MULTI-LAYERED cover-ups, political prisoners, show trials and emerging truths have suddenly and humiliatingly put Britain in the international spotlight. We are repeating what France experienced in the 12-year Dreyfus Affair.
Tommy Robinson is a key protagonist. Establishment cruelty directed at Robinson can be compared to that suffered by Alfred Dreyfus. And Robinson’s highlighting of a national scandal has parallels to the conviction of the author, journalist and playwright Emile Zola for his exposé, J’Accuse.
After Zola’s devastating open letter to the President in 1898 – accusing the government of anti-Semitism and the unlawful jailing of Dreyfus – France became split between the ‘Dreyfusards’ who wanted him free and the ‘Anti-Dreyfusards’ who wanted him to continue to rot on Devil’s Island, where he had been since 1895.
In Britain, we are at a similar juncture. The truth is out globally. Elon Musk has made sure of that.
Even the Arab world is watching, having been warning us for years that Islamism is exploiting our ignorance and ‘political correctness’. The United Arab Emirates proscribed the Muslim Association of Britainas terrorist in 2015, and just days ago the UAE proscribed many other Islamic groups and individuals in Britain.
Britain has become a notorious hub for Islamism.
The country is split in several ways, not least between those who want to preserve the ideology and strategy of multiculturalism and those of us who see the progressive Islamification of Britain as the undoing of our Judeo-Christian values and traditions.
As in France 130 years ago, we see in Britain incompetence and corruption in the establishment: church, judiciary, mainstream media, government, parliament, and the two-tier Metropolitan Police (whose duplicity we might compare to that of the French Army during the Dreyfus Affair).
· Highly publicised miscarriages of justice, including in recent months exemplary show trials of ordinary citizens condemned to long prison sentences for social-media messages.
· Our nation split between those who protest that Tommy Robinson is a political prisoner and those unbothered about the vindictive punishment he is suffering.
· Extraordinary measures to cover up evil, including a three-line whip on Labour MPs to prevent a national investigation targeted at Pakistani gangs who have for decades been perpetrating child gang rape, child torture, and even, it has recently come to public knowledge, child murder.
· Anti-Semitic mass rallies as weekly occurrences in British cities since the day after October 7, 2023, well supported by the British Islamists and the extreme left. (The main organisers of these rallies have been the Muslim Association of Britain, the Socialist Worker Party and Jeremy Corbyn’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign.)
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Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a successful artillery officer and the only Jew in the Army’s High Command. He was convicted of treason in 1894 for allegedly passing secrets to Germany. Anti-Semitism was resurging in France, and the establishment, army, church, judiciary and media went all out to make a public spectacle of Dreyfus’s treachery. Before a large and baying crowd chanting ‘Death to Jews’, Dreyfus was stripped of his badges of rank, and his sword was ceremonially broken.
The death sentence for ‘political crimes’ had been abolished in France in 1848, and so Dreyfus was sentenced to life imprisonment, in solitary confinement, 2,500 miles away in the notorious penal colony of Devil’s Island, off French Guiana. The conditions of his incarceration in a cell with no daylight were extraordinarily cruel. His guards were forbidden to speak to him. He was manacled to his bed at night. Malnourishment resulted in the loss of his teeth and an inability to speak. However, he sustained the will to live, in the hope that his wife and family back in Paris would prove his innocence.
In 1895, Colonel Georges Picquart was appointed chief of military intelligence. A year later, it became obvious to Picquart that information was still being leaked to Germany. Picquart discovered that the spy selling secrets to Germany was not Dreyfus, but intelligence officer Major Ferdinand Esterhazy. Furthermore, Esterhazy, dissolute, in debt and anti-Semitic, had forged the evidence to convict Dreyfus. When Picquart presented this information to his superiors, he was ordered to conceal it. Picquart nevertheless continued his investigation, even when relieved of his position as head of intelligence and posted to Tunisia.
The army, with the support of the civil judiciary, accused Picquart of forging the evidence to implicate Esterhazy! France’s overwhelming priority was to conceal the truth by not reopening the Dreyfus case.
Shortly after the condemnation of Picquart, Emile Zola became acquainted with the facts, helped by Dreyfus’s family in Paris, and by Esterhazy’s creditors.
J’Accuse explained to France, and ultimately the world, that Esterhazy, not Dreyfus, was guilty. Now the troubles began for Zola who, on his lawyer’s advice, fled to England during the trial for which he was convicted of ‘criminal libel’.
In 1899, the French government, fearing an international boycott of the 1900 Paris Exposition, shipped Dreyfus back to Paris for retrial. Queen Victoria, referring to ‘the poor martyr Dreyfus’, sent her Lord Chief Justice, Lord Russell, as observer. Eventually, after many twists and turns, Dreyfus became fully free in 1906, exonerated by military commission and promoted to the rank of major. Only now were the years of cover-ups fully exposed.
There were many political ramifications for France, including the rise of the anti-establishment left. The church in France had been a driver of anti-Semitism before and during the Dreyfus Affair. This resulted in 1905 in a permanent separation of church and state.
Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian-Jewish journalist, had witnessed the anti-Semitic mobs in Paris in 1894, leading him to believe that Jewish attempts at assimilation were futile. He saw the need for a Jewish homeland, and founded the Zionist movement.
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Today in Paris, as in London, anti-Semites have returned to the streets en masse, insisting that Islamist genocide is ‘resistance’, and Israel’s resistance to genocide is ‘genocide’.
The UK has found its scapegoat in Benjamin Netanyahu, apparently the international criminal par excellence. As I wrote here in November for the Times of Israel, the incoming Trump administration has threatened to ‘crush’ the UK economy if Sir Keir Starmer follows through with his promise to the International Criminal Court to arrest the Israeli PM.
What’s next for Britain? We are yet to know the truth behind the stabbing of children in Southport in July. We are merely days past Musk’s astounding intervention, and days away from the beginning of Trump’s presidency.
Starmer’s 2024 manifesto was titled Change. Of that we can be sure.
