A wave of anti-immigrant violence erupted across Belfast after a knife attack Monday night.

British far-right activists are capitalizing on this attack, using social media to circulate videos of a man, believed to be a Sudanese asylum seeker, wielding a knife over a man.

ISD’s Sid Venkataramakrishnan spoke to The Guardian about the far right’s seizing of this opportunity to promote their anti-migrant beliefs.

“It is entirely unsurprising that we’re seeing transnational far-right actors leaping in to exploit the attack, just as we saw with previous tragedies such as the murder of Henry Nowak and the Southport stabbings.” Sid said. “Boosting these signals across platforms ranging from X to Telegram helps international accounts support compatriots abroad. It also provides grist for the mill among their own supporters.”

ISD Senior Analyst Ciarán O’Connor also spoke to The New York Times and Berliner Zeitung about this week’s violence, particularly the predictable nature of these upticks in anti-migrant attacks.

“There’s a playbook,” Ciarán said. “An incident of violence like this is identified and rapidly amplified by not just a domestic but a global, transnational, far-right ecosystem who use such incidents to absorb them into their own kind of international narrative.”

Read Sid’s full feature in The Guardian, and Ciarán’s full feature in The New York Times and Berliner Zeitung.