Elon Musk calls for release of Tommy Robinson: Who is he?

It would appear that Elon Musk has taken on a new cause to start off the year, demanding the release of Tommy Robinson. On New Year’s Day he reposted a message on X which said that Robinson has been “smeared as a ‘far-right racist’ for exposing the mass betrayal of English girls by the state.” That was followed by another post which included a documentary by the self-described citizen journalist and yet another that simply said, “Free Tommy Robinson.”

Robinson is currently serving an 18-month prison sentence in the United Kingdom after admitting contempt of court by repeating false claims against a Syrian refugee. He lost a libel suit in 2021 in which he was ordered to pay £100,000 to Jamal Hijazi, who Robinson alleged was a violent thug in a viral video. That October 2018 video led to the youth and his family receiving death threats.

Who is Tommy Robinson?

The far-right British political activist, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is the founder of the English Defence League (EDL), an anti-immigrant, anti-Islam group formed in 2009. He is a controversial figure for his inflammatory remarks and actions. He has been accused of spreading misinformation that helped incite riots in the UK after the Southport stabbing incident which left three children dead.

Robison is currently in jail for breaching a UK court order preventing him from repeating the accusations against Hijazi 10 times in a manner that was not “accidental, negligent or merely reckless,” according to the sentencing judge. In his ruling he found that the threshold for incarceration had been “amply crossed.”

“All his actions suggest that he regards himself as being above the law… Nobody is above the law,” the judge added.

The original incident that led to the libel charges against Robinson took place in 2018 when he shared a video of then 15-year-old Hijazi, a refugee from Syria, being attacked by another teenager at his school in Huddersfield, northern England. The far-right activist made false allegations at the time that Hijazi attacked English girls in a number of social media videos, which he later deleted.

He was banned from Facebook and Instagram in 2019 for “repeatedly” breaking the social media platforms standards by “posting material that uses dehumanizing language and calls for violence targeted at Muslims,” Facebook said in a statement. He was also permanently banned by Twitter. However, Musk reinstated his account and other banned accounts after he bought the social media platform which he renamed X.

Part of Robinson’s breaching the UK court order was his release of a film called ‘Silenced’, in 2023, which he has pinned to the top of his account page. In it he claims that he has been muzzled by the state and that the establishment media manipulate stories to cause the public to follow a certain narrative.

He also breach the court order when he showed the “banned documentary,” which was made with funding from former owner and host of InfoWars, Alex Jones, at a demonstration in Trafalgar Square in July.

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