John Cleese is 86 years old. He co-founded Monty Python, created Fawlty Towers, and made a film so funny the Catholic Church tried to ban it. Now the United Kingdom has referred him to Prevent — the government's anti-terrorism program — apparently because his public commentary offended the right people.

The Southport stabber was a Prevent graduate. John Cleese is a Prevent referral. That's how backwards England has become.

The referral appears to have been triggered by a series of posts Cleese made on social media, including one that read: "The Islamic male ego becomes so bloated by its lack of restraint that it believes any criticism is blasphemy." Another: "I personally prefer a culture that does not approve of Female Genital Mutilation, Child Marriage and Killing Infidels." A third described a censorship effort as "Another religious diktat from the Pro-Paedophila Propaganda Department."

The complaint was pushed by 5 Pillars, an extremist Islamic organization in the UK. Their framing accused Cleese of promoting the idea that "traditional British values are under attack from Muslim belief systems." Cleese's response to the whole affair was characteristically direct: "I look forward to being arrested."

Prevent was created to identify and intervene with individuals at risk of radicalization. It is now being used to process an octogenarian comedian whose most dangerous weapon is a dead parrot sketch. The program that was supposed to catch people building bombs is instead catching people building jokes — and the people filing the complaints are members of an organization whose own rhetoric would curdle milk.

Cleese quoted one of 5 Pillars' own positions back at them: "To criticise a culture whose holy book advocates the killing of all the people they disagree with...is not racist. It's culturalist." That's not Cleese editorializing. That's him reading their material out loud and letting people hear what it actually says.

Greg Linehan, the creator of Father Ted, has faced similar treatment. So has JK Rowling. The pattern is consistent: public figures who say things that are factually defensible but culturally inconvenient get reported to government programs designed for actual threats. The system doesn't distinguish between a terrorist and a comedian because it was never built to. It was built to process complaints, and the people filing complaints learned that a long time ago.

The man who made Life of Brian — a film about a society so broken it can't tell a prophet from a confused bystander — is now living inside his own script. Britain's terrorism apparatus processed a referral on an 86-year-old comedy legend while actual extremist organizations operate freely enough to file the paperwork.

Cleese said he looks forward to being arrested. At this rate, the UK might oblige him.