interviewing Caolin discussing Tommy’s plight.

This was then followed up with this tweet from Caolin:

And then Alex Jones gets going on Twitter:

Note the volume of retweets Jones gets. Within a short period the nonsense is all over the internet.

And then Raheem Kassam jumps on the bandwagon:

Raheem pushes the idea that Tommy is at risk because he is in a prison with a high Muslim population. To give Raheem some credit he didn’t fall for the entirely made up and spurious ‘71% Muslim’ statistic that has no basis in fact whatsoever. The Mirror checked and there is not a single prison in the UK with a Muslim population this high.

It then transpired that the stats flying around were actually based on Tommy’s own immediate perception of his new wing. As to how he could tell at a glance that 70% of his wing were Muslim I’m going to attribute to the sheer racist belief that he assumes everyone with brown skin is a Muslim. Plenty of evidence to support my accusation of Robinson’s racism on Resisting Hate.

The old saying about lies winging their way around the world before the truth has even got its shoes on is never more pertinent than when it comes to fake news. Predictably none of the far right bothered to sense check or fact check the rubbish Jones and Robertson had fed them. They didn’t check why prisoners are moved. They didn’t check the stats for Muslim populations. They didn’t stop to question the narrative.

These are the actual religious population stats for the prison Tommy has been relocated to:

And this is what happens when fake news takes off:

And unbelievably the far right wonder why we call them thick!

Roanna Carleton Taylor

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4 Comments

  • Just because you are the Extreme far left doesnt mean you can class us as far right, we are middle of the road, or thats what we were called 5 yrs ago but through your silly classifications you now name us far right. Middle of the road is still a long way forward from where you guys are at present.

    • There is nothing middle of the road about irrational hatred of a community. Tommy Robinson is far right, Anne Marie Waters is far right. Raheem Kassam is far right.

      • The people you have mentioned are against the ideologies of orthodox Sunni and Shia Islam, the doctrines and immutable laws of which are something like Nazism with a god in respect of non-Muslims, namely aggressive, genocidal, oppressive ideology and political force that is a true example of “irrational hatred of a community”. Tommy, Anne Marie and Raheem have all said they are opposed to hatred being directed toward the “Muslim community”; to be aware of this while continuing to assert otherwise is disingenuous and setting up a ‘straw man’. Not all calling themselves Muslim are of a single view. Nor is hatred against people necessary to oppose an ideology.

        Sunni Shafi’i manual of jurisprudence “Reliance Of The Traveller” (translated from the original Arabic by an American Muslim) shows the self-perpetuating nature of sharia-law, and the mandatory nature of caliphate and offensive jihad in traditional Islamic doctrine. Certificates of authenticity attest the English translation from the governments of Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia; al-Azhar University has certified that “this translation corresponds to the Arabic original and conforms to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community” (the English translation omits the chapter on slavery and mistranslates original details of f.g.m*). The introduction states, “The four Sunni schools of Islamic law, Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali, are identical in approximately 75 percent of their legal conclusions, while the remaining questions, variances within a single family of explainers of the Holy Koran and prophetic sunna, are traceable to methodological differences in understanding or authentication of the primary textual evidence, differing viewpoints sometimes reflected in even a single school”.

        While some development is possible within sharia-law, not every kind of change would be acceptable — for example, the change must not be contrary to the basic teachings and objectives in Islam. Under Islamic law, injunctions laid down in the Qur’an and the Sunnah (Muhammad’s way of life, as transmitted in traditional reports of his words, actions and approvals) cannot be changed by any human agency. Note also what is written on “scholarly consensus”, b7.0 – b7.4: briefly “When the four necessary integrals of consensus exist {see manual for definition}, the ruling agreed upon is an authoritative part of [sharia-law] that is obligatory to obey and not lawful to disobey. Nor can [jurists] of a succeeding era make the thing an object of new [independent reasoning], because the ruling on it, verified by scholarly consensus, is an absolute legal ruling which does not admit of being contravened or annulled.” Though Islamic law makes allowances for circumstances, the only way to ‘change’ such rulings found in mainstream orthodox Islam as the mandate for caliphate, offensive jihad, and pressing forward for world domination under Islamic law, is to leave Islam or to become a Muslim who rejects the binding nature of these laws (the law equates both with apostasy*).

