"Western Civilisation": the far right's weapon of choice

When we hear the terms "Western civilisation" and "Judeo-Christian," we need to know what the Right intends people to understand. Far right supporters of Israel are using it to divide us.

Later today (Saturday in the UK), Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is hosting another far right rally in London. Better known as Tommy Robinson, he has attempted to gather some extreme voices from the international Islamophobia sphere to “Unite the West.”

At this point, 11 of his speakers have had their entry permission revoked by the government. One of those is former IDF soldier, Australian Avi Yemini. It is not yet clear if New Zealand/Aotearoa’s far right Pentecostal preacher Brian Tamaki is another to be refused entry. His church has been described as a place of “far-right prejudices, manifest anger and hatred.”

Both Yemini and Yaxley-Lennon have been fostered by Rebel Media, a far right disinformation outlet supported by major pro-Israel donor Robert Shillman.

On his YouTube channel a month back, Yaxley-Lennon described his far right rally as a festival and cultural celebration. He was in the US fundraising at the time, particularly for additional screens and speakers to make sure that everyone will be able to hear the bigotry. Shillman, after this interview, donated $100,000 for that purpose.

Shillman celebrated Yaxley-Lennon’s work as allowing “Britons to actively demonstrate their desire to preserve traditional British values, and culture and law which are being eroded by the unchecked immigration by people who refuse to assimilate.” He argued that: “Americans have a natural stake in seeing their cultural mother country maintain its distinct identity.”

Shillman recycled the myth that Muslims in the UK are working to replace the British secular legal system with Sharia law. This talking point has been resuscitated from its post 9/11 high point to counter Israel’s damaged global reputation.

Shillman said that a country can be “multi-ethnic” but that it must have only one “own unique culture.” He asserted that “multi-culture” is a recipe for disaster. There must be assimilation instead of what he described as “forcing the country to change to accommodate incompatible ideologies.”

This 2021 Follow the Money reporting documents speeches at an event hosted by David Horowitz, key Islamophobe and anti-Black racist. The quotation above comes from far right politician Geert Wilders. Shillman is also quoted, stating he would have liked to be in the frontline of the existential battle against “Islamists and the Left who want to destroy us,” but instead fights: “With this chequebook and this pen, I provide ammunition for those who are on the front lines. Men like David Horowitz and Geert Wilders, who confront the enemies of freedom every day. We are fortunate to have these brave men with us today.”

Yaxley-Lennon, according to 2019 The Times of Israel reporting by Eric Cortellessa, emerged from prison in the early 2000s to join “neo-Nazi tied British National Party.” Cortellessa described him as having become “one of the most prominent anti-Muslim activists in the world. A political adviser to a right-wing British party, he is the founder and former chair of a far-right Islamophobic group.”

Cortellessa situates him as having been one of the tools of the Islamophobia network since 2017. He quotes The Guardian as exposing him “being bankrolled by a nexus of international organizations. Many of those groups, it turns out, are part of the American right-wing infrastructure supporting the Israeli cause.” Daniel Pipes is quoted. He runs one of the Islamophobia network’s core entities, the Middle East Forum. Pipes declared on the stage at a NatCon conference 6 months later that Neo Nazis are his “civilisationalist allies” against Muslims in Europe.

Daniel Goldman in The Jerusalem Post in 2025 criticised the extensive platform given to Yaxley-Lennon by the Post and Israeli leaders after he was invited to Israel.

Goldman tracks Yaxley-Lennon’s time with the ethnonationalist English Defence League, stressing that its “Jewish branch” was associated with a figure connected to Jewish terrorist organisations and beliefs. [Edit: this Double Down News report places Yaxley-Lennon “founding” the EDL in 2009 as a Jewish Defence League project rather than the other way around.]

