Here are some images that are seared in the mind: a knife-wielding refugee, a Black man from Sudan, straddling his bloodstained white victim; immigrant children pulled from burning homes as a mob of balaclava-wearing white men rampage through the streets chanting “foreigners out!” And one more, perhaps the starkest, from a newspaper headline, six black letters on a white background: pogrom.
The Times used the word to describe the riots that followed the near-fatal stabbing of Stephen Ogilvie in Belfast last week. Claire Hanna, MP for Belfast South and Mid Down, also used it, saying: “What you’re seeing is a race-based pogrom.”
Hanna added that the violence was being exacerbated by “negative actors online” — a reference in part to Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, an anti-immigrant rabble-rouser with no connection to Northern Ireland, who urged his followers out on to the streets “after yet another invader attack on our people”.