Michael Adebolajo, one of the two British-born Islamist terrorists of Nigerian descent who beheaded the 25-year-old British soldier Lee Rigby on a street in London on 22 May 2013. Perhaps you had forgotten? The barbarity was the same as in Belfast last Monday. Still image: ITV News via The Telegraph / YouTube.
Thoughts turn to the dark centuries that we believed had been banished to the margins of history, the times when heads were severed and displayed on fortress walls, and the defeated were mutilated so that their bodies would speak louder than their deaths.
I ask myself whether our greatest weakness is our inability to recognise barbarism when it stands directly before us. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is concerned with how social media can be criminalised.
The suicidal immigration policy has transformed European cities into suburbs of the Third World. The migrant in Belfast reportedly had “leave to remain”, that is, permission to stay. A permission granted by bureaucrats who have never been out on Kinnaird Avenue, Molenbeek, Rinkeby, or Saint-Denis at night.
“Diversity is our strength,” it has been said.
Yes, and that strength transforms a working-class district into a gladiatorial arena where the weakest are slaughtered. It is an anthropological abyss that the Left refuses to acknowledge. This is not about “poor, desperate migrants”. It is about men who carry a culture marked by tribal violence, clan loyalties, vengeance, knives, and sharia. In Somalia or Sudan, certain scenes—the man on the ground, the knife cutting across the throat—are commonplace in confrontations between militias. Here among us, it becomes a “stabbing incident”.
The yellow streetlight, the wet asphalt, the black shadow attacking a white body as though slaughtering a goat in a market in Mogadishu. A tribal ritual imported from the Horn of Africa and transplanted onto the streets of Europe. Our misguided governments have transformed our cities into suburbs of the Horn of Africa.
(NB! Graphic images.)
The first battlefield is language. The attacker is a “man”, the attempted beheading is a “stabbing”, and the helpless crowd standing by and watching is “the community”. Here Orwellian Newspeak is applied to the multicultural bloodbath.
And every time we downplay it, attempt to find the “context”, or talk about “mental health” before we even know the facts, we sacrifice another corpse to the cult of multiculturalism. Does the mental health of an African would-be beheader matter more than the life of a white family man? Has this become the moral hierarchy of post-Christian Europe?
The Catholic philosopher Chantal Delsol wrote in Le Figaro about the “return of barbarism”, over which “governments appear quite powerless”. Powerless?
We have become accustomed to a man slashing the face of a girl wearing a Star of David necklace as she walks home from school. The girl I am thinking of has been disfigured for life. We have become accustomed to a Jewish teacher being attacked with a machete.
Belfast had already been ravaged by decades of sectarian division. Now the city adds the wounds of demographic invasion to its history of suffering. In Northern Ireland, a country where identity politics has been driven to extremes, there were violent clashes and demonstrations against immigration last summer.
After the attempted beheading, Belfast has been burning.
In some of the city’s neighbourhoods, signs have appeared stating: “Women and children are not safe in this area.”
Schools have been closed and trains halted out of fear of riots.
Jonathan Hall, the anti-terrorism tsar, has finally admitted that immigration is a “national security crisis”.
And no Italian media are talking about it. Or rather, Corriere della Sera says that the failed attempted beheading is “attributed to a refugee”. Attributed?
La Stampa—the newspaper of Turin’s left-wing elite—speaks of “violent gangs”.
In this ridiculous “woke” dramaturgy, it is not considered proper to report on an attempted beheading in an ordinary European residential district, or on the spread of exotic methods of murder in general, introduced thanks to a lack of border control. The media’s march towards the abyss of irrelevance is occurring in parallel with politics’ decline and self-delegitimisation. Politicians and authorities responsible for the migration crisis remain silent, downplay, and deny, only then to lament that “right-wing extremism is growing in strength”. They themselves have nothing to do with murderous migrants or hooded thugs, of course, and watch from a safe distance while the monopoly on violence crumbles.
War is as old as cities, kingdoms, and empires. It is among humanity’s eternal tragedies. It destroys cities, takes innocent lives, ravages landscapes, and fills graveyards. It is almost always unjust to those subjected to it. Yet even in its brutality, war remains connected to a purpose beyond itself. One wages war to defend a border, conquer a territory, impose dominion, preserve independence, or secure the survival of a people. Barbarism begins when that purpose disappears behind the very enjoyment of destruction itself.
