ENEMY OF THE STATE

ENEMY OF THE STATE by Tommy Robinson

Review by Dale Brown

Take a tour of the world of Tommy Robinson, former leader of the English Defence League, who grew up in Luton a fairly large town north of London, England. He will give you an up close and personal view of British society evolving before your very eyes. He grew up with a Catholic mum and decent stepfather playing with kids of every ethnic group under the sun but sometime during his teens he began to experience the pressure from the Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims. A rough and tumble kid who rallied with the British football clubs he soon discovered that conflict with Muslim gangs is quite different than that of competing ball teams. Even if your closest friends were black you were labeled a racist if you spoke anything critical of Islam and the police were quick to nail you with any crime they could dream up in order to keep the peace.

For an American this can be a challenging book to read for it is full of Tommyisms and British slang but if you want to walk in his shoes to get the full picture you have to get past the “f---ing wankers” and other brash terms. Tommy, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley, took on the nickname partially to protect his family from being targeted by Muslim thugs who had a reputation for torching cars and beating the tar out of anyone that shined a spotlight on their “peaceful” religion.

He admits many times that he was not the perfect example of a gentleman, husband or father, but when you are leading a movement that seemed to spring up out of nowhere he had to keep ahead of the game and sometimes getting nicked and spending time in jail was part of his experience. The coppers turned his world upside down for his public protests against the grooming gangs that were raping and poisoning the daughters of the locals with drugs. His working class friends rapidly drew a large following through social media because many other communities were experiencing the same things in there towns all around England.

He quickly became disillusioned with the church which always pointed him to the Lord's prayer and the message of forgiveness when he or others he knew were being beating or raped by the local Muslims. The bible message obviously is bigger than simply turning the other cheek. David certainly did not turn the other cheek in his confrontation with Goliath. But the police knew that he and his friends were more easily contained that the Muslims so they were always the first ones thrown in jail, and these were jails that often housed Muslims who were more than happy to thump on a white boy who had been calling their prophet a child molester. When the EDL crowd began to challenge the coppers with the fact that they were caving into Muslim sharia law it became a somewhat embarrassing bit for them to face. In the midst of all the attention the EDL was constantly having to distance themselves from white supremacist and neo-Nazis groups that were giving them a bad name.

Their protests soon got the attention of the media and Tommy was to learn how corrupt many of the newspapers were. His first experience was with the left-wing Guardian and he found he was on a sharp learning curve as to whose who in the zoo. He found that the upper crust Oxford and Cambridge educated reporters lived in a fantasy world and reporting on the world of the English Defence League was like flying to another planet. Often the twisted media would expose themselves in their stupidity and the EDL eventually began to learn how to nail them through social media. When more experienced and sophisticated critics of Islam, such as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, from America began spotlighting the EDL a new fire was ignited abroad. And 9/11 got the world's attention. The way the EDL was being targeted by an obviously corrupt police force in Britain was an eye-opener for us in America. It looked too close to what we recall of Nazi Germany. Freedom of speech in America is quite a different thing than what Tommy and the lads were experiencing in England. Then a surprising thing happened. Tommy was invited to speak in the U.S. When he arrived in New York he was promptly turned around by the authorities and sent back to the UK because he had been labeled a trouble maker and a danger to society. So he got the same treatment that Geller and Spencer had gotten when they were refused entry to England. True “enemies of the state” because their words are more powerful than guns.

In 2013 the murder of Lee Rigby by a Muslim in broad daylight was a shocking ordeal but the EDL found it to be a flash in the pan as far as its long term concern. Through the school of hard knocks they discovered that the so-called Moderate Muslims who tried to befriend them were mostly a joke for there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim, there is the Qur’an and the Prophet, plain and simple. Those that play the moderate thing for the liberal media are most often considered apostates by the true defenders of the faith and you are best to keep your distance or they will soon try blowing smoke up your pants leg.

Tommy's time in several different prisons where he lost some of his teeth gives him firsthand insight on the radicalizing of inmates. In some you convert or pay the jizya protection tax. It's sharia all the way, complete with halal meat.

He can clearly be seen maturing toward the end of the book in many ways but he is none the less hated. As I began reading his book I saw in the news that he had been whacked over the head outside a club and had ended up in the hospital. He had recently predicted in several interviews that he did not expect to become immune to death threats simply because he is no longer leader of the EDL. Even when he was given police protection he claimed they nearly always had an agenda.

“Enemy of the State” should be a wake up call to every society that is opening its doors to the world of Islam. You will be sorry. 

July 2019 more jail time