Belfast: riots after knife attack
Rioting broke out in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, on Tuesday after a video of a knife attack which left a man seriously injured the day before was posted online. Hundreds of people staged anti-immigration protests and set fire to vehicles and buildings. According to the police, the suspected perpetrator is a 30-year-old man from Sudan.
Farage pouring fuel on the fire
Xenophobia is being whipped up, La Stampa laments:
“This is a scenario that is playing out with increasing frequency: a violent incident involving migrants becomes a political flashpoint. This was already the case, after a young Englishman was stabbed to death in Southampton by a man of Indian origin. ... The leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage, accused the police of double standards and of paradoxically discriminating against white Britons to avoid suspicions of racism. An unfounded accusation, given that even in tolerant England members of ethnic minorities are four times more likely than white people to be stopped by the police and more than twice as likely to be arrested.”
Politicians' language badly out of date
The Daily Telegraph explains why the protests in Northern Ireland are gaining momentum:
“First, the place is still hard-wired for sectarian politics. Second, it is now experiencing migration and demographic change that its institutions were never designed to handle. Finally, there is almost no honest public language for discussing the overlap between the two. ... Northern Ireland's political language is badly out of date for the world it now inhabits. Its leaders are practised at condemning sectarian hatred but visibly uncomfortable talking about migration, integration and crime.”
More plain talk and less innuendo
Its time to talk turkey, argues El Mundo:
“A kind of lethargy paralyses commentators whenever an immigrant ploughs into a crowd in a city centre. Or when a group of immigrants rapes a young woman. ... The atmosphere is thick with innuendo. The dead, the wounded, the raped are being swept under the carpet because there is no diagnosis, no monitoring body, no courage. A presumed non-existent problem is supposed to sort itself out. ... The need to remain silent when bloody spectacles unfold in the heart of cities becomes almost pathological, especially when the perpetrator's origin has played a role on previous occasions.”