Belfast has suffered its fair share of horror.
During “the Troubles,” decades of bombings, shootings and riots scarred a city riven by sectarian strife.
But this week a far more vicious kind of violence visited Belfast: an almost medieval act of wanton savagery that has provoked nausea and rage across Britain and Ireland.
It unfolded in all its grim terror Monday night on a dimly lit North Belfast street.
In shaky footage that has gone viral, we see a local man mercilessly pinned down by a monster with a knife.
The knifeman jabs and stabs his victim, slicing at his face, his neck, his back.
He then punches the air with bloodcurdling delight, clearly taking pleasure in his infliction of untold suffering.
Amazingly the fiend’s target survived, thanks to the heroism of passers-by.
One used a hurling stick — the wooden bat used in the Irish sport of hurling — to whack the evil stabber’s head.
Eventually the police arrived and dragged the barbarian off his gravely injured prey.
The cops have since released details of the man’s injuries.
They make for grim reading.
He suffered “significant injuries to his eyes,” they said — in fact he lost one of them.
He suffered deep gashes around his neck.
Let’s be clear: This was an attempted eye-gouging, an attempted beheading, on the streets of the United Kingdom.
It was the return of the primitive cruelty of the Dark Ages.
Then came the revelation that turned this from a horrific atrocity into a political storm: The grinning knifeman, the aspiring beheader, is a migrant from Sudan.
His name is Hadi Alodid, he is 30 years old, and he slipped through France into Dublin and then up to Belfast, where he claimed asylum.
And there, the lethally gullible British authorities granted him leave to remain.
So behind that bloodletting in Belfast lurks a whole regime of complicity.
Yes, only Alodid is responsible for his apocalyptic violence.
But he was aided and abetted by politicians who have overseen the erosion of our borders.
People were sickened by what they saw in Belfast.
They’re fuming about the withering of our sovereignty that has allowed so many men with ill intent to cross into our country.
It’s hard to overstate how broken Britain’s borders are.
Every week hundreds of men from distant, regressive lands sail illegally into England.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer constantly promises to “Stop the Boats,” but he never does.
Instead, he puts these fighting-age men up in four-star hotels and provides them bed and board.
The state’s catastrophic failure to police the borders has resulted in an explosion of crime.
In London in 2024, a staggering 40% of sexual assaults were committed by a foreign national.
It’s happening with other offenses too: Convictions for theft by foreign nationals have risen by almost 80% since 2021, robbery convictions by 19%.
Every week now we read of grim rapes carried out by brutes who came here illegally.
Like the recent gang rape of a girl on Brighton Beach in the south of England by an Iranian and two Egyptians who arrived on small boats.
They filmed their atrocity. They laughed at their victim.
They expressed no remorse.
Other so-called “asylum seekers” are suspected of running rape gangs.
Some have carried out acts of antisemitic violence.
We need to speak frankly: None of these horrors would have occurred if the government had done what the British people have begged it to do — control the borders.
The women raped, the Jews assaulted, that poor man in Belfast robbed of an eye — all were recklessly endangered by elites who have let our borders go to rack and ruin.
That’s what I see in that sickening image of the Belfast stabber raising his fist in glee: the murderous intent of an evil individual, and the murderous indifference of the state.
Ugly scenes have followed in Belfast.
People have hit the streets to vent their fury.
They’ve burned buses and even set fire to migrant hotels.
This is terrible too.
And yet the finger-wagging of our politicians is hard to stomach — for they ignited this tinderbox of tensions.
We now see just how lethal luxury beliefs can be.
Working-class communities are paying the blood price of the self-righteous activism of their supposed “betters.”
Ordinary people are expected to absorb all the risks that come with letting in thousands of unvetted men, while the elites get to bask in all the fake virtue of saying “Refugees welcome.”
The sacrifice of our sovereignty at the altar of globalism has been catastrophic.
It is getting people killed.
There’s blood on that knife in Belfast — and on the hands of our rulers too.
Brendan O’Neill is chief political writer for the British online magazine spiked.
