British historian David Starkey returned to Friday's Ezra Levant Show with a video Ezra played him — a recorded message from Muslim activists in Birmingham, addressed to John Cleese ahead of his comedy show there, demanding the venue cancel the performance. The men in the video were dressed in black, in what appeared to be an attempt to intimidate the legendary comedian.

"There is an essential sense of: we have power. We're not going to talk about violence, but you will realize it's actually there." said Starkey in response.

The activists accused Cleese of hate speech for his criticisms of Islam, then argued that free speech in Britain is applied selectively — that attacking Judaism draws national condemnation while attacking Islam is called satire. Starkey noted that this same pressure group was behind the banning of Tel Aviv Maccabi football fans, an incident later exposed as based on lies.

He called the video an example of Islam demanding special treatment — the power, for now, not of physical force but of cancellation and the destruction of livelihoods.

Starkey then raised what he called the risk of "Northern Irelandization" — the fragmentation of British society into rival semi-militarized vigilante groups. He described a recent weekend in Portsmouth where a group called the Patriot Platform organized to resist migrant boat crossings arriving on the beaches of Normandy — the D-Day beaches — sailing across to Portsmouth.

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"They were white, but they look exactly like those Muslims. They were dressed in black. They were wearing face masks." Two groups, mirroring each other, the country fragmenting between them. He drew the parallel to Belfast, where the Palestinian flag now flies alongside the Irish tricolour, and the Star of David alongside the Union Jack.

The Birmingham pub incident was Starkey's sharpest illustration.

During the Southport riots, a well-organized group of masked Muslims carrying baseball bats surrounded a pub occupied by white protesters. Someone was beaten so severely his liver ruptured. What followed was a Muslim police inspector from the Muslim Police Officers Association addressing the mob. His message, as Starkey recounted it: come on lads, be sensible. Put your baseball bats away in the mosque. Disperse now and we'll forget about it. 

"Can you imagine doing that to the Patriot Platform?" Starkey asked.

Human rights law, he noted — citing Lord Tom Bingham, who wrote the definitive essay on the rule of law — is explicitly anti-democratic and countermajoritarian.

It protects minorities at the expense of the majority: religious minorities, transgender people, people of colour, gypsies, the mentally ill, illegal immigrants. 

"Where we are — what we're dealing with isn't simply hyper-liberalism. The law has been deliberately changed." The law of England, which invented the concept of equality before the law, has been deliberately skewed.

"And people don't understand this," Starkey said. "That's why there is such a sense of bewilderment."