Amina Shareef, a researcher of anti-Muslim racism, says that the racist violence in Belfast should not be understood simply as the work of fringe extremists, social media algorithms or far-right agitators. Masked men attacked homes believed to belong to migrants, targeted a migrants-owned businesses, and set up makeshift checkpoints to scrutinise drivers’ ethnicity. The violence followed a stabbing in which the suspect was identified as a Sudanese national who had entered the UK legally. Public figures, including Nigel Farage, Katie Hopkins and Tommy Robinson, quickly framed the attack as proof of a wider migrant threat, turning an individual act of violence into a racial story about a nation under siege. She says that such violence is made possible by years of mainstream anti-Muslim and anti-migrant racism. Politicians and newspapers have repeatedly portrayed asylum seekers as criminals, terrorists, welfare scroungers and opportunists, encouraging some white citizens to see themselves as defenders of a threatened nation. She concludes that Belfast was not simply a breakdown of Britain’s political order, but an expression of it. The question, she says, is not whether extremists exploited a tragedy, but why so many people have been taught to see racial violence as national defence. - @middleeasteye