Jane Clare Jones blog on Tommy Robinson

[CassieMaddox]

Just a really great read
https://janeclarejones.com/2024/07/28/tommy-robinson-far-right-populism-and-gender-criticism/

These are my favourite bits:

The greatest danger to women and girls has always been, and remains, the men inside their own houses. This is the nature, and the devastation, of endemic male sexual violence. It usually happens in the place, and with the people, who are supposed to be most safe. It would perhaps be comforting to imagine that we could easily identify the men who are dangerous – the Muslims, the brown ones, the ones in dresses – and then we could keep ourselves safe by keeping them out. But the argument materialist feminists made throughout the early years of the gender wars applies equally here: men are a statistical danger to women as a class and there is prima facie no way of working out which ones are dangerous and which ones are not.

The argument is no longer ‘guilt by association’ or ‘purity politics,’ it is now a) What even is the far right anyway?, b) The far right doesn’t mean anything because I was called far right for knowing men aren’t women, c) You people think anyone who disagrees with you is far right, and d) He is not far right anyway. That is, it has moved from claiming that association with the far right is either not happening or if it is happening has no impact on the substance of GC discourse, to people openly associating with the far right and recycling far right talking points while denying that the far right is the far right.

But what feminist women have tried, largely unsuccessfully, to get across, is that these kinds of men are not on ‘your side,’ if ‘your side’ is genuinely defending women’s rights. These men are on their side, and their side wants a largely white patriarchal nation, in which ‘their’ women know their place and are ‘protected’ only insofar as ‘protection’ means keeping them guarded from ‘other’ men.

The pictures at the end of the article are very illuminating too.

Brava JCJ 👏

Maybe this is where my feminism is too simplistic then.
I can think of a list as long as my arm of horrific crimes men have done to their families. I see them as mens crimes, not worse when they've been done by an asylum seekers.

I see the root cause of the Abedi case as being a willingness across society to tolerate and explain away male violence - "he didn't mean it, he was provoked, he's changed, he was such a loving family man, he just snapped" on and on ad nauseum. I don't think "fear of racism" or "putting asylum seekers rights first" is anything to do with it. It's patriarchy, pure and simple.

1/4 of the Global population are muslim. Making a generalisation about "Muslim regimes" is pointless and probably quite offensive to a lot of Muslims.

It's like me making a generalisation about Christians based on the worst behaviours of Catholic priests.

I don't think that was what she was saying at all, so (at least) one of us must have misunderstood, which indicates that her meaning was not clear and she is hard to understand.

She doesn't mention anything about 'far right activists who want to protect "their women" from "other men"'.

However, because much of the gender critical case concerned preserving single-sex space – that is, keeping men out – it always bore a certain structural resemblance to the type of sovereignty-thinking that, as we saw above, animates far-right populism. Indeed, as I explored in ‘Why Feminists are Not Nazis,’ a paper I gave at the University of Reading in 2019, that structural resemblance is precisely the basis on which TRAs always claimed that the gender critical position was fascist adjacent.

All she's saying is that some people have equated women wanting to keep men out of their spaces with people who want to keep foreigners out of their country, which leads to the far right/ fascist slur.

(I haven't read her linked paper so I may be wrong, but if so, that just reinforces the claim that she's not easy to understand.)

Yes.

Well I've read the blog twice now and am underwhelmed I must say.
Tommy Robinson is not a star of the GC movement.
You've noticed 'far right' talking points on this board! Pass the smelling salts. You mistake your own prejudices for the truth.

To quote Michael Freeden 'All political statements are ideological, yet every ideology attempts to present certain ideas as outside reasonable contest.'

As far as I'm concerned consider and question everything.

I was interested in another article by JCJ

Here are some quotes
Unreasonable Ideas - A reply to Alison Phipps by Jane Clare Jones

"Yesterday Kathleen suggested that, rather than making endless dark subtweets about what an evil toxic force we are, Alison Phipps actually tried talking to us like human beings and engage in debate about the ideas at the heart of this conflict."

"a great deal of what Phipps - and many like her- are devoting their energy to here is casting us beyond the moral pale by analogical guilt-by-association."

"Firstly, because the claim of a perfect overlap between 'privileged white women who are racist' and 'privileged white women who think sex exists' is rhetorically produced and empirically spurious."

"My basic point here is that, converse to the usual historical mechanisms of othering [1], the trope Phipps is deploying here hangs on placing us beyond the discursive pale by using a Tumblrised intersectional 'Oppression Olympics'-style matrix [2], one which positions us, and our ideas, as an artefact of privilege and power, and which then allows her to write off anything we say as an instance of morally egregious harmful dominance without actually having to bother engaging with the substance of what we're saying."

"We're all familiar with these formulations- 'you're Nazis,' 'you're Christian fundamentalists,' 'you're the same people who supported Section 28' etc. etc"

"What it is, rather, I'd suggest, is a moral claim - a claim that we and our ideas are so morally delinquent that we can, and should, be excluded from the community of legitimate speaking subjects."

Genuine question - why do you have to agree with him at all? Just because you may hold a similar position on somethings doesn't mean you have to state any sort of agreement.

