And Now What?: Northern Ireland Edition

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, June 09, 2026

 

The BBC reports that:

 

A man believed to be Sudanese has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a “brutal” knife attack in Belfast, police have said.

 

The man, in his 30s, remains in custody after the incident in north Belfast at about 22:30 BST on Monday.

 

Video circulating online shows a number of people, including one wielding a hurling stick, confronting the apparent attacker until the police arrived.

 

A man injured in the attack, aged in his 40s, is in hospital where his condition is described as serious.

 

Later in the story, the BBC notes that:

 

Northern Ireland’s Justice Minister, Naomi Long, condemned the attack and said “there is no place for this kind of horrific violence in our community”.

 

What does this mean? I’m not picking on Naomi Long, or on Northern Ireland. A lot of American politicians talk like this, too. What I’m asking is: why? What, precisely, does Long think she’s conveying? Against whom is she arguing? The comedian John Cleese once pointed out that, for some reason, flight attendants tend to emphasize the word “will” when informing the passengers that “the plane will soon be landing.” “The plane will soon be landing,” they say, as if prepared for the passengers, in unison, to shout back, “oh no it won’t!” So it is with politicians’ responses to terrorist attacks. Presumably, nobody thinks that Naomi Long is in favor of public beheadings. Nor is the desirability of public beheadings a live topic in Northern Ireland. So what — or who — is her audience? “There is no place for this kind of horrific violence in our community” is, within this context, completely meaningless. It was stipulated, tacitly, before anyone said a word.

 

What matters is what comes next. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said, that he will have “absolutely no tolerance for abhorrent scenes of violence like this on our streets.” That’s good. But, again, what does he mean? As far as I can see, there are three options. The first option is that Britain intends to rework its immigration process so that Sudanese would-be beheaders find it harder to get in. The second is that Britain does not intend to do that, but that it intends to increase the use of the police to deal with would-be beheadings if and when they happen. The third is that Britons ought to consider would-be beheadings an inevitability in an interconnected world, and to accept that the government’s only role is punishing their perpetrators after the fact. One can construct a case for all of these options, but, in order to do so, one has to say more than that one has “absolutely no tolerance for abhorrent scenes of violence.” Outside of the psych ward, that is a given. The material question is what, specifically, do you intend to do now?

 

In Naomi Long’s case, what came next was this:

 

“I don’t think its helpful, for people to seize on this as yet another weapon, in the war that they wage on issues around immigration, I do not think it is healthy and I do not think it is fair.”

 

But that, too, doesn’t mean anything because it lacks a substantive argument. Why isn’t it “helpful”? What does “seize” mean? Why is complaining about a Sudanese immigrant trying to behead someone in the street equivalent to wielding a “weapon” in “war”? What are the “issues around immigration,” and why, if this isn’t indicative of anything bigger, were the words “yet another” used? Why isn’t it “healthy” or “fair” to inquire about this, or even to be angry? Sometimes, the answer to these questions is that we need to wait for the details. But that doesn’t apply here, because, as Long and Starmer have already conceded, “there is no place for this kind of horrific violence in our community” and the government will have “absolutely no tolerance for abhorrent scenes of violence like this on our streets,” and, as such, there can be no extenuating circumstances that render the attack acceptable.

 

What Long and her friends really seem to mean is that the people of Northern Ireland ought to consider this an act of “horrific violence,” but then ask no further questions about how it happened. Look through the responses and you will glean a list of acceptable discussion points. On the Allowed List are the horror of the incident, the bravery of the citizens who intervened, the lamentable existence of knives on the British archipelago, and the kind demeanor of the police and medical services. On the Not Allowed List is why a Sudanese lunatic was in Northern Ireland in the first place, attempting to behead someone on the street. There may, somehow, be a good answer to that inquiry, but it won’t be satisfying to anyone in the community if it is accompanied  by a broad injunction to shut up.