03 World

This girl was stabbed in the neck. Meanwhile, just a few days ago in Belfast, a Muslim migrant was caught in the act of trying to saw off the head of someone who had offended him. And in Italy, a man named Issam Chlih beheaded a woman while reciting Qur’an verses.

Nor is that even close to all. The magnificent Kevin Downey Jr. gave me a shout-out here for reporting a few other beheading stories, and there is never any shortage. In February in north London, a 13-year-old boy stabbed two other boys, ages 12 and 13, one of them in the neck. As the attacker did his stabbing, he screamed “Allahu akbar”; after he did his work, he fled into a local mosque. In Italy in January, a man of “North African origin” stabbed a priest in the neck as the clergyman walked through Modena’s city center.

Last August, there was a shocking news story about a 12-year-old Scottish girl who pulled a hatchet and knife on an immigrant in Dundee. A video clip of the hatchet-wielding girl, with other terrified and angry girls shouting at the man to leave them alone, went viral.

The story made international headlines. The girl in the video was dubbed “Sophie of Dundee,” and for some, she became a symbol of everything that has gone wrong in Britain: a working-class child in an impoverished, post-industrial city, harassed by a predatory migrant man, reduced to carrying crude weapons to defend herself, abandoned by the institutions and authorities that were supposed to protect her. The whole tragic story of Britain was contained in that one video. I wrote at the time that these kinds of incidents, and the refusal of political leaders to acknowledge or take them seriously, were driving Britain toward civil war.