Masked thugs smashed the windows of a Belfast house with a wheelie bin during a night of anti-migrant violence, hours after a Sudanese asylum seeker was arrested over a knife attack in the city. Filmed at about 10.30pm on Monday night on a Belfast street, bystanders captured the moment when a man believed to be a Sudanese asylum seeker wielded a knife over another man he had pinned to the ground. By Tuesday, the clip had become the latest transnational ‘trigger event’ – in the mould of the Southport killings and the case of the murdered 18-year-old student Henry Nowak – as far-right activists from Britain and beyond seized on it.
Those playing a pivotal role in the spread of the footage on Elon Musk’s X included the far-right activist known as Tommy Robinson, fresh from a meeting this week at a sumptuous Moscow hotel with the billionaire’s father. X eventually placed age-related restrictions and a warning on the video shared by Robinson, but by Tuesday afternoon it had more than 52,000 views, while full and uncensored versions were still easy to find across the platform. Robinson posted details of planned demonstrations across Britain and Northern Ireland on X, which Elon Musk shared to his 240 million followers.
“Masked thugs smashed windows of a Belfast house after a Sudanese asylum seeker was arrested for a knife attack, as far-right activists spread footage online.”
As police and political leaders in Belfast pleaded for calm and cautioned against the public getting taken in by rumours before the full facts are established, the incident has once again underlined the challenges social media poses to law enforcement, and the opportunities for extremists seeking to sow division. “It fits into the current trend of trigger events where something horrifying happens and is then attached to an existing narrative being pushed by the far right, with mass migration being promoted as the reason,” said Joe Mulhall, the director of research at Hope Not Hate. “We saw this in Southport, Southampton with the Henry Nowak case as well as in Epping, with the anti asylum seeker protests there. The even bigger danger is when you have a number of such events in quick succession.”
Some rightwing commentators have attempted to do just that by suggesting, without foundation, that a stabbing in Manchester was also somehow related to immigration. There has also been a proliferation of AI-generated images promoting protests. Telegram was at one point the favoured platform for the organisation of such actions, but activists are now openly discussing plans on X. The masked thugs targeting a house with a wheelie bin were part of the wider unrest that followed the knife attack, as the far right continues to exploit such events to stoke division.