John Cleese can say whatever the hell he wants about Islam

Imagine devoting 65 years of your life to entertaining the nation only to be told by a gang of pious pricks that you’re no longer welcome in England’s second city. That’s been the fate of the great John Cleese. He’s given us six decades of comedy, yet still he finds himself mobbed by hysterics who want to muzzle his wisecracking mouth. His crime? You already know. Everyone knows. It’s the same thing every time. He took the piss out of Islam.

Cleese is touring England with a live stage show celebrating Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He screens the 1975 movie and takes questions from the audience. That’s a pretty stand-up thing for a comedy giant in his late 80s to be doing. Not in the eyes of Islamo-narcissists, though. They’re amazed Cleese can even show his face in public following his numerous sins of blasphemous thought. Nothing makes the pious wet their pants like a comic chortling at their superstitions.

Cleese took his show to the Islamic Republic of Birmingham on Sunday night. News of the blasphemer’s arrival caused a wave of horror among that city’s legion Islamo-nutjobs. One group, by the name of Deenified, put out a hilarious / sinister video in which young men upbraid Cleese for ‘attacking Islam’. You’re a ‘hate preacher’, they cry. Islamic agitators calling others hate preachers? RIP irony.

They called on Birmingham Town Hall, where Cleese was appearing, to ‘align with its duty of community respect’ and ‘cancel the show’. ‘Align with its duty of community respect’ – what a chilling, slippery euphemism. Perhaps they were worried they’d give the game away if they said ‘Silence the blasphemer!’. Unfortunately for them, we infidels aren’t as dumb as we look: we know that lurking in that velvet glove of community-speak is the iron fist of a medieval intolerance for the greatest liberty of all: the liberty to speak.

What sacrilegious utterances has Cleese made to earn such ire? He said, ‘The Koran’s teaching is ALL about acquiring power’. He said Britain’s ‘cultural heritage’ is ‘vastly superior’ to the Islamic way of life. He said ‘Islamophobia’ is a sinister term designed to ward people off from ‘criticising a religion’. He said too many comics hold back from mocking Islam because they don’t want to be murdered. He said some Muslims behave like ‘a bunch of five-year-olds’, wailing whenever someone mocks their beliefs.

Okay. What’s the problem? All of this falls squarely within the realm of legitimate discussion of an ideology. He’s right that living in Britain is better than living in a desert state where women are put in binbags and you can be whipped for dissing Allah. He’s right that people have been slain for ‘insulting Islam’, from the heroes of Charlie Hebdo to the schoolteacher Samuel Paty. As for his claim that some Muslims behave like five-year-olds – the Birmingham mob’s horror at such ‘hate speech’ might carry more weight if they weren’t behaving like five-year-olds. Aw, someone hurt your feelings? Do you want your dummy?

Even if Cleese has said things that don’t stack up, so what? Neither does the claim that Muhammad flew to heaven on a horse, yet I’d fight to the death for your right to peddle such medieval mumbo-jumbo. You have the liberty to believe whatever you want and the rest of us have the liberty to rip the living piss out of your beliefs. It’s the British way. If Birmingham is falling to a non-British ideology, one that treats criticism of Islam as a moral offence punishable by exile, then we need to take action. Firm action.

In the end, Cleese’s Brummie show went ahead. But we still need to talk about the sheer gall of these self-appointed blasphemy police who think they have the right to crush speech that wounds their porcelain feelings. In 1979, it was Christian hotheads who came for Cleese and the other Pythons over their ‘blasphemous’ film, Life of Brian. Now it’s Islamic hotheads hounding Cleese for his profane chatter. What a brilliant, terrible snapshot of the slow-motion conquering of our cultural realm by the unforgiving Islamist mindset.

It was British society’s suicidal indulgence of Islam that gave rise to these insufferable, preening, lily-livered Islamo-censors. For too long we’ve bowed to the backward idea that demurring from Islam is a species of racism. We have institutionalised the thought-strangling ideology of ‘Islamophobia’. Even now, the Labour government is rustling up yet another definition of ‘Islamophobia’ that will punish impious speech. Every time our ‘betters’ turn a blind eye to acts of Islamist intolerance – like the hounding into hiding of the Batley Grammar schoolteacher, or the despicable censoring of a film about the daughter of Muhammad in 2022 – we embolden the mob. Their censorious arrogance feasts and fattens on our cowardice.

Enough. We now have a moral duty to make fun of Islam, in order that we might puncture this sanctimonious regime of silencing that our dumbass establishment helped to birth. Cleese is doing a great service to the historic cause of British liberty by dislodging the deranged idea that one religion should still enjoy protection from blasphemy. No way. Our forebears had their tongues torn out and their faces branded for the crime of speaking frankly about God and religion. We finally abolished our blasphemy laws in 2008. We didn’t go through all that only for people to risk losing their jobs and in some cases their lives for saying Islam is bullshit in 2026.

The Life of Brian ‘scandal’ helped to push us closer to the promised land of liberty. Cleese and the other Pythons took to the airwaves against priests and bishops to defend the hard-won right to ridicule religious dogma. Comedians and cultural figures backed the Pythons. Where are those people now? Why are they silent as Cleese is insulted by religious cranks? Why have they not spoken about the Batley teacher or the pre-emptive crushing of art that might offend Muslims? What treachery. Give me Cleese’s fruity commentary over such arse-covering cowardice any day of the week.