British Jewish communities expressed their horror that Yaxley Lennon had been invited to Israel by “Diaspora” Minister Amichai Chikli who has been a visitor to far right events in Europe as well as inviting far right political leaders to Israel. In Australia’s The Jewish Independent, Colin Shindler reported that “The Board of Deputies of British Jews, together with the Jewish Leadership Council, described Robinson as a ‘thug’ who represented ‘the worst in Britain’ and described Chikli as the Minister for the Diaspora ‘in name only’.” French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu described Chikli as having “displayed close ties to the French far right while urging Jews worldwide to move to Israel as soon as possible.”

It is crucial that we note Shindler’s emphasis that this embrace of far right “thugs” is the activity of the pro-Israel far right and not representative of broader Jewish community support.

In this fight to dehumanise and demonise Muslims, Yaxley-Lennon represents the ground game, riling up faux-populist rage at fellow citizens. There is also the elite circles gathered around a “defence” of Judeo-Christian and Western “Civilisation” marking Muslims as the primary existential threat to its survival.

Far right figures like Daniel Pipes are not platformed at the NatCon conference by chance. The national conservative (NatCon) ideology promotes God in government, in religiously-defined ethnostates. The NatCon conference organisation was inspired by Yoram Hazony’s efforts to redeem “nationalism” from Nazism. Hazony is an Israeli settler intellectual and Atlas Network partner founder.

The Edmund Burke Foundation which founded NatCon is heavily weighed with far right pro-Israel figures and groups. Supporting Israel is a core mission alongside imposing Christian Nationalism on Western countries.

French-Israeli journalist Charles Enderlin described Hazony in 2022 as a significant node in creating an “Israel in the grip of hardline religious nationalism.”

The influence of this transnational ideology and its links to Israel are corrosive of our countries’ institutions. Mark Rowley, the Commissioner of the UK’s Met Police, has been urged to retract his lies about pro-Palestine rallies, having claimed they regularly tried to target synagogues. (To be clear, there are treasured Jewish blocs in these rallies. It is not an antisemitic movement.) This reporting from Double Down News illustrates the threats Rowley faced from both IDF-connected Tory politicians and Yaxley-Lennon in 2023 for not being coercive enough against the peace marchers. It also documents the pro-Israel operations that have worked on Rowley since.

In Australia, the current Royal Commission into antisemitism has given extensive time to the voices of far right pro-Israel body representatives but has denied the Loud Jew Collective (LJC) the right to speak. The Commissioner embraced the problematic IHRA definition of antisemitism which prevents criticising Israel. This means, one presumes, that hearing the LJC’s ethical and substantiated criticism of Israel’s genocide and apartheid would be adding to a list of antisemitic events.

The Australian budget this week made an $102 million allowance for an “Israeli-trained volunteer group permitted to carry arms” at work on Australian streets.

Australian politicians, journalists and thought leaders are deeply integrated into another national conservative organisation, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which works to protect “Western Civilisation” with “better narratives”. Writing about the last London conference, the editor of The Australian argued that the “opponent” being fought in the breakdown of the West is “secular progressivism.” The threat is not just to Muslims, but to pluralist and secular governments that protects us all from religious coercion.

“Judeo-Christian” was largely a term invented to encourage antisemitic Christians to, for example, “mobilise against Nazism.” Now it is being used to exclude Muslims in a deeply dangerous way.

A monolithic “Western Civilisation” at war in a Clash of Civilisations with a monolithic “Islamic World” is 1990s nonsense designed for neocons to justify Western militancy against Middle Eastern countries, not least for oil, by a deeply bigoted academic.

And we have seen that antisemitism continues to be integrated into the bigotries expressed by the far right. Furthermore, the twisted definition used against supporters of Palestinian safety and justice hurts Jewish people by risking the merging of their identity with the interventions of far right activists of and for Israel like “Tommy Robinson.”

We need our institutions, all the way up to our governments, to adjust their current focus from fighting “antisemitism” to fighting all forms of bigotry that threaten to drive us towards fascistic states.