The most powerful weapon in the progressive armoury is the destruction of reputation that leads to the cancellation of anyone who threatens them.
So it is, with some hesitation that I write about Tommy Robinson.
You will have been trained to despise him as a far -right football hooligan thug. But it is propaganda of the most dangerous and destructive sort. That is not to say that Tommy Robinson has more or fewer virtues than anyone else from his background. Only to say that he has been demonised beyond what any human being could be expected to bear and survive with reputation or sanity intact.
I’m still coming to terms with the level of propaganda that has affected me in my life, after this point. Not propaganda directed against me, but directed against the Church that Jesus founded, and that gave our country and culture the best parts of the foundation our society has flourished on.
Only as I re-read the history of the 16th century, do I discover how many distortions of truth I have been fed with, in order to justify the state rejection of Catholicism. I’m astonished at the success of the propaganda inside my head.
And if I ever seem to my critics over-energetically enthused to take the struggle back to the Anglican establishment, that so illegitimately presents itself as the natural successor to the Catholic Church, it is in response to the depth of the lies told by the establishment, and the cost in blood and suffering of Catholics who loved Jesus, and especially loved him in the mass.
What is the bottom line here?
What do I most want to present you with?
It is the reclaiming of Christendom in the face of a powerful two-pronged assault against Christ and his Church, by an alliance between progressive secularists and Islam.
As I write these words, I wince, already knowing that this opens me up to the charge of being bigoted and phobic. But the facts are on my side. Or rather I am on the side of the facts.
Islam does not behave generously to either Christians or secular westerners. We don’t have to quote journalists in Mosul describing Isis’ implanting Shariah law, but it might help the waverers if we do. And it offers some protection against the inevitable accusations of phobia. For example this uncontested news report from a few a years ago”
“ISIS has released images that appear to show gay men being hurled off buildings and then stoned to death, part of the militants’ self-professed mission to crack down on “sexual deviance.”
The horrific execution tactic is the latest in a string of brutal punishment methods applied by ISIS under its strict interpretation of Islamic — or shariah — law, from crucifying Christians to stoning alleged adulterers to flogging young men for drinking.” https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-uncovered/isis-hurls-gay-men-buildings-stones-them-analysts-n305171.
If the “Gays for Palestine” only remotely understood the cause they have given their support to, they would not sleep at night.
43% of Muslims living in Britain admit or acknowledge they want to live under Sharia law. So when international forces that we find it difficult to identify, with the complicit support of our Government, whom we can identity but not easily hold to account, open the floodgates to legal and illegal Muslim immigration without the consent of their people, what do we do? What are our options? Are we allowed to prefer Christian culture to Islamic culture?
For years, I have tried to manage the painful and easily misunderstood conversations that are provoked by this, saying wholly truthfully, that the best solution is the evangelisation of our Muslim neighbours. It is.
And we are encouraged by the stream of apocryphal news that Jesus appears to Muslims in their dreams across the world; or the less apocryphal testimony by the woman herself, born in Pakistan, Nikki Kingsley, who encountered our Lady in St Patrick’s Cathedral New York after she had fled to the West. (see; Beyond the Burka: A Muslim Women’s Journey to Jesus w/Nikki Kingsley | E239 Lila Rose Show https://youtube.com/shorts/2sxBG8jtbFs?si=Fq_6GvzJojwT5ofe ), but the scale of the conversions needed does not begin to match the numbers of Muslims rushing to the west.
It is true however, that only the renewal of Christianity in the West can save it from either collapsing into anarchy and decadence under the weight of secular materialism, or being drawn into the suffocating and persecuting embrace of Sharia law.
This weekend, Tommy Robinson has brought together somewhere between three million (the organisers’ figure) or 100,000 (the police figure) people into central London to protest against both.
Friends have been sending me astonishing videos of the Lord’s prayer being said at the heart of the event from the central stage in Trafalgar Square. I’m being told of speaker after speaker invoked the name of Christ.
I was asked to speak last time, and I refused. It still wasn’t clear to me that this was going to be a Christian movement rather than a secular political protest. Seven or eight years ago, I received a message from some intermediaries that Tommy Robinson wanted to meet me privately in London hotel. He was due for a visit to the Royal Courts of Justice, and he want to be to stand next to him in a cassock in solidarity on the steps of the Royal Courts of Justice. This is what Banksy currently thinks of British justice.
I told him that until he became a Christian, I could not stand alongside him for two reasons. The first was that he had suffered, such intense toxification at the hands of the establishment that no one could stand next to him and survive the public opprobrium that would inevitably be poured upon them, at which point I would be of no use to him.
But more importantly, I was convinced that no political solution could do anything but lead us deeper and further into cultural conflict, and that only a movement founded on the renewal of our relationship with Christ could be acceptable or effective.
I asked him if I could explain to him why becoming of Christian was so important for him an individual, and why it would matter to him personally? I tried to persuade him of his need for Jesus, and to explain why Jesus was the answer to the cultural and political crisis.
He allowed me to lay hands on him and pray for him, and I left with some hope. A short time later, a friend sent me a private video released to his supporters, mocking our conversation, and explaining how an Anglican bishop had tried to convert him and how he had resisted him.
A great deal has happened since. Perhaps the two most significant events were his interview with Jordan Peterson, and his time as a political prisoner in solitary confinement at the hands of our government.
Only somebody with the reputation and reach of Jordan Peterson could have begun the process of detoxification that would allow people to listen to Tommy Robinson’s words without a filter applied by progressive propaganda.
Slowly, but surely, other commentators allowed him onto their platform and the process of hearing him clearly began to develop and become possible. A couple of weeks ago, he appeared on Trigonometry, and has almost reached the mainstream.
At the same time, he was seen, leaving prison, clutching a rosary, and it is beginning to seem entirely possible, that people may have been able to earn his trust and explain how important Christ is to what he is trying to do, and the legitimate claims of the Catholic Church on his heart and mind.
It matters enormously, therefore that Jesus has been at the centre of the events in London today, and that speaker after speaker has called on the name of Christ in the public sphere.
The professor of war studies at Kings College, London, David Betz has been speaking in Hungary in the last few days, about the imminence of civil war in Great Britain. We are not far off a similar situation to the powder keg that erupted when a single assassin fired a bullet in Sarajevo in 1914, and as the dominoes fell, a great conflagration broke out in the form of the first world war.
What is the conclusion of this article?
There is none more than to say that we have reached a point of precipitate civil instability, and we desperately need the leaders of the church to speak into the situation, and to clarify our need for a renewal of the Christian faith and more specifically the Catholic Church.
I became a Catholic in part, because I believe that only the Catholic Church has the authority, resources, charity and spiritual power to achieve the healing and conversion of a society at this time of profound crisis.
And so I write as I do as a Catholic, hoping and praying that my words can play any part at all in the process of renewing, strengthening and clarifying the purpose of the church at this charged moment of history.