A soldier may kill out of duty, fear, discipline, or conviction. The barbarian kills while simultaneously seeking to destroy the very humanity of the one he kills. He wishes to destroy the face before taking the life. He wishes to degrade as much as to exterminate. Recent history provides us with many examples of this reality.
In Rwanda in 1994, neighbours massacred one another with machetes in a frenzy that seemed to have broken all ties to civilisation. In areas controlled by ISIS, men were beheaded before cameras so that their deaths could be seen by the entire world. In Mexico, drug lords hang mutilated bodies from bridges and leave human remains in public squares to terrorise their opponents. In Sudan, entire villages have been subjected to murder, looting, and rape. On 7 October 2023, Jewish families were massacred, civilians murdered, and images of their suffering transformed into trophies intended for circulation on social media.
Belfast is part of the same story.
Civilisation does not abolish these dark forces. It keeps them in check. It restrains them. It disciplines them. But when civilisation ceases to see them, refuses to name them, or dissolves them into abstract explanations, it weakens itself. Societies do not die because they encounter enemies. All societies have encountered enemies. They begin to die when they lose their judgement, when they can no longer distinguish the tragic dimension of history from its most monstrous forms, when they confuse war, which belongs to the human condition, with barbarism, which is the very celebration of humanity’s destruction of humanity.
Some thousand “no-go zones” in Europe, cities in flames, a demographic upheaval without precedent in history except in Lebanon, vandalised churches, an explosion in sexual violence, Jews fleeing or being thrown out of windows, daily stabbings in the smallest places, forced marriages (from 70,000 in Sweden to 200,000 in France), honour killings, beheaded teachers and priests with their throats cut, female genital mutilation, sharia courts, hundreds of celebrities under bodyguard protection…
When will we have had enough and say no to this colonisation, and take back control of Europe’s borders and our own destiny?
The Critic speaks of “Lebanonisation”:
Protestant loyalists and Catholic nationalists have stood side by side in Belfast, united in a demonstration against mass immigration. For some in Northern Ireland, historical divisions are evidently less important than today’s challenges. As the old saying goes: “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” This bizarre alliance should surprise no one. What we are witnessing, both in Northern Ireland and in England, is a reshaping of traditional identities and political allegiances in response to a new and existential challenge. Old enmities and alliances are beginning to crumble, while mass immigration is changing the character of our societies and reshaping political norms. Over recent decades, we have opened our doors to millions of people from countries with vastly different cultural, ethical, and political norms. Instead of encouraging assimilation or radically reducing immigration levels in this country, the establishment has pursued a deliberate policy of multiculturalism.
On 20 April 1968, the British politician Enoch Powell delivered a dramatic and prophetic speech, as the first politician in Europe:
“It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. […] Under such circumstances nothing is more necessary than to reduce the inflow to negligible proportions and to take the necessary legislative and administrative steps without delay […] As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.”
Following his criticism of multiculturalism, Powell received 100,000 letters of support.
A Gallup poll showed that 74 per cent of the British public agreed with him. Nevertheless, Powell was dismissed from his position as Conservative Shadow Defence Secretary. The politician educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, a Hellenist and poet, was demonised in the media.
When a white man reacts, it is “racism”. When a black man saws through someone’s throat, it is an “incident”. This is a civilisation at twilight. It does not fall with a cannon shot, but with a thousand knives wielded by hands that have never built anything of what they destroy.
The West opened its doors believing that progress was contagious, that the noble savage would learn Magna Carta and respect for life. Instead, it imported the bush, the savannah, the desert, the Qur’an, and madness with its unwritten laws of blood and domination. The victim from Belfast fights between life and death in a hospital bed. Perhaps he will never see the light again. If he has children, they will forever bear the trauma of a father who was almost beheaded in the street. And the attacker?
He will sit in a comfortable cell, assisted by lawyers paid for by the state, and invoke childhood trauma or retaliation against “Islamophobia”. Meanwhile, more boats will cross the Channel, more residence permits will be granted, and more neighbourhoods will be “enriched”.
For how long?
Until a new video shows another mutilated head in a European street?
Until the last natives, in utter despair, realise that their patience has run out and that the defence of their own country and people is not a crime but a duty, before the Tiber foams with blood?