The following article by Mike Morrissey was first published in Unity, the weekly paper of the Irish Communist Party.
FREQUENTLY, '11th night' bonfires are festooned with images of nationalist politicians. This year, a 20-metre pyre in Moygashel had a model mosque on top companied by slogans 'end the threat of radical Islam' and 'secure our borders'. When the PSNI attempted to intervene, it was set alight on July 9th. In August, a number of what looked like professionally-prepared placards appeared on lampposts at the Cloughfern roundabout (beside Newtownabbey Hospital). They contained extracts from a variety of news sources (Belfast Live, the Belfast Newsletter) but all described crimes committed by Muslim immigrants. Elsewhere in Newtownabbey, the wall outside Merville, one of the old garden villages popular with pensioners, was sprayed with 'Fuck Islam' – painted over admittedly within days.
These three, amongst many similar examples, are representative of a growing narrative that declares all Muslim men especially violent and particularly abusive of women (for example, in grooming gangs) either because of the unacceptable values of their religion or their actual hostility to Christianity. The same roundabout has also seen recent anti-immigrant violence and was mentioned as a key site in an X post (09/06/2026) 'to all the men of Northern Ireland: in light of the attempted beheading last night, they are calling for a mass protest'. The slogan was 'enough is enough', all of which was presented as a spontaneous reaction to specific events, most recently a knife crime in North Belfast.
The attack on Stephen Ogilvie by Hadi Alodid, originally from Sudan, was truly horrific; but for the courage of those nearby, it could have been considerably worse. While condemnation of the act was universal, some went considerably further. Jim Allister warned of 'alien cultures' being imported into the UK. Restore Britain pledged 'a Restore Britain government will put murderous, third-world savages to death'. Unsurprisingly, given that the attacker had originally travelled from the Republic, the usual suspects called for the hardening of the Irish Border – Gavin Robinson warned about the dangers of 'an open porous border'.
In short, the slogans and placards are part of a developing anti-Muslim narrative. In fact, when the Belfast protests erupted into violence, those engaged in ethnic cleansing didn't seem to differentiate between religions – non-white faces, including Christian, were sufficient pretext for people to be driven from their burning homes.
Equally, those claiming Alodid's violence was completely alien to Northern Ireland were accused of 'historical amnesia' by Suzanne Breen (Belfast Telegraph, 09/06/2026) citing the similarly horrific murder of senator Paddy Wilson by Loyalist paramilitaries. She might have mentioned also the Shankill Butchers or Stakeknife's torture chambers.
The Great Replacement Theory
Central to the narrative is the Great Replacement theory, i.e. that liberal elites have deliberately encouraged migration to discriminate against and disempower nationals. The idea that migration is overwhelmingly made up of 'military-age' men is simply misleading. Migration is incredibly dangerous. It's often undertaken by men alone who, under 'family reunion' procedures, hope they can bring their families later – the procedure was actually suspended by the British Home Office last September (The Economist 06/08/2026).
The narrative's origins lie not just in the streets of Northern Ireland but also lead to the world's richest man. Asked by The Economist if he was anti-Muslim, Elon Musk responded that 'I am against rape and murder' (28/07/2026). On X, he claimed 'a quarter million little girls were—still are—being systematically raped by migrant gangs in Britain'. This figure came from Restore Britain's 'Rape Gang Inquiry Report' where it was asserted that the abusers were 'predominantly Muslim Pakistani gangs'. Child abuse should never be tolerated and cannot be relativised by reference to customs or culture. Those investigating it should never be deterred by racism accusations. Nevertheless, the Economist interrogated the Restore statistic and found it mostly nonsense.
A major theme of the narrative is that the UK is particularly prone to an Islamic takeover – actually only about 6.5% of the UK population identify as Muslim, 0.6% in Northern Ireland – 10,870 people (www.theglobalstatistics.com). In a recent interview for Israeli army radio, Benjamin Netanyahu described Britain as 'the first Islamic republic to get a nuclear weapon' (The Guardian, 14/08/2026), echoing a statement originally made by JD Vance. Last September, Donald Trump claimed that the London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, wanted London to 'go to sharia law' (BBC News, 25/09/2025). Nigel Farage claimed that anti-white racism has become 'embedded into the heart' of the British state (www.political.org, 15/06/2026). More widely, Marco Rubio claimed that the whole of Europe faced 'civilizational erasure …accelerated by godless communist revolutions and anti-colonial uprisings' (Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, 16/08/2026).
