Belfast Is Burning, and the Media Won't Say Why

By Josh Hammer 

Nearly three decades after the end of the Troubles, Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, is once again on fire.

On Monday, June 8, a Sudanese "asylum" seeker attacked a local man on the street with a kitchen knife, slashing him across the face and neck. Graphic video of the attack, which blinded the victim in one eye, rapidly spread online. The suspect, identified as Hadi Alodid, has been charged with attempted murder, possession of a knife in a public place, and making threats to kill.

In response, Belfast erupted.

Rioters took to the streets, hurling bricks and bottles at police, torching vehicles, and burning homes in some Belfast neighborhoods with large migrant populations. Police deployed water cannons. Families were forced to flee burning buildings. The Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service responded to 62 incidents in a single night. At least 27 people have been left homeless.

Lest there be any doubt: Arson, mob violence and the burning of innocent people's homes are all indefensible acts. Mobocracy is here, there and everywhere, the enemy of civilization. The masked men who burned out their neighbors for no reason disgraced themselves and their cause.

But that hopefully obvious point aside, here is the question the Western press refuses to ask: Why does this keep happening?

Because it does keep happening. Almost exactly a year ago, Northern Ireland convulsed in riots after two Romanian teenagers were charged with the attempted rape of a schoolgirl in Ballymena. The year before that, riots swept across England itself — Southport, Rotherham, town after town — following a mass stabbing at a girls' dance class by a Muslim terrorist.

The pattern is not difficult to discern. A horrific crime, or series of crimes, is committed. The perpetrator is a migrant, often some variety of "asylum" seeker. The government responds by condemning the violence of an enraged public while studiously avoiding any reckoning with the underlying policies that generated the crime and the inevitable subsequent rage. The Pravda press dutifully follows the official, regime-approved script.

This week's coverage has been instructive. The framing in outlets after establishment outlets has been nothing if not predictable: "anti-immigrant violence," "far-right protesters," "racist riots." Northern Ireland's first minister called the rioters "thugs" but had very little to say about the fact that a Sudanese national blinded a constituent in Northern Ireland's largest city. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned the stabbing as "sickening" - fine — but devoted considerably more rhetorical energy to warning that "violence against people based on their background would not be tolerated."

As the late Canadian comic Norm MacDonald so memorably quipped a decade ago: "What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?"

No one in the current British or Irish political leadership has earnestly asked whether a government that imports the whole world, with inadequate vetting and nonexistent assimilation, bears some meaningful share of the culpability for the social fractures now detonating like dynamite all across the British Isles. Why bother with any introspection? Far easier to just blame the "fascist" street thug menace.

As for the regime media: It's not that the press fails to condemn mob violence. On the contrary, it condemns it loudly and with great self-satisfaction. The press's failure is more insidious: It's the deliberate suppression of honest inquiry into cause and effect. It's the refusal to consider why working-class people across Britain and Ireland are at a boiling point. The question goes unasked, the fateful underlying policies go unexamined, and the pressure cooker keeps building.

The relevant facts are not in dispute. The United Kingdom has presided over one of the largest and least-managed immigration expansions — and, specifically, Muslim population expansions — in modern Western history. Applications for asylum, legitimate or not, have surged. Vetting has been porous. Integration has been an afterthought. And communities that were never consulted have borne the consequences most acutely. They have been told, repeatedly, that their discomfort reflects moral failure on their part rather than policy failure on the government's part.

That is British snobbishness at its absolute worst. Call this, instead, what it is: social transformation without representation. And ruinous social transformation, at that.

At some point, the people who actually live with the consequences of the elite's destructive policies cease asking permission to be heard. The answer is not to excuse violence but to take the underlying grievances seriously before the violence erupts in the first place.

Starmer does not want to have that conversation. The BBC does not want to have that conversation. The New York Times most certainly does not want to have that conversation.

But Belfast is having it — and it's ugly.

Worse, it may not stop anytime soon. Because unless Western governments stop treating skepticism of mass migration as a thought crime and start treating it as a legitimate concern, the fires will keep burning.