It is St. George’s Day in England, when patriots celebrate their identity and patron saint, and leftists leap to their keyboards to let everyone know that the Christian martyr was not, in fact, an Englishman.

This is true, but it is news to almost no one and hardly matters: St. Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, was not Scottish. Ironically enough, St. Patrick was British rather than Irish.

What is not true is the new spin leftists have put on St. George’s identity to buttress mass migration and multiculturalism. It has been variously claimed that the saint was “Turkish,” “Palestinian,” or even a “migrant worker,” with the claims usually accompanied by a side-splitting remark that conservatives would want him deported if he was alive today.

Happy St George’s Day, a day plastic patriots and racists ignore St George was a migrant worker from and in the Middle East who they’d ban from a UK he never visited anyway.

— Kevin Maguire (@Kevin_Maguire) April 23, 2021

LEFT-WING MYTHMAKING. 

“Saint George was born in Turkey to a Turkish father and Palestinian mother,” declared a 2017 article in the Independent, titled ‘This St George’s Day, we should remember that the patron saint of England was an immigrant.’

“I wonder if any of those who have wrapped themselves in a St George banner and chanted objectionable, racist slogans ever realized that the man himself was a Turkish Arab?” asked Jack Straw, the Lord Chancellor under Britain’s previous Labour government, in a Guardian article titled ‘St. George the Turkish Arab.’

Absolutely none of this is true. St. George was a Greek born in the Roman province of Cappadocia in the 3rd Century. It may be part of Turkey today, but it would be many hundreds of years before the Turks appeared on the scene and began their long conquest and colonization of the territory. (Yes, Europeans aren’t the only “colonizers,” if you can believe it.)

His mother, similarly, may have been born in what the Romans called Syria Palaestina, but, centuries before Mohammed’s birth and the Arab conquest of the Levant, no one resembling a modern “Palestinian” lived in the region.

As for being an “immigrant” or “migrant worker” in England or anywhere else, there is no evidence for this whatsoever. He was born in the Roman Empire — which included modern-day England, for what it’s worth — and died in the Roman Empire; if he did any “migrating,” it was on operations as a Roman soldier.

WHO WAS GEORGE ACTUALLY?

St. George was, first and foremost, one of the greatest Christian saints, looked to as a patron not only by England but also by Greece, Russia, and a host of other countries.

The public knows him best as a dragonslayer. English local legend has it that he accomplished the feat on Dragon Hill, in Uffington, although the story’s older and more common version is set in Silene, in modern-day Libya.

But it was not tales of dragon-slaying, which can be traced only to the Middle Ages, that earned his canonization. Like many early Christians, he won fame as a martyr rather than a warrior, refusing the demands of Emperor Diocletian, to whom he may have been a personal guard, to renounce his faith.

Diocletian, responsible for the Great Persecution, had St. George tortured to try and force him to do homage to Rome’s pagan gods. When this did not work, the emperor threatened him with the headsman’s axe — but St. George submitted to it gladly.

It is a simple, powerful story, and it is a shame that America, which celebrates St. Patrick’s Day so well, has lost touch with it.

It was not always so, with Jamestown holding Olympic Games to mark St. George’s Day in 1691. The St. George’s Society of New York, founded on St. George’s Day in 1770, performs charitable work with an English flavor to this day.

NOT SO PROGRESSIVE. 

Despite efforts to turn the saint into a Turko-Palestinian symbol of and justification for modern immigration policy, America’s English forebears did not choose St. George as their patron because he was a multicultural cosmopolitan.

On the contrary, he was to them a rather uncompromising symbol of muscular Christianity: English knights said they saw apparitions of the soldier saint in the Holy Land, fighting alongside them during the Crusades. King Richard the Lionheart, England’s greatest Crusader, said the martyr had come to him in a dream, encouraging him in his quest to free Jerusalem.

So no, conservatives would not be rushing to deport him if he were alive today — but leftists in government would probably turn him down for a visa.

Happy St. George’s Day!