Droves of masked men gather. Cars and bins are set alight. Thick smoke fills the air.
The mob moves through residential streets, smashing windows and kicking in doors, targeting homes believed to belong to migrants.
A Turkish barbershop and an Arab-owned business are attacked. Makeshift checkpoints appear, as men stop cars and scrutinise drivers’ ethnicity.
These are scenes from Belfast, Northern Ireland. The violence followed a brutal stabbing this week in which a white man was critically injured after being attacked in the eye, neck and back. The suspect was quickly identified as a Sudanese national who had entered the UK through legal routes. Footage of the attack spread rapidly online.
Within hours, public figures such as Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe, Katie Hopkins and Richard Dawkins were presenting the assault as evidence of a wider threat posed by migrants. The attack was framed as an attempted “beheading”, transforming an individual act of violence into a racial story about a nation under siege.
