Maajid Nawaz, a Muslim counter-extremist and founder of left-wing think tank Quilliam, slandered Rebel Media’s Tommy Robinson calling him an ‘extremist’.
Nawaz’s employee, Julia Ebner slandered Tommy Robinson and called him a white supremacist in an article in The Guardian.
Julia Ebner is a senior researcher at Quilliam International.
Via The Guardian, Ebner called Robinson a “white supremacist”:
The British far-right landscape is increasingly splintered and leaderless. But low membership numbers of street protest movements such as the EDL and Pegida UK are hardly comforting. Some of their former cohort have joined smaller, more militant groups while others have focused their efforts on spreading hate online. Increasingly, far-right movements show signs of collective learning and create powerful multiplier effects for their messages. As early adopters of new technology, they have been exceptionally good at using social media to widen their echo chambers and foster ties with like-minded groups abroad.
British “counter-jihadis” have stepped up their cooperation with American alt-righters, French and Austrian “identitarians” and even German and Polish neo-Nazis. This is the paradox of modern-day nationalists: they capitalise on the opportunities of globalisation to spread their anti-globalist views globally.
It is within this context that EDL founder turned Pegida UK leader Tommy Robinson features prominently on Alex Jones’s conspiracy theory show, Infowars, and receives support from American alt-right leaders Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller. Platforms such as Gates of Vienna, the FrontPage Mag and Jihad Watch provide outlets for all of them.
That the far right has moved from the fringe into the mainstream demonstrates the massive support that white supremacist movements have attracted from digital natives. Their online followership often exceeds that of mainstream political parties: with over 200,000 followers, Tommy Robinson’s Twitter account has almost the same number of followers as Theresa May’s.
The following tweets and videos explore the controversy, which exploded all over Twitter today. You can read Quilliam’s response to Tommy Robinson approaching them in person about the libelous article here.
Maajid tweeted this out early this morning:
BREAKING: Extremist Tommy Robinson raided @QuilliamOrg office &intimidated staff. Police escorted him off (new link) https://t.co/IdUDIu0omb
— Maajid (@MaajidNawaz) May 2, 2017
With this exchange following:
.@QuilliamOrg Basically @QuilliamOrg staff member wrote something that hurt Tommy Robinson’s feelings.He storms our office uninvited. Good call, snowflake
— Maajid (@MaajidNawaz) May 2, 2017
@MaajidNawaz @QuilliamOrg No your staff member wrote blatant lies with an agenda to slander me pic.twitter.com/E3aHeLMmbg
— Tommy Robinson (@TRobinsonNewEra) May 2, 2017
After the early back and forth, the entire situation grew into a beast with Maajid ending up on the wrong side of the story making indefensible and salacious claims:
@MaajidNawaz @TRobinsonNewEra @Pen_Revolver @QuilliamOrg Oops! Yesterday’s Guardian article by your researcher says it. https://t.co/Jdi9hdApWw I think you need to apologise to @TRobinsonNewEra 😜 pic.twitter.com/XKNEeguDGA
— Slevdi (@slevdi) May 2, 2017
@MaajidNawaz @QuilliamOrg pic.twitter.com/Hj5b7UvZMn
— Tommy Robinson (@TRobinsonNewEra) May 2, 2017
Can u please retract your false press statement about us storming your office & intimidating & bullying @MaajidNawaz https://t.co/TLfrNyOlYG
— Tommy Robinson (@TRobinsonNewEra) May 2, 2017
https://t.co/TLfrNyOlYG video proves Adam to be a liar https://t.co/6IBtmDbDpX
— Tommy Robinson (@TRobinsonNewEra) May 2, 2017
How pathetic is their statement when you watch the reality https://t.co/TLfrNyOlYG &read what their employee wrote about me in the @guardian https://t.co/hgafJFMDDk
— Tommy Robinson (@TRobinsonNewEra) May 2, 2017
You have been exposed @MaajidNawaz slandering those with genuine fears as white supremacists through your employees research pic.twitter.com/QUzuh5dRcJ
— Tommy Robinson (@TRobinsonNewEra) May 2, 2017
You can watch Tommy’s video in full here: