“What we cannot complain is that Tommy Robinson is being detained illegally,” asserts British journalist James Delingpole in a Monday article for Breitbart.

Now, Delingpole is supposed to be one of the good guys when it comes to this sort of thing. In the same article, in fact, he maintains that he is friendly with Robinson, who on May 25 was arrested while streaming live on Facebook from outside Leeds Criminal Court, where several Muslims were being tried for mass child rape. Tommy was then brought before a judge who sent him straight to prison for having violated the terms under which he was released by another judge last year. Delingpole says he admires Tommy and considers him brave. At the same time, alas, Delingpole charges that Tommy is “an adrenaline junkie who sometimes pushes it that bit too far.”

First, anent “adrenaline junkie”: I’d suggest that a lot of the great men and women of history were probably adrenaline junkies. I think Trump is one. Thomas Edison barely slept. Neither did Nikola Tesla. Or Leonardo da Vinci.

“Pushing too far”? Tommy’s “offense” last year was trying to videotape alleged Muslim pedophiles outside a courthouse in Canterbury.

On that occasion, he was brought before a female judge who, when asked about the very real danger of him being beaten up — or worse — if sentenced to prison, said: “So what?” Yes, that’s what she actually said. Every day, in the same courts, they treat accused mass rapists with more respect.

So I ask: how far is “too far” when you’re sounding the alarm about a nationwide child-rape epidemic that authorities up and down the line have conspired to cover up, that is still going on, that is (although one is not allowed to say so) a byproduct of Islamic theology, and that the mainstream media, even after they’ve finally been forced to face up to the reality of it, prefer to treat as if it were a series of parking violations?

As for Robinson being “detained illegally”: I, for one, certainly wouldn’t say that his detention is illegal. No, it’s entirely legal. That’s precisely the problem.

British law itself — the whole process of deciding what’s legal and what’s illegal — is no longer what it used to be, and hence no longer worth respecting. It’s been twisted into a tool of those who wish to protect Muslim criminals and troublemakers (and their apologists and defenders) and to punish those who blow the whistle on Muslim crime and tell the truth about Islamic ideology.

Tommy’s thirteen-month sentence, Delingpole reminds us, “was a consequence of an incident in May last year when he had been found guilty of contempt of court while filming defendants outside a Muslim rape gang trial in Canterbury, Kent. The judge was perfectly clear to Robinson as to what would happen if he did this again.”

Yes, the judge who ruled on Robinson’s case last year effectively told him to stay home and shut up. He refused to do so, out of principle. That doesn’t make her right and him wrong. It means that those in charge of administering justice in Britain are now doing something very different indeed from administering justice. A friend of mine who is a criminal lawyer in Canada, and who has studied last year’s ruling, calls it “petulant, vague and injudicious.”

Disappointingly, Nigel Farage has taken much the same position as Delingpole. Denying on his Saturday radio show that Britain is becoming a “police state,” Farage pointed out that “Tommy Robinson was under a court order not to interfere with the judicial process in any way at all,” but added that “for reasons of self-publicity, and not to benefit anything that would help society, he chose wilfully to breach that. He was warned that he was in breach of that. … Frankly, the judge had almost no choice but to give him a jail sentence. … He was out there asking for trouble.” In short, Robinson is “not heroic in any way at all.”

I must say that I have long admired Farage for his role in the Brexit campaign. I have also, however, noticed his careful refusal to ever say anything critical about Islam. Ever. Anything. He won’t go there. Robinson does. That makes Robinson, in my book, the braver man. Farage’s remark about “self-publicity” rubbed me, to put it mildly, the wrong way — especially coming, as it did, from one of the great self-promoters of our time. In any event, to my American ears, Farage’s comments to the effect that Robinson was “asking for trouble” and that he should not have “interfere[d] with the judicial process in any way at all” — as if standing outside a courthouse and talking into a camera amounted to interference! — make no sense at all. No, not in a supposedly free country.

Then there is Daniel Hannan, a Conservative Member of the European Parliament whose cogent opposition to the EU, criticism of the NHS, and friendliness to the U.S. I have been much impressed by over the years. So I was disappointed to see him suggesting, in the Washington Examiner, in an article headlined “The real story, and why Tommy Robinson belongs in prison,” that Tommy, by doing that report from outside the Leeds courthouse, “was seeking to provoke a criminal conviction that would turn him into a ‘free speech martyr’ and — let’s not beat about the bush — boost his earnings on the American speaker circuit.” What is it with this eagerness to impute base motives — especially to people who are risking their lives to expose criminals who have committed the basest of atrocities?

What the hell is going on with these “friendly” critics of Robinson? One factor, indubitably, is class. (It’s hard for most Americans to process it, but Tommy’s accent is a very big deal in the UK.) I also suspect that Tommy’s friendly critics are acting, at least in part, out of a reflexive respect for British public order and establishment institutions, something instilled in them from an early age, at Eton and Oxford and so on. They claim that — as unpleasant as it is to say so — Robinson deserved what he got because he knew what he was doing. They then proceed to cite ridiculous legal technicalities and absurd details about, for example, how close he was standing to the courthouse when he was broadcasting on Facebook on the day of his arrest. And they insist that his arrest was fair because, as they put it, “justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done.”

I have seen this line repeated like a mantra in the last few days — but never with any irony. The idea of justice being “seen to be done” seems to be a beloved concept in Britain. But no objective observer of the current behavior of cops and courts in that country could say that justice is being done, or being seen to be done, when it comes to Islam.

If justice were being done, the courts would be overwhelmed with trials of serial Muslim rapists and other Muslim felons — as well as with the trials of the British police, politicians, journalists, social workers, and others who covered their crimes up over a period of decades.

Every single one of those offenses is far more serious than anything Robinson has ever done.

Supposedly “friendly” critics of Tommy, by way of showing that he’s not perfect, dredge up his conviction a few years back for mortgage fraud. The crime? He loaned money to a relative so that the latter could get a housing mortgage. Tommy was imprisoned for this. He was imprisoned for it because the authorities had combed through his finances in search of something, anything, to send him up the river for — and this was the best they could do. Meanwhile, what offenses could some of Britain’s more reprehensible imams be nabbed for, if the authorities were as eager to jail them as they have been to punish Tommy? The mind boggles.

This is not just selective “justice.” It’s outrageously, insanely selective “justice.” “Legal,” of course, is not always a synonym for “fair” or “just” or “equitable” — and in Britain today, as far as Islam is concerned, what is “legal” and “illegal” has less and less to do with the question of justice and more and more to do with a desire to avoid “social discord” or “unrest” and to promote “diversity” and “multiculturalism.”

One pseudonymous commenter on Delingpole’s article puts it bluntly: “Technicalities are one thing, realities and motives are quite another. The reality is that he was targeted. He goes to a possible death sentence in prison for a minor violation of a ridiculous law, and the gangs of rapists, by contrast, are defended and allowed to rape more British girls. Insane.”

Exactly: a minor violation. A ridiculous law. While rapes go on, under the noses of the pusillanimous police.

Then there’s this from my criminal lawyer friend in Canada: “When the top judge in the UK isn’t content to acquiesce — bad enough — but actually celebrates the demise of the nuclear family in favour of (ostensibly) illegal polygamy; where the courts almost never prosecute FGM and have yet to secure a single conviction; and where governments at all levels have been complicit in covering up Muslim sex crimes and persecuting valiant guys like Robinson or, as here, people who dare to support him, it’s hard to respect the British law or take it seriously.”

It seems to me that these people who, while having a certain degree of sympathy for Robinson, nonetheless defend his imprisonment, can’t quite wrap their minds around the fact that the savior of their ancient country might yet prove to be some rough-around-the-edges chap who never attended Oxford or Cambridge, and who speaks in what they consider a horrid low-class dialect.

I also suspect that they’re looking desperately for a reason to believe that their nation’s system is still working — and that it’s still fair.

Their desperation is understandable. It’s touching.

But the system isn’t fair. On the contrary, it’s become the cruel instrument of cynical and cowardly officials who are manifestly determined to cover up evil — and to utterly destroy those few courageous souls who are standing in their way, driven to bring evil into the light and to drive it from their once-great country.