The fact that the narrative strays far from a complex, multi-sided truth is irrelevant. It's actually an organised project (the development of a fortress, Christian west) shared by the Trump administration and the majority of far-right political parties in Europe. In a destabilised world with mass population movement resulting from climate change, conflict, drought and famine, the goal is to insulate these developed economies from problems they helped create. A further purpose is to define all Islam as undifferentiated, extremist, murderous and intent on undermining the west. This universally pre-legitimates any action, no matter how extreme, taken against Muslims or Islamic countries as was seen in Israel's response to the Hamas attack – systematically levelling Gaza and ethnically cleansing the West Bank. It was further used to justify the unprovoked attack on Iran.
Organised Violence
In Northern Ireland, PSNI data (14/05/2026) show that hate incidents motivated by race are now more than double those labelled as sectarian. Race hate incidents are also the fastest growing – by over 30% between April 2024 and March 2026. The highest monthly incidents in June 2020 numbered 109. In June 2025, the figure was 348. It seems that a region steeped in sectarianism for decades has easily transferred its focus to another 'other'.
A key question is whether such statistics reflect a spontaneous reaction to incidents reported in the news and amplified on social media. Nigel Farage insists so, for example his 'pure, cold rage' response at the murder of Henry Nowak. Yet as Keir Starmer made clear, that was nothing less than a call for violence completely at odds with the wishes of the Nowak family.
A Guardian investigation (08/08/2026) of Northern Ireland's recent violence also suggests more organisation, less spontaneity. For example, exhortations to protest included: instructions to 'wear dark clothing….be prepared to fight or be arrested'; 'leave mobile phones at home and deactivate dashboard cameras and door-bell phones'; the Guardian concluded 'the agitators refined their methods to hit more targets and reduce the chance of arrest'.
Rather than a reaction, multiple 'posts about dark-skinned men in parks and foreigners moving into houses of multiple occupation' from a variety of organised networks prepared people for an 'animating event' like the knife crime. This works. A local poll for More in Common found that 8% of respondents thought it justified to burn migrants out of their homes, 11% agreed with intimidating them out of an area, 75% were worried about asylum seekers coming to Northern Ireland.
Anti-Social Media
The Centre for Countering Digital Hate undertook an analysis of posts related to the Belfast violence on Musk's platform X (The Owner Amplifier, June 2026) by Musk himself (240 million followers), Rupert Lowe from Restore Britain and Tommy Robinson. All were designed to amplify tension: Musk posted 'Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change'; Lowe called for mass deportations; Robinson for 'flash protests' – 'give us all a voice tonight'. The Centre then analysed 72,000 replies to these posts to identify those inciting violence against immigrants and concluded that 3930 did so explicitly. Two thirds of these were replies to Tommy Robinson. Examples include: 'Muslims in that house. BURN IT THE FUCK DOWN; 'BELFAST IS TAKING OUT THESE IMMIGRANTS. GOOD. EXECUTE THEM ALL'; and, Britain should start beheading migrants'. X itself thus functions to incite violence and murder while the social media environment as a whole disproportionately amplifies division and hate.
Beyond the violence, beyond the images of women, still in their care uniforms, carrying their children from torched homes, anti-Muslim sentiment is being progressively normalised. A study by British Future (The Guardian 15/06/2026) found that one in six of the general public strongly agreed that 'the growth in the Muslim population poses a foundational threat to UK culture' and one in five did not agree that 'Muslim people born in this country are as British as white, non-Muslim people born here'.
Almost two centuries ago, the Irish fleeing famine conditions to Britain were the threat characterised (including by Engels) as living with their pigs, permanently drunk and perpetually violent. Fascism takes many forms, but all have two things in common; the pretence that it represents a revolt against an 'establishment', and; the identification of a minority group as the source of a nation's problems that could be resolved if only the group were disappeared.