Let’s talk about what happens when the media elite get nervous. A new kind of journalism has crawled out of the gutter in recent years, and it works like this: Someone publishes an opinion piece, and instead of debating the actual argument, the mainstream commentators start scrabbling around for hidden networks, shadowy alliances, and secret pipelines to explain how such dangerous thoughts were ever allowed to see the light of day.
That seems to be the pathetic game UnHerd is playing with their recent article questioning why The Jerusalem Post published me. They dress it up as some kind of investigation, but read it properly and you may find something different: a narrative built on association, insinuation, and ideological framing because they’re too cowardly to engage with the argument I actually made.
UnHerd doesn’t open with an argument – it opens with a mood. They drop the name Jeffrey Epstein like a bomb, designed to shut down conversation before it begins. Then, like a bad novelist trying to create drama, they stage a scene – Epstein supposedly praising Steve Bannon about me – as if a third party’s private message is proof of my involvement.
But here’s a newsflash for UnHerd: I wasn’t in that exchange between Epstein and Bannon. I didn’t send it, receive it, or respond to it (obviously, because I was not part of it). The only fact they’ve established is that two men talked about me. If this is what modern journalism has come to – where someone disreputable mentioning your name makes you tainted – then public life has become a smear-by-mention game where evidence is optional, and insinuation does all the work.
The irony here is so thick you could cut it with a knife. My Post article addresses this exact issue. In the opening paragraphs, I state plainly that I never met, spoke to, or communicated with Epstein, and I condemned him as “a despicable, predatory, and evil man.” That clarification isn’t buried – it’s the starting point of the piece. Yet UnHerd would rather frame their story around the email exchange, treating the insinuation as the hook while largely bypassing the explanation offered in the very article they claim to be examining.
The next rhetorical move is equally familiar and pathetic. UnHerd tells us that “Robinson’s critics” have seized upon the Epstein emails as evidence that I’m compromised by foreign money or even an Israeli “asset,” repeating the childish nickname “Tommy Robinstein.”
This attribution to unnamed critics can be a useful journalistic trick: It allows one to introduce a smear without having to defend it. But the nickname itself isn’t just childish mockery; it rests on a long-standing antisemitic trope that treats Jewish identity as something covert, manipulative, or politically or religiously subversive.
That’s precisely why that term circulates so easily in online conspiracy circles. Its logic is simple: If a political figure rejects narratives or expresses sympathy or support for Israel, he must secretly be Jewish and therefore acting on hidden loyalties.
It’s an ugly piece of rhetoric that collapses political disagreement into ethnic and/or religious suspicion. Repeating it does little to clarify the debate and much to amplify the very conspiratorial thinking the article claims to be scrutinizing. But hey, why let consistency get in the way of a good smear?
Criticism of the article
UnHerd then turns briefly to my Post column itself, summarizing my argument that the claim Epstein was some kind of “Zionist agent” is a crude caricature that obscures the truth. But rather than engage with that argument, they can’t resist inserting a dismissive aside: The piece is written in “neat prose with more than a whiff of ChatGPT about it.”
This line does no analytical work at all. It offers no evidence that the article was written by artificial intelligence, nor does it attempt to rebut the substance of what was said. Its purpose seems to be purely rhetorical – to nudge the reader toward treating the argument as artificial or inauthentic without having to explain why. When you can’t attack the message, attack the messenger, right?
UnHerd’s description of my article also quietly shifts what my piece actually argues. We’re told I “offered a rebuttal to arguments that the paedophile financier was working for Israeli intelligence.” But that’s not what the article says.
The claim I address is the much cruder slogan circulating online: that Epstein was a “Zionist agent.” My argument is that this reductionist narrative turns a scandal about elite protection and institutional failure into an ethnic and/or religious conspiracy theory.
More importantly, the article does not rule out the possibility that Epstein operated within the murky overlap of intelligence, politics, and money.
In fact, it explicitly raises the opposite possibility: that Epstein functioned as a kind of opportunistic broker, trading access and leverage among powerful networks where deniability was the point. Narrowing the debate to “Israeli intelligence” conveniently simplifies a much broader claim – that Epstein’s world was populated by billionaires, politicians, and intelligence-adjacent figures across multiple countries, peoples, ethnicities, and religious (or not) beliefs.
The article even cites Epstein’s relationship with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak as an example of why consistent scrutiny matters. That point isn’t offered as proof of a conspiracy but as evidence that powerful figures should face the same questions regardless of nationality or political and/or religious (or not) alignment.
In other words, the piece apparently argues for standards, not scapegoats. But standards don’t make for good smear pieces, do they?
UnHerd nonetheless declares my argument “an odd claim to make,” citing Epstein’s donations to Israeli organizations and an anecdote that he once wore an IDF T-shirt. But what exactly is this supposed to prove? I visited Israel and I wore a Mossad and an IDF T-shirt, which I bought from a souvenir shop. Does that now make me a Mossad agent? Or a member of the IDF? I don’t think so.
Epstein's financial contributions
Epstein was a billionaire who scattered donations across universities, charities, foundations, and political networks with remarkable promiscuity. In 2006 alone, the contributions cited amount to sums that, for Epstein, were little more than loose change: $25,000 to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, $15,000 to the Jewish National Fund, and $100,000 to the Ziv Tzedakah Fund.
These aren’t the financial fingerprints of ideological devotion; they’re the routine gestures of a man who bought influence, access, and social cover wherever it could be found. The same Epstein funded organizations such as Seeds of Peace, which brought Israeli and Palestinian youth together in dialogue programs. If donations alone are proof of ideological allegiance, does that make him a champion of Palestinian reconciliation as well?
It’s a question my haters should tackle with clarity and fairness, but we know they work within different agendas.