        Unfortunately, online .pdfs that have been retyped from Reliance of the Traveller omit important sections; but if you can get a copy of the whole book, you can check the points below…

        See o25.0 – o25.6 on caliphate and its obligatory nature; here is a brief excerpt: “The investiture of someone from the Islamic Community (Umma) able to fulfill the duties of the caliphate is obligatory by scholarly consensus, though scholars differ as to whether its obligatory character is established through reason or through Revealed Law.”

        From o9.0 – o10.3 on jihad (war against non-Muslims): “Jihad is a communal obligation. When enough people perform it to successfully accomplish it, it is no longer obligatory upon others”; “If none of those concerned perform jihad, and it does not happen at all, then everyone who is aware that it is obligatory is guilty of sin, if there was a possibility of having performed it. In the time of the Prophet … jihad was a communal obligation after his emigration (hijra) to Medina. As for subsequent times, there are two possible states in respect to non-Muslims. The first is when they are in their own countries, in which case {offensive} jihad is a communal obligation … upon the Muslims each year. The second state is when non-Muslims invade a Muslim country or near to one, in which case jihad is personally obligatory upon the inhabitants of that country, who must repel the non-Muslims with whatever they can”; “The caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians (provided he has first invited them to enter Islam in faith and practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)) … until they become Muslim or else pay the [jizya] … The caliph fights all other peoples until they become Muslim (according to the Hanafi school, peoples of all other religions … are permitted to live under the protection of the Islamic state if they either become Muslim or agree to pay the poll tax, the sole exceptions to which are apostates from Islam and idol worshippers who are Arabs, neither of whom has any choice but becoming Muslim …)”; “Whoever enters Islam before being captured may not be killed or his property confiscated, or his young children taken captive. When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled” (plus w37.1, 2nd para.: “whom their right hands own” refers to their slaves; the Arabic chapter on slavery has not been translated*); “Interests that justify making a truce are such things as Muslim weakness because of lack of numbers or materiel, or the hope of an enemy becoming Muslim … If the Muslims are weak, a truce may be made for ten years if necessary … It is not permissible to stipulate longer than that, save by means of new truces, each of which does not exceed ten years.” Jihad al-talab (offensive jihad) is the sharia-law-based imperative to subjugate the world: http://www.meforum.org/2767/offensive-jihad.

        See o11.0 – o11.11 on non-Muslim subjects of an Islamic state.

        There are other sections of interest to non-Muslims (e.g p1.0 – p1.3 (on “shirk”); p17.0 – p17.3 (on homosexuality); w4.0 – w4.7 (on religious supersession, unbelievers, finality of Islam: for example, “Previously revealed religions were valid in their own eras … but were abrogated by the universal message of Islam … {I}t is unbelief (kufr) to hold that the remnant cults now bearing the names of formerly valid religions, such as ‘Christianity’ or ‘Judaism,’ are acceptable to Allah Most High after He has sent the final Messenger … to the entire world … This is a matter over which there is no disagreement among Islamic scholars, and if English-speaking Muslims at times discuss it as if there were some question about it, the only reason can be that no one has yet offered them a translation of a scholarly Koranic exegesis (tafsir) to explain the accord between the various Koranic verses, and their agreement with the sunna”; “The Prophet … said: ‘By Him in whose hand is the soul of Muhammad, any person of this Community, any Jew, or any Christian who hears of me and dies without believing in what I have been sent with will be an inhabitant of hell.’ This is a rigorously authenticated (sahih) hadith”); and others.

        *For chapter on slavery, see https://mdharrismd.com/2015/03/03/translation-of-the-manual-of-islamic-sacred-law/. Re f.g.m, Arabic-reader Mark Durie has stated that e4.3 should read “Circumcision is obligatory (for every male and female) by cutting off the piece of skin on the glans of the penis of the male, but circumcision of the female is by cutting out the clitoris”; David Wood has produced an informative video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qle_4qiH4tU. Recently the High Religious Committee of Morocco abolished Morocco’s death penalty for apostasy by arguing that previous punishment for apostasy was politically “meant for the traitor of the group, the one disclosing secrets … the equivalent of treason in international law”: this is not so much a change in the apostasy law as a redefinition of its previous meaning in law: https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2017/02/207505/moroccos-high-religious-committee-says-apostates-should-not-be-killed/

  • Nothing you wrote changes the fact that he was moved to a prison where he is less secure. He was put in solitary confinement for his own safety. He was also unable to carry out videoconference with his lawyers. The authorities might not want to kill him, but they obviously want to intimidate him, maybe to affect his appeal process. He is definitely treated more severely than other offenders.

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