How the Belfast stabbing was the spark to a fuse loaded with grievance and provocation

Politicians, social media and far-right agitators convinced people that migrant-targeting violence would solve all their problems

Within minutes of the footage going online – of a Black man stabbing a white man – there was a sense of inexorability to what came next in Northern Ireland.

The grievances, the social media platforms, the politicians’ doublespeak and the international cheerleaders all provided a fuse. On Monday night came the spark.

Those who saw the video will not easily forget it: an assailant on a north Belfast street stabbing and slashing his victim in the face and neck, shouting in Arabic. Residents intervened and halted the assault but the victim, Stephen Ogilvie, was seriously injured, including having lost an eye.

On Wednesday, Hadi Alodid, 30, a Sudanese refugee, appeared in Belfast magistrates court charged with attempted murder. The judicial system was fast, but the gutted homes of minority ethnic families showed that a warped form of vigilante justice was even faster.

“Who was in there?” a woman asked on Tuesday night, indicating a scorched, smouldering ruin on McMaster Street, off Newtownards Road, in east Belfast.

The woman nodded, as if it made sense that a family should be expelled for a crime committed by a stranger on the other side of the city and that hundreds of youths, many with masks, should be prowling streets filled with acrid smoke and the drone of police helicopters. To the rioters who burned homes and vehicles, including a Glider bus and a police car, it did, in fact, make perfect sense.

Their social media feeds, elected representatives and far-right agitators, such as Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson, assured them it was all connected: immigrants and refugees were taking houses, imposing alien customs and committing crimes while the police did nothing, thus requiring community action.

That worldview underpinned riots in Belfast in 2024, a copycat to riots in England after the Southport attacks, and impelled the ethnic cleansing of Roma from Ballymena last year and patrols by vigilante groups who intimidate dark-skinned men.

Yet Northern Ireland’s crime rate fell last year by 3.3% from the previous 12 months and reached its lowest level since 1998, with especially steep falls in violence and injury. Racist hate crime and racist incidents, in contrast, reached their highest level since records began in 2004.

Within hours of Monday night’s attack, social media platforms crackled with rage. “Enough is enough!” many posted. By 10am on Tuesday activists where sharing lists of assembly points and times. All business