Axel rudakubana

Last week’s headline in the New York Times was obfuscating: ‘In the UK, a Violent Cycle: Hateful Attacks, Right-Wing Agitation and Riots.’ Because hatred is now irrevocably associated with the ‘right-wing’, innocent American newspaper readers will have presumed that these agitating, rioting reactionaries were also the authors of the ‘hateful attacks’. The New York Times and the PBS News Hour delivered such twisted, incomplete and minimised versions of recent incendiary events in the UK that I was obliged to tell the stories of Henry Nowak and Stephen Ogilvie to more than one ordinarily up-to-date American friend, because the salient details had been omitted from left-leaning reports.

‘I can’t breathe.’ When those chilling words were uttered by George Floyd in 2020, they provoked global outrage. The combination of the horrific manner of Floyd’s choking by the police officer Derek Chauvin, the pressure cooker of lockdown and the historical tensions around American race relations led to worldwide protests; despite Floyd’s death being 4,000 miles away in Minnesota, Keir Starmer felt compelled to take the knee in solidarity. ‘I can’t breathe.’ These were also the dying words of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old student in Southampton murdered by the 23-year-old Vickrum Digwa. Nowak was coming back from a night out when he was stabbed by Digwa five times with a ceremonial knife. When the police were called, Digwa accused Nowak of having been racist.