Yesterday’s Nazi, today’s ‘anti-extremist’: UK far-right leader Tommy Robinson gets a makeover

The leader of the Muslim-hating, neo-Nazi English Defence League, Tommy Robinson, and his deputy Kevin Carroll renounced racism this week. They are leaving the EDL and joining the anti-extremist Quilliam Foundation.

But why now, and what is the Quilliam Foundation? And have they really changed? 

Economic depressions are fertile ground for fascism. In the mid-1930s Lord Rothermere's Daily Mail and Lord Reith's pro-Hitler BBC lent credibility to Jew-hating Nazi blackshirts as they marched through London's East End. Opposing them on the streets were the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement hunger marchers and crowds of decent Londoners let down by a Conservative government that was appeasing Hitler. 

As the Red Cross in 2013 once more begins distributing food to hungry Britons Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is facing criminal charges for obstructing police officers at his own English Defence League demonstration. This took place in the aftermath of May's horrific Woolwich alleged murder of serving soldier Lee Rigby. Was it during negotiations with the police over how these charges would proceed that Tommy was persuaded to jump ship?

The EDL portrays itself as a grassroots community association, but it would not exist without financial backing from two wealthy individuals who, like Robinson, use pseudonyms to hide their true identity. 

Millionaire landlady Ann Marchini owns and controls a buy-to-let property empire in Highgate, North London. Said also to prefer pseudonyms, she was a founding member of the abortive far right British Freedom Party and a close friend of its wealthy chairman, former UK Independence Party candidate Paul Weston.

The other important EDL funder is “sugardaddy” Alan Ayling, former director of the Pacific Capital investment fund. Under the pseudonym Alan Lake, he penned the ominously-named “EDL Final Solution,” which advocates front organizations and illegal activities to undermine Muslims and their representatives. 

At this week's news conference, Robinson expressed shock and surprise that “Nazis” were appearing at his racist demonstrations, but was his astonishment real? And how real is this Quilliam Foundation that Robinson is moving to? 

An examination of its longtime spokesman and co-founder, Mohamed Husain, reveals a dubious CV that failed to slow his dazzling career rise through the world of privatized transatlantic foreign policy. Now calling himself Ed Husain, he says he was once a member of pan-Islamic political organization Hizb Ut-Tahrir, a claim they strongly deny. 

What is known is that Husain landed a job working for the UK Foreign Office-funded British Council in Saudi Arabia. Ed also opposes boycotting Israeli goods, saying that: "Many people condemn Israeli settlements and call for an economic boycott of their produce, but I saw that it was Arab builders, plumbers, taxi drivers and other workers who maintained Israeli lifestyles."

In other words, because some Palestinians are being paid as odd-job men for Israelis they can't really want a boycott - a blatant distortion of Palestinian aspirations, remarkably in tune with Zionism and the Global Crusader Movement.

As top Quilliam Foundation spokesman, Husain had made it. In the blink of an eye he became an international news commentator. Appearing on CNN, Fox, NPR, BBC and Al-Jazeera, he was published in the New York Times, Financial Times, Guardian, National Review and Jewish Chronicle, to name just a few. 

Quilliam and Husain became the go-to propagandists for the broadsheets and TV news across Western world for an anti-Islamist Muslim perspective. As a result, the far more accurately representative Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) or the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (MINAB) were sidelined.

How Kafkaesque. Indeed, as one of the world's leading independent experts on postmodernism Ravi Zacharius points out, we are living in an age of unbridled mass media where truth, meaning and certainty are systematically undermined. At Quilliam, Husain has shown us how, and now he's been headhunted and his career is really motoring, he's a senior fellow at the big guns of the US Council on Foreign Relations. 

In the 21st Century there are literally hundreds of think tanks like Quilliam, most funded by funny money from tax exempt “philanthropic” foundations and lobby groups connected to the national private clubs that lay down modern Western foreign policy. It is here where the establishment lays both its colonial plans and its contingencies to muzzle the backlash at home.

In the UK, the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA), or Chatham House, based in London's St James' Square, is funded by big business and, obligingly, does the Foreign Office's thinking for it. It creates a business-led, BBC- and crusader-friendly, foundation-funded consensus that the Foreign Office rarely has the courage to question. 

Husain’s new outfit, the Council on Foreign Relations, has for 90 years made sure US business interests come first at the State Department. Indeed it was the CFR's War and Peace Studies group that in 1943 first suggested a transatlantic elite policy group that emerged a decade later as the notorious Bilderberg Group, founded by a former SS officer.

The sumptuous slush funds circulating around these private policy hubs of Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations fund so much professional-looking globalist policy “chaff” that any genuine expert sentiment or overtures to détente are consistently drowned out.

Postmodern think tanks like Quilliam deconstruct and repackage the legitimate voices, in this case from Britain's Islamic community. They decide what Muslims ought to have said and, pretending to be Muslims, say it for them for the world to hear.

Zionism and the Global Crusader Movement see the world in these terms. Through their influence in finance and the mass media they steal, synthesize and repackage views that oppose their War on Terror throughout the NATO-zone mainstream media, systematically skewing and dumbing down the entire national and international debate.

Gone from the discussion is the right of occupied nations to self-defense and respect for the global rule of law. Gone too are the stunning similarities, pointed out in 2008 by former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, between genuine Sharia law and Britain's own, all-but-forgotten, Canon law, which is still in force.

The EDL’s Robinson and Carroll have merely been nudged upstage from one front organization (that would have no credibility, but for the platform given it by the mainstream media) to another. Robinson has merely gone from overt racist to covert racist; from black propaganda to gray propaganda. 

As in the 1930s, the far right, both in its street thug and more respectable forms, is only a hair's breadth from the British establishment. Hanging in Winston Churchill's old country home dining room in Kent you'll find one of his own paintings, “Tea at Chartwell” which he modeled on a contemporary photograph. 

Sitting round the table with the man who was later to become Britain's wartime prime minister is a frequent visitor to Churchill's country home, Diana Mitford. Mitford was soon to marry blackshirt-in-chief Sir Oswald Mosley on a visit to the German home of Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels. Guest of honor at that happy occasion was none other than Adolf Hitler himself.

So Robinson has gone from street fighting thug to globetrotting propagandist in a day. As this puppet of Britain's crooked establishment is reinvented for the London media, he should find those criminal obstruction charges from his last race riot will be conveniently dropped. We shall see.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.