Will Brits have Tommy Robinson's back?

Bruce Bawer writes in support of Tommy Robinson in FrontPage Magazine.

It was middle- and upper-class Brits who decided to import armies of Muslims into Britain; but it’s mostly working-class Brits who have had to live daily with the results of that decision. Britain’s middle and upper classes aren’t accustomed to caring what their social inferiors think, and the members of Britain’s working class aren’t in the habit of noisily protesting their own circumstances.

It’s instructive to compare Tommy’s circumstances to those of the brave and estimable Douglas Murray, the closest thing Tommy has to a middle-class counterpart. Would Amazon stop selling Douglas Murray’s Islam book, The Strange Death of Europe, which is a worldwide bestseller? Would he be picked up unceremoniously on the street, thrown in a paddy wagon, driven to a courtroom, put through a highly irregular trial without benefit of his own counsel, and then thrown in jail?

No. Not yet, anyway. There’s virtually no light between Tommy’s and Douglas’s views of Islam. But that’s not what matters. What matters is that they come from opposite sides of the tracks. Douglas went to Eton and Oxford; he writes for respectable journals and has a great many friends in high places; and even though he and Tommy are pretty much on the same page when it comes to Islam, the Oxford grad and the Luton lad use very different language to say the same thing. In Britain, this sort of superficial difference matters a lot more than it does in the US. So it is that if Douglas were subjected to what Tommy’s been subjected to, scores of MPs, journalists, Oxbridge dons, and major cultural figures like Stephen Fry and Rowan Atkinson would be sputtering in outrage. By contrast, the reaction from these quarters to Tommy’s mistreatment has been silence.

...Tommy is the voice of all of those who are standing up against, or who are struggling to work up the nerve to stand up against, this surrender – all those who don’t want their children and grandchildren to live as dhimmis, in a caliphate, under sharia law. It seems to me that for a great many of those who can’t bring themselves to stand shoulder to shoulder with Tommy, the problem is not cowardice, exactly, but something having to do with manners and image, with deeply inculcated ideas about propriety and good form and knowing one’s place. One can only wish that those who have not yet decided to capitulate to the Religion of Peace should stop worrying so much about keeping a stiff upper lip and instead grow a spine, find their voices, and have this guy’s back. Now. For soon it’ll be too late.

Read more here.