The hatchet-wielding Scottish girl was right, and her detractors were wrong. But there’ll be no apologies from the British elite.
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.
But plenty of others, including many in the corporate press and even the police and political leaders in Dundee, saw nothing more than a group of racist little guttersnipes threatening a migrant man simply because of the color of his skin. Indeed, the police initially arrested the girl for carrying a bladed weapon and issued statements saying that what was being shared on the internet was wrong, that the migrant man and his adult sister were the victims, not the girls.
Powerful politicians and major media figures mocked the story of the girls being attacked by a migrant as racist “propaganda slop,” and those who spread the story as “far-right.” The entire intellectual establishment, reacting instinctively with classist prejudice, accused anyone who supported the girls as “scum.”
But it turns out the story was true. The man, a 22-year-old Bulgarian named Ilia Belov, has been found guilty of sexually harassing and assaulting the girls. His sister, 20-year-old Nadjedzha Belova, previously pled guilty to assaulting a 13-year-old girl “by seizing and pulling her hair, dragging her to the ground, and striking her on the head to her injury during the incident.”