From the blog:
In the mind of patriarchal nationalists [like Tommy Robinson], the border marks the difference between women who belong to the men of the nation – ‘our women’ – and the women who belong to the foreigner – ‘their women.’ The crime committed by the ‘foreign’ man who rapes white British women or girls is not that he has committed a profound human rights violation against a female human being. It is that he has illegitimately helped himself to our women, who are there to be used by us, not them^^

Thank you for answering

Ah, you don't care about the treatment of muslim women by muslim men in the UK? Not your concern? Is it because they are 'brown'?

You don't care about the Uk muslim girls forced into marriages, not allowed to work, no access to finances, sexually abused by husbands with no escape, not allowed to divorce, application of sharia law, etc?

Why don't you care about those women in the UK?

You also don't seem to care about the mass rape of working class girls across the UK by muslim gangs.

You can care about everything you listed and care about the imapct of muslim men on women in the UK. They are nt mutaully exlusive. Yet you leave the expereince of Uk muslim women off your list.

I think youare preapred to ignore the plight of these women becuase of your fear that even talking about it might be racist. Which in reality means you are prapered to sacrifice 'brown' women (using JCJs language) and vulnerable white girls maintain your 'good' self identity.
I'm not sure how you manage the dissonance though tbh.

"Do you think TR is far right?

Depends what you mean by far right 😂

I think he's a racist thug and if he has left the country, all I can say is 'good riddance"

Most people would think people who have founded and been members of parties that have explicitly called themselves far right would be pretty easy to categorise. But not on here or course 🙃

Well you don't have to but if you find you are discusiing it it's an accurate summary to use.

And it's easier to say that than writing a 4000 word essay.

Or obsessing over whether it means you are a bad person now.

Nice strawmanning well done 👏

That would be like me saying you "don't care" about any of the things I've listed because you are fixated on Muslim men.

It's really really not.

Could you tell us what you don't agree with TR about then?

It's not simplistic to attribute this to being "men's crimes". This was clearly a crime committed by a man. But it is a crime committed by a man who shouldn't and needn't have been in the UK at all if the powers that be had acted in the best interests of the women and children who were born and raised here or, in the case of the woman and children who were attacked, have been granted permission to remain here.

The point at which this man was granted asylum he already had been convicted TWICE of sexual assault. We are obliged to take responsibility for our own degenerate men and deal with them accordingly but I cannot for the life of me work out why we should be under an obligation to take responsibility for men from other countries where the attitude towards women, is often far far worse than it is here.

Nope, it wouldn't.

Beacuse I didn't write a list of all the things I cared about and then things I didn't.
You did.

I care about the things you listed and I think that feminists should be concerned about the tretament of women by men in muslim culture in the UK.

You might not understand Jcj @AlisonDonut but I do. And you might prefer 4 word sentences over more complicated sentences but I don’t. And that says more about you than you might realise

But what feminist women have tried, largely unsuccessfully, to get across, is that these kinds of men are not on ‘your side,’ if ‘your side’ is genuinely defending women’s rights. These men are on their side, and their side wants a largely white patriarchal nation, in which ‘their’ women know their place and are ‘protected’ only insofar as ‘protection’ means keeping them guarded from ‘other’ men.

Thank god for JCJ, without the insightful commentary of such a powerful intellect I could accidentally find myself inviting Tommy Robinson for tea cos I thought he was a nice young man.

Why the fuck are socialist feminists giving the man oxygen?

Nice try. I said Islamist not muslim.

I'm trying to think of any country that is ruled by Catholic Priests.

🙄

@CassieMaddox Cassie, I always vow not to engage with you as I find it deeply frustrating but I can't let this one pass:

@Signalbox said:
I’m wondering which of them would argue that women living under islamist regimes aren’t treated poorly.
You respond:
Making a generalisation about "Muslim regimes" is pointless and probably quite offensive to a lot of Muslims.

'Islamist' does NOT mean the same as 'Muslim'. It doesn't even mean the same as 'Islamic'.
'Islamist' is Hezbollah, or Iran, or the blokes who shot up Charlie Hebdo. 'Muslim' can include 'Islamist' but it also includes all Muslims, including the moderate ones.

If you're going to put things in quote marks, it's really advisable to make sure that you are actually quoting. It also helps a lot to check out definitions. Words have to have meanings, otherwise there is no point trying to talk to anyone.

My position
Ideas exist beyond the person who originated them. They're often linked and built on other people's ideas. An idea should be judged only on its own merits.

Also a book is not responsible for the person who wrote it. It should be judged for itself. Same for all art.

That is how healthy cultures develop.

She says quite clearly:

In the subsequent two years, there has been a massive proliferation of far-right talking points circulating in the GC space, and a good deal of open support for far-right figures. It is not uncommon now to get into a conflictual exchange with someone over some contentious aspect of the pushback against trans ideology (voting for Labour, repealing the GRA, using wrong sex pronouns, making common cause with far right actors) and to then check their TL and find it full of tirades against the degeneracy of the left, cultural Marxism, critical theory and the ‘woke mind virus,’ anti-Muslim propaganda, covid conspiracy theory, and the most extreme and salacious formulations of concerns about the impacts of the trans rights/alphabet people project

I agree with her. We've started seeing some of that on this thread.

Why do you need my personal views on TR??

I don't know that much about TRs views tbh.

From what I do know:

I probably agree with him on gender ideology.
I agree there needs to be urgent review of immigration policy. (I don't know excatly what he wants, I may/ may not agree)

If he hates black people. I disagree.
If he wants women to be men's property. I disgaree.

How about you?

Thank you EdithStourton It's so tiresome being so badly misrepresented.