It was 10.30pm on Monday 8 June when, on Kinnaird Avenue, in north Belfast, a man was chased and stabbed, suffering very serious injuries to his face and eyes. Nothing is known about the causes of the attack, but in a few hours the social media population has already issued the verdict and elevated the event to the new flag of the identity crusade.

The images go viral. The attack is heinous and brutal and has all the elements not to remain limited: it recalls an episode in 2013 in Woolwich, the murder of soldier Lee Rigby, in which the attackers used knives and a machete. Both were British citizens. The attack was immediately circulated online as an attempted decapitation; the alleged attacker, Hadi Alodid, is Sudanese, an immigrant. The perfect recipe to justify violence on the streets: setting fire to cars and several homes, including a house with children inside.

Just like during the 2024 riots, when the news circulated that the attacker at the gymnastics school in Southport – where some girls tragically lost their lives – was an illegal immigrant. He was born and raised in the United Kingdom. In this case too, the false news had circulated that the attacker was an illegal immigrant: that was enough to trigger the fuse. So, when it emerged that Alodid was living in the United Kingdom with a regular permit, all it took to justify the violence was to shift the axis: the problem is not just illegal immigrants, but also regular immigrants. They cannot be integrated. Everyone. Even though only a week ago the crusade was against the Sikhs, a perfectly integrated community.

The mud factory and the Southport “script”.

“People are tired” then becomes the new moral justification with which they try to transform every criminal action of non-ethnically indigenous people – whatever that means, given that the United Kingdom was an empire – into a pretext to legitimize pogroms.

And here several plans emerge. If it is possible to recognize the existence of critical issues linked to the integration of part of the recent immigration, the fracture opens up in the field of solutions. On the one hand there are those who interpret the problem within the scope of the instruments of the rule of law; on the other hand there are those who casually use the term “remigration”, which refers to a logic of generalized expulsion on the basis of identity. It is precisely this approach, based not on individual behavior but on collective belonging, which is in continuity with paradigms incompatible with democratic principles and with the legal architecture of liberal states, in which rights and responsibilities remain individual and not ethnic or national.

The total clash

Hadi Alodid committed a heinous act, undoubtedly. But when his crime is elected as a symbol of “the government continues to ignore the problem”, we abandon the field of factuality to enter that of ideology.

Let’s start with the facts. Alodid would have been granted a residence permit in 2023. At that time the government was led by the Conservatives: Suella Braverman was Home Secretary and Robert Jenrick held the role of Immigration Minister. Both have now merged into Reform UK, the rebranding of the radical wing of the Tories. A paradox.

Two possibilities open up: either direct responsibility is attributed to the choices of the governments that issued the residence permits, and in this case it is contradictory that some of those who participated in that system today propose themselves as a solution; or it is recognized that the granting of legal permission does not, in itself, imply automatic political responsibility for the individual’s subsequent acts.

The game of benevolence

In both cases, a question remains: to what extent could a subsequent government intervene on a person who already holds a valid residence permit, in the absence of new crimes or loss of the legal requirements that justify his/her stay in the country?

But, as often happens in populist rhetoric, the facts are progressively marginalized through collective formulas of delegitimization: “then you don’t want to understand it”, or other expressions that shift the comparison from merit to moral opposition. The specific case that shortly before was a flag now becomes a hat under which to include all the problems that those who interpret democracy as the rule of law would contribute to creating: “yes, continue like this”.

Added to this is a benign-type dynamic, in which, once one argument has been weakened, we move on to another, in a sequence of disconnected examples which however keeps the overall direction of the discussion unchanged: the normalization of radical solutions presented as protection measures, from mass deportations to remigration.

In the end what remains is a trail of crimes: the attack on Kinnaird Avenue against an unarmed man, the attempt to set fire to homes with entire families inside. And the tragedy of our time is that there are those who call this second crime justice.