New in PJ Media:
There are around four million Muslims in Britain, and with that rapidly growing population come societal changes. Oxford’s Magdalen College has in the past celebrated St. George’s Day on April 23 with a ceremonial dinner; this year, however, St. George’s Day plans have been deep-sixed, and Magdalen will instead host a formal dinner to mark the end of Ramadan. In Britain’s celebration of diversity, there is room for only the one observance, not both.
GB News reported Wednesday that “an annual St George’s Day dinner has been cancelled by an Oxford college.” Magdalen College “usually holds an annual banquet to mark the day of the English saint, with students and academics dining together to enjoy a traditional feast.” It’s understandable that the college would take this step: the patron saint of England has been out of favor for years now.
As far back as 2006, the UK’s Daily Mail reported that “the Church of England is considering rejecting England’s patron saint St George on the grounds that his image is too warlike and may offend Muslims.” St. George didn’t end up getting deep-sixed altogether, but he was severely deemphasized, and not just by the Church of England. In May 2013, the Telegraph noted that in the town of Radstock, Somerset, “a local council decided against flying the flag of St George after concerns were raised that it would offend the town’s 16 Muslim residents.” In April 2016, according to the Express, the Bristol City Council “refused to host St George’s Day celebrations because the area is ‘too multicultural.’”
Stories of this kind are all too easy to find. According to Breitbart, on April 23, 2020, Britain’s Secretary of State for the Department of Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock, “thanked Muslims for their Ramadan ‘sacrifice’ on St George’s Day, but made no mention of the English national day itself.” Hancock added: “I want to say to all British Muslims, thank you for staying at home. I know how important the daily Iftar is, how important communal prayer is at night, and how important the Eid festival is.” Nothing about how important St. George’s Day was, because it wasn’t.
Leftists, meanwhile, have been busy crowing that St. George wasn’t really English at all. Breitbart reported in April 2022 that “Leftists in Britain celebrated St George’s Day on Saturday with their annual issuing of false claims that the Roman soldier of Cappadocian Greek ethnicity was, variously, ‘Turkish’, ‘Arab’, and ‘a migrant worker’ in an effort to ‘own’ English patriots.”
There is more. Read the rest here.
