On June 8, 2026, Stephen Ogilvie, a 44-year-old disabled man, was attacked by Hadi Alodid, a 30-year-old Sudanese asylum seeker, on a quiet residential street in north Belfast. The assault was filmed by bystanders at the scene and posted online. Police immediately warned the public not to share the footage, but within less than an hour, it went viral after far-right anti-immigration campaigner Tommy Robinson posted it on his X account, which had more than two million followers. The very next night, on June 9, 2026, a group of masked men took to the streets of Belfast, setting homes on fire because they believed immigrants lived there.
Hadi Alodid, the attacker, had already been arrested on the very same night of the attack. But the violence that followed was fuelled by something deeper, a hatred towards immigrants, no matter who they were, where they came from, or what they had done.
According to an NBC News report, Yara Navrotska, a Ukrainian refugee living in Belfast, was attacked despite having no connection to the incident. She escaped through her back door with her dog as her neighbour’s house was set ablaze. She believed her street was targeted simply because it was known as an area where many immigrants lived and that people in the area were not particularly welcoming towards certain immigrant groups. She was not Sudanese. She was not an asylum seeker. She was just an immigrant, and that was enough to invite hate.
The attacks in Belfast were not just a reaction to the knife incident. They reflected years of political messaging in which immigrants have been blamed for problems such as crime, unemployment, the housing crisis and pressure on public services in the UK. As anti-immigration narratives have become more common in politics, they have created a more hostile atmosphere for immigrants across the country. This was not the first time it had turned bloody and violent.
On July 29, 2024, three young girls, Bebe King, 6, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, 9, were stabbed and killed at a dance class in Southport. Before the facts were even established, far-right activists, including Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and Andrew Tate flooded social media with a false post claiming that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker. Their ill-intended and false posts were viewed at least 15.7 million times. The posts were everywhere, and that anger quickly moved from screens to streets. Riots broke out across England and Northern Ireland. According to Al Jazeera, several mosques were attacked.
The attacker turned out to be a 17-year-old born in Cardiff to Rwandan Christian parents, British by birth, with no immigration status, but innocent communities had paid the price for false claims.
These patterns are never just about one incident. They are about what has been said, shared and normalised long before anyone takes to the streets. And the permission to hate had already been given. Just 12 days before the violence in Belfast, British MP Rupert Lowe, a former Reform UK MP who left to start his own far-right party called Restore Britain, focused entirely on stopping and reversing immigration, posted on his X
“I don’t believe we should import millions of Pakistanis and Indians to do jobs that unemployed Brits should be doing. If that makes me a racist, then so be it.”
This was not an isolated post. Lowe had consistently posted anti-immigrant content on social media. In another post, he argues that legal immigration was “a bigger problem than illegal immigration” and that any foreigner who could not speak English should “go home”. In a separate post, he proposed a “red-list” system targeting countries like Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia and Bangladesh, linking them to crime, extremism and “cultural concerns”. He also asserted that “millions will have to go.”
Similar statements were made by other political leaders. After the Belfast attack, Reform UK, a right-wing populist and far-right political party in the United Kingdom, leader Nigel Farage said Britain’s immigration policies had led to “horrific consequences” and called for a ban on visas from Sudan, saying the attack showed why immigration needed to be reduced. He called for a blanket ban on people from that community entering the country. in. According to The Guardian, he went even further, saying that he would ban all foreign nationals from social housing, and those who could not find private accommodation would “lose their right to remain and be liable for deportation”. In a lengthy essay, he also wrote that “white Brits will become a minority in this country before the end of the century”.
Neither Lowe nor Farage was referring to Hadi Alodid, the attacker. Instead, they used the actions of one individual to make broader claims about immigrants as a whole. This is the kind of rhetoric that takes the crime of a single person and uses it to justify attributing blame to an entire community.
Critics had warned about this for years. As far back as 2013, Green Party leader Natalie Bennett warned that the way politicians spoke about immigrants was putting ordinary people in danger. She argues repeatedly that blaming immigrants could send a powerful message to people who are already angry and fearful – a message that, over time, could contribute to acts of violence. She warned there was a “real risk” of this happening “if we keep this rhetoric up”. Thirteen years later, those warnings took on renewed significance when fires were lit in Belfast. According to recent reports by Human Rights Watch, things had only gotten worse. In its 2026 World Report, the organisation warned that the government’s own approach to immigration had helped spread anti-migrant hatred and that the far-right groups had used it to their advantage.
And when Belfast riots happened, the same pattern followed. Hope Not Hate , a UK organisation that researches and monitors far-right extremism, revealed that the stabbing had become a “trigger event”. A neo-Nazi group called the Ulster Youth Club, part of a global network known as Active Clubs, was among the first to respond. According to Wired, they played a key role in organising and directing the masked men who carried out much of the violence on the streets. People were told not to bring phones or cameras. Some were even told to remove their Ring doorbells so there would be no record of their actions. Another disturbing detail emerged from a report by the World Socialist Web Site: a list of migrant homes had already been circulating among loyalist groups since August 2025 and had been sent to police as early as January 2026, months before the stabbing happened. If accurate, this suggests the riots were not a simply spontaneous reaction to a single knife attack. The infrastructure for targeting migrant communities had already been put in place long before the violence erupted.
The irony was striking. The family of the man whose attack was being used to justify the violence publicly condemned the riots themselves. While politicians were making demands and far-right figures were calling for mass deportations, the victim’s family released a statement through the PSNI. The family stated that they were “completely devastated” by what had happened to Stephen and made it clear that the violence on the streets was “not welcome”. They urged people not to spread false information and pleaded, “Do not use our tragedy to fuel hostility.” They also rejected the anti-immigrant narrative that had grown around the attack, saying that migrants make a “deeply valuable contribution” to the country and that Britain depends on them. The family of the victim was defending the very communities being attacked in Stephen’s name. They were not calling for anger. They were calling for calm. But their appeal went largely unheard
The fire of anti-immigration rhetoric was already burning long before the organised riots. It was stoked every time a politician blamed immigrants for the country’s problems. Every time a public figure with millions of followers singled out an entire community as a threat. Every speech, every headline and every post that portrayed migrants as dangerous added more fuel. The hatred did not appear overnight. It has been cultivated for years. All it needed was a spark to spread further. That is why one incident can so quickly become a wider campaign against an entire community. The focus shifts away from the individual accused of the crime and towards people who share nothing with the suspect except their background or the way they are perceived. Innocent families become the ones who pay the price.
One man committed a crime. An entire community paid the price.
The Belfast riots were not just an accident. They were the outcomes of years of rhetoric that turned suspicion into fear and fear into hostility. Unless those who repeatedly fuel that hostility are held accountable for the consequences of their words, the next Belfast is already being planned. The debate over immigration is not going away. But if politicians continue to treat migrants as easy political targets instead of human beings, stories like Belfast will keep repeating themselves in different places and under different names. The victims may change. The headlines may change. But the politics behind them will remain exactly the same.
This article is republished from The Secularist under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Karuna Kumari Kandregula is an independent writer and researcher from Andhra Pradesh, India, whose work focuses on social issues, politics, education, rural systems, gender, child protection, and climate.
