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Millions of Americans have exhibited this year a seemingly boundless appetite for things that call to mind the greatness of Britain. We have voted with our feet to make successes of movies about the plucky extraction of 300,000 soldiers stranded at Dunkirk and the indomitable man who, in his country’s darkest hour, rallied the nation to effect that miracle with a fleet of small boats. We have also breathlessly followed the marriage of one of us to one of the Royals in a ceremony whose pomp and circumstance harkened back to the days of their kingdom’s most fabled monarchs.

Sadly, it seems the Great Britain of those earlier, storied eras is no longer great or, for that matter, particularly British. A prime example is the fact that a man whose plucky pugnaciousness and love of freedom and country is reminiscent of the scappy Brits who helped Winston Churchill win the Battle of Britain and his nation’s civilization bestride the world has been thrown in jail for thirteen months. His “crime”? Simply reporting on a trial that showcases how far the United Kingdom has fallen.

Tommy Robinson is a courageous freedom fighter who has long warned about and struggled against the once-creeping, now-galloping Islamization of Britain. He has been repeatedly punished by the authorities for doing so. His resulting, periodic run-ins with Sharia-supremacists, their leftist enablers and even the police have been used as pretexts for silencing him.

The most egregious example occurred last week when Tommy did a Facebook Live stand-up outside of the court in which members of a so-called “grooming gang” were being tried. That euphemism obscures the heinous nature of this widespread crime: the effective enslavement and serial rape of large numbers of non-Muslim women and girls by predominantly South Asian immigrant men.

Such dishonest deflection fits a larger pattern. Usually, the authorities have known about these criminal enterprises and done nothing to stop them (see for example, here). The media is either restricted from reporting on these cases or voluntarily does so, giving a pass to the perpetrators and the malfeasance of the relevant political and law enforcement leadership.

Instead, official and press outrage is vectored toward those like Tommy Robinson who dare to expose and condemn such practices. He has been singled out for especially harsh treatment for denouncing the accommodation of rape gangs as symptomatic of many other concessions made to the U.K.’s growing population of Sharia-supremacists in the name of not offending them, and therefore risking their violent wrath.

These days, Tommy Robinson is an endangered species. He literally may not survive his incarceration in a prison system rife with jihadists keen to kill him. According to one report, the last time he was incarcerated, “inmates tried to douse him with a combination of boiling water and sugar - in other words an acid attack, known as 'napalm' by fellow prisoners. This will surely happen again.”

The danger is deemed sufficiently great that a British peer, Malcolm Lord Pearson, has warned Britain’s Home Secretary that he will face prosecution if any harm comes to Tommy in jail.

The trouble is that, as elsewhere in Europe and even increasingly in the United States, it is so much easier to silence those like Tommy Robinson than it is to address their legitimate concerns and urgent warnings. If the public is either unaware of the steady erosion of their rights and security in the name of accommodating the dictates of Sharia and its adherents – or cowed into acquiescence lest they face the state’s wrath or the Islamists’ – the appearance of order can be maintained.

The truth, however, is that as Winston Churchill and British monarchs like Queen Elizabeth understood intuitively, appeasement merely postpones a day of reckoning. And when that day comes, the costs inevitably will be higher than they would have been if the problem had been addressed earlier on. In some parts of Europe, there is open speculation about whether the upshot may ultimately be civil war.

America has a stake in all this, too. Not only are we at risk of repeating the mistakes being made by Britain and others in Europe. If history is any guide, we will likely find ourselves embroiled in whatever comes if and when native populations finally confront, rather than appease, Sharia-supremacists. Such a potentially horrific outcome can only be avoided by standing up for and protecting Western civilization, in Britain and elsewhere.

Start by freeing Tommy Robinson.