You know the kind of people I'm talking about. They're the kind of people who believe that the Paris attacks last November do not demonstrate a need for tighter controls on the influx of Muslims into Europe, because the attackers were mostly French or Belgian "born and bred", just as French or Belgian as Gérard Depardieu or Jean-Claude Van Damme, and therefore indicate that the problem of jihad is "home grown". They're the kind of people who believe that the Islamic State cannot possibly be Muslims or represent Islam, because Nadiya Hussain who won the Bake Off is a Muslim, and she's lovely. They're the kind of people who gather in a big, imaginary circle on social media in the wake of the latest Islamic atrocity on Western soil and metaphorically pull each other off while tweeting things like #terrorismhasnoreligion and "do we blame ALL Christians for the Westboro Baptist Church?!" (i.e. 38 fucking fruits with placards; nary an assault rifle, a suicide vest or a hijacked 767 in sight). And they're the kind of people who spontaneously ejaculate at the apparently Kathy Burke-esque Britishness of a Bangladeshi woman from Manchester who undertook hijra to the Caliphate with her five children to be with her husband, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, only to return after deciding that it wasn't "wasn't (her) cup of tea", as though she represents some sort of triumph of multiculturalism and Muslim integration.
Well. Time, belatedly, for me to set a few things straight. Get yourselves comfy, because here is the truth about Saint George according to the most reliable accounts and scholarship pertaining to his own life, and the truth about the wider context, according to fucking reality.
Saint George was not Turkish.
Modern Turkey is less than a century old, and is a successor to the Ottoman Empire which was established in the wake of the invasion and colonisation of Anatolia by Turkic peoples and Mongols. Once upon a time, what we today think of as Turkey (Anatolia) was inhabited largely by ethnic Greeks, Armenians, and Kurds. It still is, but the vast majority of those from the former two groups were assimilated under Ottoman rule. The Kurds largely retain a distinct identity ethnice and cultural identity, perhaps because many were already Muslims, and also because they mainly inhabit(ed) relatively remote mountainous areas.
Saint George was not "Syrian".
There may well have been a region named Syria in the third and fourth centuries A.D., and Saint George may well have been born or lived there, but bar geography, it bears very little relation to the majority Muslim, culturally and linguistically Arab nation state of the same name which was carved out as a result of the Sykes-Picot agreement between the British and the French after World War I. There were no Muslims there then because there was no Islam, and there likely weren't too many Arabs around because they were mostly still confined to the Arabian deserts. There was also a region called Britain back then, but we haven't got a lot in common with the fucking Druids, have we?
Saint George was not a "migrant".
However convenient it may be for virtue-signalling lemmings to pretend otherwise, Saint George was not a "migrant" in any sense of the term that anyone would understand in conventional usage, and certainly not in the sense that the mostly Muslim millions currently flooding into Europe are migrants. He was a soldier in the Roman army, and the son of an officer in that army. Moving from one part of said empire to another at any time in his life no more makes him a "migrant" than someone from the Royal Corps of Signals being sent to the Falkland Islands for six months makes them a "migrant".
Saint George was fucking Greek.
He was Greek. His parents were Greeks. The clue lies in the fact that his name was fucking Georgios. Hint fucking hint. Ethnic Greeks existed in cultural, linguistic, and religious terms in the time of Saint George in a form which we today would recognise as pretty similar to contemporary Greeks. But nothing remotely resembling the modern nation states of Turkey or Syria, or indeed contemporary Turkish or Syrian ethno-religious identities, existed in any sense at that time.
Most importantly of all, Saint George was a Christian, and, if the hagiography is to be believed, was tortured and decapitated at the order of the Roman emperor Diocletian for steadfastly refusing to abandon Christianity.
Why does that matter?
Well, for my money, here's why: Christians are currently the victims of ethnic cleansing and genocide across Syria and Iraq today at the hands of Islamic supremacists. That's why it matters.
So the day of remembrance for a Christian martyr is a good time to ask why the historically Christian nation of the United Kingdom is not bending over backwards to offer refuge and a second chance at life to the oppressed and long-suffering Christians and other religious minorities of the Middle East.
And no. I'm not a believing Christian. In everything but name and baptism (Anglican), I'm irreligious. But I'd like to see our leaders direct our good will and our humanity toward people who don't turn up with the mentality of colonisers and theocratic supremacists for a fucking change, rather than fucking virtue-signalling our way right up to the gates of demography's big halal abattoir.
Share this post now, but more importantly, bookmark it, remember it, and share it in the run-up to Saint George's Day 2017 and beyond. Or, for that matter, any time you see someone repeating ideologically motivated misinformation about England's patron saint.
Done.
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