Editor's Introduction – the following article comes from Michael Shaw, Associate Pastor of Strandtown Baptist Church in Belfast. He gives us an on-the-ground assessment of what's going on in the city, and urges us to think carefully about some important issues.
It is one thing to read about civil disorder in a newspaper. It is another to watch it unfold on your own streets. Last night (Tuesday, 9 June), like many others across the nation, I watched news footage of buses and cars set alight and buildings ablaze in Belfast. In one area of the city, hundreds of masked men carrying bottles and bricks set bins on fire and shouted ‘foreigners out’.
In a particularly harrowing sequence, a family – including a young child – was evacuated by members of the fire service and bundled into the back of an ambulance, the house next door to theirs engulfed in flames. That house is just over a mile from the church where I serve as a pastor. Hundreds of young men, many of them masked and unidentifiable, moved through the streets whilst buildings and vehicles burned behind them.
The supposed provocation for the disorder was a brutal attack the previous evening. A Sudanese man accosted a local resident on Kinnaird Street in North Belfast, struck him about the face and head, and, in the detail that sent shockwaves through the city, attempted to behead him. He was swiftly arrested for attempted murder and his victim continues to receive treatment in hospital.
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