The Belfast Riots Are a Symptom of a Dysfunctional Immigration System That the Media Ignore

In the aftermath of this month’s attempted beheading in Belfast, for which the Sudanese migrant Hadi Alodid has been charged, the media’s focus predictably turned to the social unrest and rioting that followed the attack. The dominant angle being promulgated by the ‘progressive’ dominated media class was how the riots following the attempted decapitation revealed the latent racism in working class areas of Northern Ireland and particularly, but not exclusively, amongst the Protestant working class. As with every atrocity carried out by someone from a non-European background, the media’s focus is never on the racial, cultural or religious biases that motivate such attacks against civilians right across Europe.

None of our enlightened media class thought to ask whether a black African from a country plagued with Islamic supremacism who has been charged with trying to cut the head off a white man in full public view could have some racial or religiously motivated biases of his own. Instead, we had the media turn up at a purportedly anti-racist protest in Belfast on the Saturday following the attempted beheading to amplify the predictable platitudes about borders being mean and how all migrants are just a homogenous blob of loveliness that should be able to go wherever they want no questions asked. Europe appears to be the only continent on planet Earth where a large cohort of the population responds to atrocities against their fellow citizens by foreign individuals who hate them by organising protests to congratulate themselves for not hating foreigners. 

These self-congratulatory demonstrations of ‘progressive’ virtue are an utterly bizarre and inappropriate response to atrocities committed against your own people. Manchester City Council’s response to the mass slaughter of the city’s teenagers at a pop concert in 2017 involved a public poetry reading that made no reference to the children murdered by the Libyan Islamic terrorist Salman Abedi. Instead, Mancunians were told to “choose love” by the well-intentioned but hopelessly naïve poet Tony Walsh.  The appropriate emotional response to your children being deliberately blown to pieces shouldn’t involve sentimental poetry readings that are trying to manipulate you to bury your righteous anger. It is a grotesque affront to human dignity to ask people to deny their own self-preservation instinct by debasing themselves in such a manner.

As that other Irish-British wordsmith from Manchester, Morrissey, sang in response to the atrocity:

And the silly people sing “Don’t look back in anger.”

And the morons sing and sway “Don’t look back in anger”

I can assure you I will look back in anger till the day I die.

Well, in the nine years since the slaughter at Manchester Arena, our elites have continued to “choose love” by leaving our borders wide open, which has continued to allow some people who prefer to ‘choose hate’ to come here and attack us. The Belfast-based writer and podcaster Jenny Holland quite aptly and wittily remarked in last week’s episode of her highly recommended podcast that instead of an anti-racist demonstration, perhaps an anti-beheading rally would be the more fitting response to an attempted public beheading. We live in such demented times that coming out publicly as beheadophobic is probably a cancellable offence in much of the public sector and creative industries that are dominated by open borders fanatics.

Whether it be the Southport Massacre, the knife attack on children in Dublin’s Parnell Square by an Algerian shouting about the “fucking Irish” or the stabbing to death of the Conservative MP David Amess, the liberal-Left dominated media will never focus on the fact that all migrant related atrocities are the direct negative consequence of their biases in favour of an excessively open asylum system and mass immigration more broadly. It’s worth mentioning that those aforementioned examples are just a tiny sample of the atrocities that have occurred as a result of our asylum and immigration policies. Sure, the rioting that took place in the aftermath of the attempted beheading shouldn’t be condoned and nor can any incidents or rhetoric that involves abusing or attacking people simply because they are non-white. Genuine racism is always morally reprehensible. Viewing all ethnic minorities as a threat, many of whom are well-integrated citizens born and raised on our islands, is as ignorant and close minded as naïve Leftists who refuse to acknowledge that mass immigration from the non-Western world brings with it particular security threats and certain cohorts of people who are incompatible with Western cultural norms and unwilling to adapt to them.

Our morally righteous media class has shown zero curiosity as to whether the rioting and unrest in Belfast could even be partially motivated by legitimate grievances. Surely, an immigration and asylum system that allows beheading enthusiasts, gang rapists and homicidal jihadists to move to our islands with ease should be considered a legitimate grievance worth discussing. It’s not mutually exclusive to oppose rioting and racist thuggery while also wanting to reform a broken immigration system that is tearing asunder the social fabric of our islands. Contrast the UK and Irish media’s response to the recent Belfast riots with how they amplified and sought to understand the grievances of Left wing-inspired ‘mostly peaceful’ rioters in America who attacked the police and burned areas of American cities that included minority owned businesses to the ground after the death of George Floyd in 2020. The British and Irish ‘progressive’ Establishment show no such generosity of spirit or willingness to understand the grievances or justified anger of their own people in the aftermath of any of the ever-increasing number of atrocities being committed against us by dangerous individuals that our elites brought to our shores. Working class led protests against migrant crime and mass immigration in the UK and Ireland, even when peaceful, are collectively smeared as ‘far Right’. Their grievances, even when shared by second and third generation ethnic minority citizens, are too often haughtily dismissed as racist. The more nuanced perspective held by a large swathe of the British and Irish population who support a degree of immigration and are appalled by racism but also want an end to mass immigration is rarely given a fair hearing. Instead, the media too regularly project their own ‘progressive’ biases into their reporting and commentary. 

According to our enlightened political, cultural and media elites, anyone pointing out any negative consequences of their favoured mass immigration policies is guilty of ‘sowing division’. They’d prefer for us to pretend that public beheadings, frenzied knife attacks, car rammings, train bombings, grooming gangs and kids being blown up at concerts are just everyday occurrences that have nothing to do with de facto open borders. In fact, they even deny that we have open borders despite that being a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights means we have no legal right to limit the amount of non-European economic migrants turning up on our shores pretending to be asylum seekers. A responsible and diligent media class that holds truth to power, as the old saying goes, would be holding our political class and the ‘progressive’ deep state accountable for immigration policies that are inimical to the security and well-being of their own citizens.

Andrew Devine is a 2010 Orwell Prize winning blogger and author of Generation F (under the pseudonym Winston Smith). Former radical leftist. Fully recovered. He blogs on his Substack page, the Devine Message. Subscribe here.