The barbarism in Belfast

Are we allowed to feel pure, cold rage yet? It’s what millions of us felt this morning as we watched footage of that barbarous assault in Belfast. However much the pleb-fearing thoughtpolice of Keir Starmer’s government might disapprove of such fury, it’s the emotion that swelled in all decent British and Irish people as they saw a brute rain stab after stab upon his sprawled, struggling victim. Good luck trying to curb the people’s rage over this act of wanton savagery.

It was truly obscene. On a dimly lit nighttime street in north Belfast, a kind of medieval butchery unfolded. A local man in his 40s was mercilessly pinned down by the knifeman. Each plunge of the knife was coldly, cruelly executed. The monster went for the man’s face, his neck, his back. The police announced this morning that the victim suffered ‘significant injuries to his eyes’. Was this an attempted eye-gouging? In the United Kingdom in 2026? Some are calling it an attempted beheading. Whichever it was, we now know the early media reports about a ‘knife incident’ were shamefully euphemistic, dolling up a monstrous atrocity in the garb of everyday crime.

Then came the most salient revelation, the one that imbued this feral exhibition of violence with political urgency – the suspect is Sudanese. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) tried to get the details out quickly, clearly having learned how much it riles the public when the truth about barbaric violence is withheld from us on the grounds that we’re too dumb and racist to handle it. The suspect is in his 30s, he seems to be from Sudan, and he got to Northern Ireland via Dublin. Oh, and he was granted leave to remain.

These findings change everything. Everything. Yes, only the blood-stained degenerate bears responsibility for the horrors inflicted on that innocent man. But we now know the piece of scum had an army of witless aiders and abetters. There lurks in the background of this abomination a whole regime of complicity. The wilfully oblivious technocrats who have overseen the withering of our borders. The spineless legal system that refuses to remove people who should not be here. The virtue-hoarding activist class that agitates for the right of every ‘asylum seeker’ to stay, because they cherish the spotlight of self-righteousness far more than they do the safety of working-class men and women. None of them wielded the knife, no; but all helped to pave the way for that reprobate’s presence in Belfast.

Isn’t there now a case against officialdom of reckless endangerment? Every week there are reports of horrifying rapes carried out by illegal immigrants. Working-class women and girls have suffered sickening abuse at the hands of men who came on small boats under the noses of our apathetic, cowardly rulers. People have been murdered, too. From the alleged rape gang overseen by Afghan nationals in Norwich to last night’s demented bloodletting in Belfast – when are we allowed to say this is all the bitter harvest of state failure, the predictable outcome of refusing to get a handle on who is coming here and why?

People are sick of paying the blood price of bourgeois virtue. That is increasingly how it feels to working-class communities – that they are expected to absorb the risk of letting in tens of thousands of unvetted men, while their betters absorb the glow of righteousness that comes with crying ‘Refugees welcome’. The activist class in their leafy suburbs are shielded from the social consequences of their moral theatre. It is the lower orders who suffer the fallout. Working-class girls who suddenly have 800 men from fuck knows where in the hotel at the end of their road. Women like Rhiannon Whyte, murdered by a Sudanese ‘asylum seeker’ from the very migrant hotel she worked in. This poor man in Belfast. It seems their suffering is a small price to pay for the moral gloating of our rulers.

This is why people are angry. Not because they’re racist. Not because they want all non-whites cast out of the kingdom. Such defamatory classist bile doesn’t wash anymore. No, it is the pathological nonchalance of the establishment that infuriates them, and the green light that such institutionalised cowardice gives to certain wicked men who come here. That image of the suspect in Belfast seeming to punch the air with bloodcurdling delight as his exhausted victim fought for his life – this will be burned into people’s minds. It deserves to become a defining image in the life of our nation. For it grimly embodies the twin horrors of an individual’s murderous intent and a state’s murderous indifference.

Already the political class is fretting more about the masses’ response to this apocalyptic event than the event itself. Just as Starmer lamented the calls for ‘pure, cold rage’ over the death of Henry Nowak, so they will seek to crush our outrage over the barbarism in Belfast. An MP for Northern Ireland’s Social Democratic and Labour Party is fuming about the ‘English right-wing politicians’ who might exploit this atrocity to ‘further their own ends’. Imagine witnessing such End Times violence and thinking, ‘Shit, how are people going to react?’. They are so lost. They are beyond lost.

It could have been worse. Had it not been for the intervention of passers-by – one of them using a hurling stick to beat the knifeman as the cops arrived – the victim would unquestionably have perished. The heroism of these good people deserves reward. And yet we can’t have a situation where the only thing standing between civilisation and barbarism is a hurling stick. So much moral repair is needed. And it needs to start now.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.