The problem with this logic becomes clearer the further you follow it. Epstein reportedly spent millions supporting individuals he took a personal interest in, including the Belarusian student Karyna Shuliak, for whom he allegedly offered Columbia University a $5 million donation in an effort to secure her admission there. By the standards UnHerd is applying, that would make Epstein more ideologically committed to Belarus than to Israel.
The reality is far more mundane: Epstein used money as social currency. Donations, gifts, and symbolic gestures were tools for building networks, cultivating prestige, and purchasing proximity to power – of course, I am not excluding the possibility of him garnering favor with powerful, rich, politically connected and “intelligence connected” individuals.
Once you recognize that pattern, the “odd claim” begins to look rather ordinary. My point isn’t that Epstein never interacted with Israeli institutions; it’s that reducing the Epstein scandal to the slogan “Zionist agent” is a simplistic distortion.
Epstein moved through a web of billionaires, politicians, academics, and intelligence-adjacent figures across multiple countries. His loyalties appear to have been transactional rather than ideological. The uncomfortable implication is not that one nation secretly owned him but that many powerful networks – financial, governmental, and intelligence – allowed him to operate with little, if any, interference.
The question of publication
Then comes the most revealing sentence in the entire UnHerd article: “Putting the strength of his argument to one side, however, the more interesting question is how Robinson came to be published by The Jerusalem Post in the first place.” It is an extraordinary admission.
The writer, Felix Pope, seems to tell us, in plain terms, that he is not interested in whether my argument about Epstein is correct, well-supported, or flawed. The substance is brushed aside. What appears to fascinate him instead is the supposed mystery of how someone like me was permitted to publish the article at all.
The scandal, in UnHerd’s telling, is not the argument but the audacity: A controversial British activist expressing an opinion in a prominent international newspaper. The implication hangs in the air – how did he end up there? Who allowed this? Why would that paper publish him? The suggestion is not that the article breaks rules or standards but that its very existence requires explanation.
But opinion pages are not private clubs for a narrow social set. They exist precisely to publish arguments that provoke disagreement. Newspapers routinely print contributions from activists, politicians, dissidents, and campaigners from across the world. The Jerusalem Post publishing a column challenging a conspiracy narrative about Epstein is not evidence of hidden alliances or ideological intrigue.
It is simply the normal function of an opinion page. Indeed, the same publication has also printed commentary sharply critical of me and my politics – hardly the behavior of a newspaper captured by a single ideological camp.
What UnHerd presents as a puzzle therefore tells us less about me than it does about the habits of a certain strain of modern commentary. Increasingly, the argument itself becomes secondary. The real question becomes who is permitted to speak, which voices are considered respectable, and which must be treated as inherently illegitimate.
Once debate shifts from truth to permission, journalism stops interrogating power and starts policing conversation.
A chain of associations raising questions
From there, the article expands its scope again, linking my visit to Israel to the movement Betar and its founder Ze’ev Jabotinsky. The reader is guided through a chain of associations – Betar, Revisionist Zionism (as distinct from the Labor Zionism of David Ben-Gurion), Israeli ministers – as though the mere existence of these connections explains why my column appeared in the Post.
Yet the leap from a political visit to a newspaper opinion page remains unexplained. Activists travel internationally all the time. They meet politicians, speak at events, and build relationships with groups that share aspects of their worldview. None of this demonstrates editorial influence over a newspaper thousands of miles away.
The article then quotes a Betar spokesperson praising me as “one of the world’s finest journalists” and calling the Post a “friendly outlet.” But supporters praising allies is hardly investigative journalism. Writers submit to outlets where editors are willing to publish them; editors publish voices that provoke debate among their readerships.
Presenting this entirely ordinary dynamic as evidence of hidden influence stretches the idea of investigative reporting beyond recognition and pushes the article into the realm of partisan political propaganda.
The same pattern appears when the article reaches back into my past activism. It notes that the English Defence League once had a Jewish division and that a supporter compared its members to an Israeli naval commando unit. Whatever one thinks of the EDL, the relevance of this anecdote to my opinion column is unclear. If anything, the existence of a Jewish division within a movement often labeled “far-right” complicates the simplistic low-resolution caricature frequently presented in political commentary.
The references to Robert Shillman and the Middle East Forum follow a similar pattern. I worked for the Canadian media outlet Rebel News under its founder Ezra Levant; Shillman was among the investors who helped establish that platform.
To present this as direct financial patronage of me is at best careless and at worst another example of guilt by association. Likewise, the Middle East Forum’s involvement related to legal and political support surrounding my imprisonment after my reporting outside a courthouse in 2018.
One may agree or disagree with that support, but presenting it as “personal funding” is at best disingenuous and at worst deliberately misleading.
By the time the article concludes with the line “to many in Britain, the truth is rather different,” the pattern is unmistakable. A sequence of associations has been assembled – emails I never saw, donations that prove little, historical references that add atmosphere, funding relationships stretched beyond recognition – yet the central insinuation remains unproven.
The irony is that my original column was arguing against precisely this kind of conspiratorial low-resolution simplification. Turning Epstein into a slogan about secret ethnic and/or religious loyalties obscures the far more troubling reality: that wealth, power, and influence can shield individuals from scrutiny across national and political and religious and ethnic boundaries.
Those questions deserve serious examination. But that examination begins with arguments and evidence, not insinuations about who should or should not be allowed to publish an opinion.
Because when journalism abandons the debate over ideas and focuses instead on policing who is permitted to speak, the search for truth quietly gives way to the enforcement of acceptable opinion. Once that line is crossed, the public is no longer being informed – it is being managed.
The writer is a British patriot, street-level activist, and unapologetic truth-teller who has spent two decades exposing the rot in Britain’s institutions. His views are his own and do not represent The Jerusalem Post.