Far-Right Anti-Islam Activist Cultivates Russia Ties

US media is report­ing on the attempts by far-right fig­ure Tom­my Robin­son to cul­ti­vate rela­tion­ships with Rus­sia. Accord­ing to a New York Times report, Robin­son may be seek­ing new sources of sup­port in the post-Trump era:

April 23, 2021 Now that Mr. Trump is out of office and the Amer­i­can mon­ey is appar­ent­ly dry­ing up, Mr. Robin­son and some oth­er far-right fig­ures are turn­ing to Moscow. Mr. Robin­son, who is fight­ing a poten­tial­ly cost­ly libel case in Lon­don this week, did a media tour of Rus­sia last year but three asso­ciates told The New York Times that part of his agen­da was kept secret — to seek accounts with Russ­ian banks.“Why else would you vis­it Rus­sia?” said Andrew Edge, a for­mer senior fig­ure in the Eng­lish Defence League and anoth­er far-right group, Britain First, who said that he dis­cussed mov­ing mon­ey to Russ­ian banks with Mr. Robin­son and Britain First’s leader, Paul Gold­ing. In many ways, Mr. Robin­son is now use­ful to the Krem­lin — which has often encour­aged fringe polit­i­cal fig­ures who might desta­bi­lize West­ern democ­ra­cies — for the same rea­sons he was wel­come in Mr. Trump’s Wash­ing­ton. He preached an angry nar­ra­tive of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion in decline, of a soci­ety ruled by shad­owy elites and of the per­sis­tent threat of Mus­lims to the West­ern world — nev­er mind that he was an agent of chaos in Britain, a key Amer­i­can ally.

Read the rest here.

Accord­ing to a well-researched Wikipedia bio:

Stephen Christo­pher Yax­ley-Lennon (born 27 Novem­ber 1982), bet­ter known as Tom­my Robin­son, is a British far-right and anti-Islam activist. He is the co-founder and for­mer leader of the Eng­lish Defence League,[and lat­er served as a polit­i­cal advi­sor to for­mer UKIP leader Ger­ard Bat­ten. Robin­son has been active in far-right pol­i­tics for many years. He was a mem­ber of the neo-fas­cist and white nation­al­ist British Nation­al Par­ty (BNP) from 2004 to 2005.For a short time in 2012, he was joint vice-chair­man of the British Free­dom Par­ty (BFP). Robin­son led the EDL from 2009 until 8 Octo­ber 2013. He con­tin­ued as an activist, and in 2015 became involved with the devel­op­ment of Pegi­da UK, a now defunct British chap­ter of the Ger­man-based far-right organ­i­sa­tion Pegi­da. From 2017 to 2018, Robin­son wrote for and appeared in online videos for Rebel News, a Cana­di­an far-right polit­i­cal web­site. Robin­son’s crim­i­nal record includes con­vic­tions for vio­lence, finan­cial and immi­gra­tion frauds, drug pos­ses­sion and pub­lic order offences. He has been com­mit­ted to prison for con­tempt of court.

Reads the rest here.