Why Are the Irish Media Ignoring an Apparent Islamist Knife Attack?

On July 29th 2025, a member of the Irish police (Garda Siochana) was attacked by Abdullah Khan, a second-generation Pakistani Muslim immigrant in Dublin city centre. Ireland’s state broadcaster, RTE, in the immediate aftermath of the knife attack was quick to assert that the attacker had Irish citizenry: “The man, who is an Irish citizen and born in Ireland, can be questioned for up to 24 hours.”

However, those of us of a more cynical disposition across these islands have noticed in recent years that when the media rush to assert the Irish or British identity of a violent criminal, it usually signifies he’s from a non-European ethnic minority background. If last week’s Dublin knife attacker had been an indigenous Irish man, we wouldn’t have been informed of what passport he’s entitled to or where he was born. Similarly, the Welsh choirboy status of the Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana would never have been immediately asserted had he been a Welsh choirboy. Unfortunately for Ireland’s biased liberal-Left media and political establishment, there’s a thing called reality that people can now record on smartphones and see with their own eyes. So, as footage emerged online of last week’s knife attack, people noticed that the perpetrator wasn’t ethnically Irish and they pointed this out on social media. The media and police response was to accuse the people who noticed that the man wasn’t ethnically Irish of spreading misinformation.

It would appear that our governing and media elites only want us to notice ethnic and cultural diversity when they want us to regurgitate the diversity is our strength mantra. Last week’s knife attack by an ethnic Pakistani Muslim is an example of diversity not always being a strength and so the political and media establishment has pretended not to notice the ethnicity of the attacker and the culturally specific nature of what appears to be an Islamist style attack that is alien to Irish culture.

The cognitive dissonance of the open borders liberal-Left demands that diversity is a strength while simultaneously reacting to expressions of cultural incompatibility by insisting we are all the same.

Focusing on Abdullah Khan’s passport as opposed to his cultural identity is a way for the media to sidestep dealing with inconvenient truths that conflict with their pro-migration biases. According to the liberal-Left mindset, being Irish, British or European is just a matter of having the correct paperwork in order. While I’m not an ethnic nationalist, being of mixed ancestry myself, at the very least I expect ethnic minority citizens to fully integrate into the culture of their host society. They also need to remain firmly in the minority so that there’s a dominant, indigenous culture with which to integrate.

Two days after the Dublin knife attack, new footage was obtained and broadcast by the independent, conservative leaning media outlet Gript.

It showed the seconds leading up to the attack in which Abdullah Khan is seen running from behind towards the Garda while shouting “Allahu Akbar“. This is an Arabic phrase shouted by every Islamic terrorist during a terrorist attack.

The mainstream media’s response to this new footage has simply been to ignore it. It’s quite bewildering that in the days since Gript released updated footage that there hasn’t been a single article anywhere in the Irish media responding to recorded evidence of what appears to have been an Islamist terror attack in Dublin city centre. The mainstream media, the entire political class and the state appear to be content to leave it on the record that Abdullah Khan is just an ordinary Irish person who engaged in a violent attack and that the motive is so far unknown. When a Muslim from a migrant background living in any European country plunges a knife into someone from behind while shouting an Arabic phrase that precedes every jihadist attack, it’s a giveaway that he most definitely hasn’t integrated into his host culture and society. What’s more he clearly views his host society as his enemy. We should view him and his ilk accordingly. He is not one of us.

It is an egregious dereliction of duty for the Irish media not to query the apparent Islamist dimension of last week’s stabbing. Islamist terror is a significant threat right across Europe and has claimed hundreds of lives in recent years in brutal attacks. Had Abdullah Khan successfully immobilised the two Gardai, there’s a strong probability that he would have continued his attack on members of the public, as usually occurs during Islamist knife attacks. Several years ago, it was revealed by the UK authorities that approximately 40,000 potential Islamist terrorists are being monitored by the security services. Alarmingly, several high profile Islamist attacks were carried out by individuals not on the watchlist, which indicates that the figure of 40,000 potential Islamist terrorists in the UK is an underestimate.

Given that the Republic of Ireland shares a common travel area with the UK, any Islamists with a UK or Irish passport can move freely between both jurisdictions. In the aftermath of last week’s apparent Islamist stabbing, the media should be querying the extent of the Islamist terror threat in Ireland. However, to probe the Islamist terror threat also raises questions about Islamic immigration more generally and its overall compatibility with Western liberal democracy. This is a conversation that pro-migration zealots in the Irish media and political establishment are unwilling to have.

Any honest appraisal of mass Islamic immigration would reveal that Ireland, like other European countries, now has to contend with the threat of Islamist violence and other social pathologies from the Islamic world that were absent from our societies a few decades ago. Nowhere in Europe had female genital mutilation, forced marriages and people in hiding for contravening Islamic blasphemy laws before mass Islamic immigration. It doesn’t matter that most Muslims aren’t violent jihadists or that FGM isn’t practised by all Muslims (although Somalians do have a 99.2% FGM rate).

The fact that many Muslims are genuine moderates has no bearing on the very many who have views that place them on the extremist spectrum. The inconvenient truth for our political and media elites is that as your Islamic population grows so does the security threat posed by violent Islamists, along with the prevalence of cultural practices and value systems that are directly opposed to liberal democratic values. In 2016, former UK Labour Party politician Trevor Phillips conducted an opinion poll for Channel 4 which revealed that a range of extremist views incompatible with liberal democracy are widespread within Britain’s Muslim population. In fact, many Muslims living in Ireland also hold views that place them somewhere on the extremist spectrum, even if they don’t support terrorism in Western countries.

As I wrote for pieces in the Conservative Woman, I encountered such extremist mindsets in both Dublin and Manchester as well as detailing how Ireland’s largest mosque has close ties with the extremist Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an affiliated organisation. Most people in Ireland are completely unaware of the extent of extremist views among Muslims living in Ireland. This is hardly surprising when the political and media class chooses to pretend that an ethnically Pakistani Muslim shouting Allahu Akbar while stabbing a Garda is as culturally Irish as making small talk about the weather. At some point, the Irish media and political class is going to have to engage with reality and the negative consequences of its preferred immigration policies.

What we see in trends right across Europe is that the threat from both violent and non-violent Islamism and cultural tensions related to mass Islamic immigration are only going to worsen. Pretending the problem doesn’t exist won’t make it go away.

Andrew Devine is a 2010 Orwell Prize winning blogger and author of Generation F (under the pseudonym Winston Smith). Former radical leftist. Fully recovered. He blogs on his Substack page, the Devine Message. Subscribe here.