There's a lot a man with a sense of mission can accomplish by overcoming his fear of getting punched in the face.
In this case, the mission is penetrating the nihilistic fog that is preventing a nation from perceiving, let alone confronting, an existential threat. The man is Tommy Robinson, and the face has already been punched on various occasions.
Tommy Robinson is a British activist and co-founder, former spokesman, and leader of the English Defence League (EDL). He also founded the European Defence League, and for a short time in 2012 was joint party vice-chairman of the British Freedom Party. In 2015 he became involved with the development of Pegida UK, a British chapter of the German-based Pegida organization, whose stated aim is to counter the "Islamisation of our countries".
He is a journalist for The Rebel Media and the author of an autobiography, Enemy of the State, and Mohammed's Koran: Why Muslims Kill For Islam, coauthored by Peter McLoughlin.
Despite being accused of antisemitism, Robinson has declared his support for the Jewish people and Israel, calling himself a Zionist.
At the end of April, Robinson went to an Oxford courthouse to confront group of Muslims accused of grooming and raping 12-year-old girls. Were this not a war, the profanity in the video would probably justify not airing it here:
The two met in a heated 20-minute clash on ITV’s Good Morning Britain program, the day after the Finsbury Park terror attack in which a white man killed one Muslim and injured several more.
At one point, Mr. Robinson held up a copy of the Quran, calling it a “violent and cursed book”, quoting Liberal Prime Minister Sir. William Gladstone – “of whom we have statues across our capital city” – who once said: “So long as there is this book, there will be no peace in the world.”
Robinson waving the book on screen seemed to frighten Morgan, who repeatedly shouted over the Good Morning Britain guest to tell him to stop disrespecting the Quran. He said: “put that book down a minute. Show some damn respect for people’s religious beliefs, right? Just put it down. Put it down!”
Mr. Morgan told him: “You’re sounding like a bigoted lunatic. You’re stirring up hatred.”
“What you’re doing now is deliberately inflammatory. You’re stirring up hatred. You are abusing people’s religion. You are abusing their faith.” With his actions, Mr. Morgan was accused online of enforcing an informal “blasphemy code”.
Mr. Robinson later tweeted: “I was called a ‘bigoted lunatic’ by [Piers Morgan] for repeating our greatest… PMs Gladstone and Churchill views on Islam. Let that sink in.”
In a chat with Jonny Gould, the founder of the English Defence League said Morgan had become scared by him in the interview.
He said: "What I found is how scared Piers and everyone in the studio got because I picked up the Quran.
“I wasn’t disrespecting it, I was picking it up and quoting it. That’s when the panic came in from them.
"That’s what I say Islamophobia is – they are fearful of a reaction."
Douglas Murray is a British author, journalist, and political commentator. He is the founder of the Centre for Social Cohesion and is currently the associate director of the Henry Jackson Society and associate editor of The Spectator. The description of the following video of him brilliantly analyzing Robinson's effect says his "speciality is in intelligently pointing out the blindingly obvious to all the bone-headed careerists within politics, academia, and the media. If nothing else the inability of the established classes to deal with this issue has revealed how incapable and unremarkable they are."
Tommy Robinson was barred from giving this speech by the University of York students' union. It's about his experiences in what he calls "the British police state".
He describes growing up on the streets of Luton, a town plagued by Islamic extremism and criminal gangs and how his livelihood was taken from him when he led a street protest against it.
Hounded through the courts and thrown to the Muslim underworld "which runs England's prisons", Tommy refused to be broken when the police tried to blackmail him – into working for them: