Sometimes very little separates irony from tragedy and Labour’s Keir Starmer, the UK’s month-old prime minister, has already set eyes rolling blinkered as he is against the political steamroller heading his way.

Labour’s left faction from which Starmer hails abhors Israel. While Starmer defeated the left’s worst antisemite to take the Labour mantle, he chose the fight against British “Islamophobia” as his first prime ministerial initiative overshadowed by war in Gaza.

It’s ironic that Starmer chose to champion Muslim illegal immigration as his maiden Quixotic windmill. This was the brainchild of Germany’s Angela Merkel, who in 2015 opened the sluice gates of Europe to a flood of mainly male Islamist extremists from Africa and the Levant. The crime wave that followed led to border crises from France to Poland, Sweden to Sicily, culminating in the UK’s Brexit from the EU. But it also ended in Merkel’s ruin.

It’s further ironic that Merkel led the centre-right Christian Democratic Union of Germany believing that future Muslim generations from this immigrant base would bolster her party’s ranks. She only had to turn to Lebanon and Turkey to see what an Islamist Sharia voting bloc could do. Islamists are not impressed by Christianity.

As for tragedy, Starmer’s policy has meant a crackdown on all anti-Muslim behaviour but it is loosely defined. In Starmer’s UK criticising illegal immigration even in thought is considered “far right”. You can libel Israel and slander Christians and Jews on the streets, but you cannot reply.

For the ultimate irony, while Merkel was an idealist Starmer is simply naïve. You can’t crackdown on anti-Islamism when everywhere you look in the UK, Christianity is on blatant display.

It’s there in the United Kingdom’s flag.

Look at the Union Jack. It blends three Christian crosses representing the unity of England’s Saint George (patron saint of the Third Crusade against Saladin no less), Scotland’s Saint Andrew (Christ’s first disciple), and Ireland’s Saint Patrick (who banished the snakes of paganism from the Emerald Isle).

Take a step further and you’ll see that the UK’s Crown Jewels come replete with crosses. The Royal Family is a Christian institution after all; its coronation ceremony is steeped in Christian ritual, and the UK’s national anthem begs “God”, not Allah, to “save” its Christian monarch.

Despite boasting a Jewish prime minister and Jewish Lords, Jewish parliamentarians, nobles, Commonwealth governors-general and governors proving its secular pluralism success—the UK remains a majority Christian dominion.

This reality has already cost Starmer.

Ipsos reported last week that 52% of Britons see him taking the country “in the wrong direction”. Starmer does not understand his people.

Centuries of irony explain what the United Kingdom is:

An island fortress since the Viking and Roman conquests of ancient times, neither Napoleon nor Hitler stepped foot there. It was a pagan expanse that stoically embraced Christianity yet then abandoned orthodoxy to establish its own reformed church. It is a landmass so small, yet once ruled an empire from the Americas to Australia, the subcontinent to the Atlantic Ocean. It is a polity that calls for anti-imperialism now yet resolutely refuses to free the peoples of Northern Ireland and the Falklands from its realm. It was the commander of an unparalleled navy that monopolised commerce through the East India Company, cleared the Atlantic of German menaces in two World Wars and defeated Argentina near the South Pole in 1982 yet, due to budgetary cuts today, can no longer guard the English Channel from dinghies carrying a malcontent human traffic from Africa and the Levant.

This is the Britain that Starmer must lead but he cannot fathom that nuance—of a national tragedy that he not only inherited but has only since inflamed.

Free Palestine marches erupted last year across the streets of London and major cities in the UK after the proscribed Iranian-backed Palestinian terror organisation Hamas crossed from the Gaza Strip and unleashed an orgy of rape, murder and kidnapping in Israel on October 7 2023 to further a platform of jihad.

On August 18 1988 Hamas publicised its mission statement to the world in a document called the Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement where it announced that:

“Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes”.

Hamas said that: “The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [a promise] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up”.

It demanded that: “The day that enemies usurp part of Moslem land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised … It is necessary to instill in the minds of the Moslem generations that the Palestinian problem is a religious problem, and should be dealt with on this basis”.

And even though in 2017 Hamas sought to water down its blatant PR faux pas there, replacing the word “Jews” with “Zionists”, its aims were irrevocably clear. Hamas had declared itself a racist, antisemitic, militant organisation: jihad is its aim; jihad meant a “religious” war. And seeing the violence that followed, numerous Western countries then outlawed it.

Now you know where those chants against “Zionists” and the propaganda of “anti-Zionism” come from.

You’re better informed than most of the herd in the UK marching with Hamas flags and their sloganeering banners.

That’s ten months of Free-Palestine marches inciting antisemitism, misogyny, rape culture, anarchy, “global intifada” and the overthrow of UK democracy; ten months of sexual assaults and stabbings; ten months of vandalism, economic interference, calls for boycotts and supermarket shelf tampering; ten months of flying the terror flags of Hamas and Hezbollah; ten months of inciting murder through the display of the inverted red triangle.

Berlin outlawed that triangle in July. Yet, Starmer can’t understand why the majority of Britons are angry at him.

Under the pretence of keeping the peace, Starmer has deemed any act seen as the provocation of hate towards Islamists an offence.

(Note this article’s definition of “Islamist” here, referring to supporters of extreme Islam or Islamism such as that espoused by Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS and Iran’s Shi’ite Pasdaran among others. This differs from secular Muslims who believe in peaceful rights for all).

In the first week of August 2024, mainstream media reported that UK courts meted out “over 32 years’ prison” to Britons participating in counter-marches, watching riots and writing their feelings on social media.

But justice cannot exist unless hate speech and incitement have clear, uniform definitions. In Starmer’s UK they do not.

Hence, the world is struggling with a UK in dystopia: where calling for the death of Jews, the subjugation of women and actual rape are either ignored by authorities or acquitted. Where mass Islamic prayer on church grounds near empty mosques is police-protected—yet a Christian preaching on the street, a Jew wearing a yarmulke or an Iranian calling Hamas a terror organisation is asked to disperse or be arrested. Where vandalising Britain’s monuments with Palestinian slogans is forgiven but wearing the UK’s flag in pride is considered “likely to cause a riot”.

Starmer is far from building racial harmony. He is destroying centuries of pluralism. The polyglot reverie of a multicultural Britannia that once sent its young soldiers, sailors and aircrews around the world to boot invaders from the Falkland Islands, is being stifled.

As the crime of racial vilification goes, chanting “Jews out!” and “Sharia now!” cannot be ignored while “Stop illegal immigration!” is prosecuted.

Starmer’s folly will only worsen. He cannot champion Muslim rights at the expense of all British citizens protected by the Union Jack and its Christian monarch.

Forgiving rape on the basis of Islamic culture has no place in the UK. Calling for the Sharia overthrow of English law is sedition. The pejorative label “Infidel” flung at non-Muslims is anathema to British society.

Rather, Starmer must douse these flames of jihad at their ignition and demand homage to pluralism by all who reach the UK’s shores. A democratic national leader cannot succeed when justice is denied to everyone.

By definition an Asylum seeker is one who seeks the shelter of the citizenry they approach while fleeing persecution—they don’t seek to sow revolution. That is called invading.

Yet, when law and order become arbitrary, the risk of revolution only grows. This is Keir Starmer’s self-inflicted dilemma.

Right now, the UK is seen as a dangerous place by both locals and those looking in.

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs warns against visiting the UK due to the dangers of “Islamic extremism” and “extreme right-wing ideology.”

A sad irony again. Starmer wants you jailed if you mention that first part, but if you incite violence against the second he’ll give you a visa.

Do you see how the unmentioned danger of “extreme left-wing ideology” seems to be bundled up with Islamic extremism there?

© 2024 Adam Parker.

Picture credit: United Kingdom Government, Crown Copyright expired. Public domain. This rendition © 2024 Adam Parker.