The Jerusalem Post has just given Britain’s most notorious far-right grifter a platform, adding to the one already gifted to him by Elon Musk. In an interview published on Thursday, Tommy Robinson — convicted fraudster, prominent racist, virulent Islamophobe, pro-Putin demagogue — is posing again as Israel’s champion. It’s a typically grotesque spectacle: a white-supremacist conman who has spent years vilifying Muslims as a “civilisational threat” using Israel’s ongoing genocide as a backdrop to depict himself and Israel as the real victims.

Maybe the JP could continue its tribute to Tommy – or Stephen Yaxley-Lennon to use his real name – by running his notorious 2022 essay, The Jewish Question, published on his 'Urban Scoop' site in which he recycled the neo-Nazi Great Replacement conspiracy theory, the ideological glue of the modern far right. According to this fever dream, Jews are orchestrating Muslim and non-white migration to the West to “replace” whites — inspiring the slogan chanted at the infamous white supremacist Charlottesville rally in 2017: “Jews will not replace us.”

This is Robinson’s grotesque two-step. For Israel, he performs as a philosemite, laundered through Netanyahu’s hasbara machine, given sanction to parrot his customary script depicting Muslims as terrorists, in exchange for lauding Israel as civilisation’s frontline. Back home, he is a white-supremacist pamphleteer with Wi-Fi, channelling the Daily Stormer and painting Jews as global puppet-masters. Jews are heroes when bombing Gaza, villains when imagined as Hollywood “globalists.” The only constant: Muslims — and anyone non-white — are always the enemy.

Robinson is hardly alone, of course. Netanyahu’s Israel is now the far-right’s favourite fig-leaf. Trump and his administration, Holland’s Geert Wilders, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the AfD in Germany, and sundry far-right pundits including Katie Hopkins and Douglas Murray— all loudly proclaim their solidarity with Israel to launder their own hatreds. This enables them to smear Muslims as terrorists while insisting they can’t possibly be Nazis because they “support Jews.” Israel, however insanely far-right it goes, is their get-out-of-fascism-free card.

Meanwhile, these far-right figures' less house-trained cousins — David Duke, Nick Griffin, Mark Collett, Jim Dowson, Tucker Carlson — play the other side, feigning ‘support’ for Palestine and outrage at Israel’s genocide, with a solidarity as counterfeit as Robinson’s philosemitism. In reality, they hate Muslims and non-white people every bit as much as they hate Jews. Israel is his figleaf, Palestine is theirs.

The common denominator between all the above is Putin: all roads lead to Moscow. Whether veiling themselves in Israeli flags, union jacks, or Palestinian keffiyehs, the far right’s lodestar is Vladimir Putin. For years, both ‘brands’ of fascism also hailed Assad — until Syrians toppled him. Putin, a geopolitical chess grandmaster, plays both sides effortlessly: allied with Netanyahu, propping up Assad, courting Iran, inspiring MAGA. He is the authoritarian lynchpin, the MAGA partner still hailed as an ‘anti-imperialist’ by Western Tankies (though fewer than before) so blinded by reflexive contrarianism they’ll cheer a fascist strongman as resistance.

And all of this monstrous theatre plays out while Israel continues with genocide and ethnic cleansing in real time. Palestinians in Gaza are being killed, starved, and expelled. Regional nations — Syria, Lebanon, even Qatar — are being bombed. The violence is accelerating, yet world powers look on, paralysed or complicit, all agreeing that it’s definitely genocide while treating that as if it were merely another trending hashtag.

This is the far-right’s real project: to weaponise Israel and Palestine alike as just more props in their culture war while the peoples of the Middle East are treated as expendable. Israel is “useful” to Robinson and Hopkins because its Islamophobia gives them cover. Palestine is “useful” to Duke and Griffin because it lets them masquerade as moral crusaders for freedom and justice. And Putin is essential to them all, the global conductor of this grotesque choir.

The Jerusalem Post may think publishing Tommy Robinson makes him a friend of Jews. In reality, it makes Israel complicit in laundering the propaganda of a white-supremacist Islamophobe who calls Jews puppet-masters while cheering their killers. Robinson is, in fact, a fitting envoy for Trump, Netanyahu and Putin: another ethno-supremacist genocide-denier serving war criminals in the Kremlin and the Knesset, dressing up his bigotry as morality and wrapping it all in a Union Jack.

By Ruth Riegler

Photo: Tommy Robinson addresses a rally in Parliament Square, London on June 1, 2024