Media: the flame of anger

By Richard North - February 11, 2026

If there is a difference between the legacy and social media (at least on my timeline), it’s that in the former, the focus is almost entirely on the Starmer psychodrama and related issues while, in the other (on X, at least) there is as much if not more coverage on immigration.

In particular, there has been much coverage of the evils associated with Pakistani (Kashmiri) immigration and the role of Muslims, with special reference to the commentary emerging from Rupert Lowe’s grooming gang inquiry – which has been almost entirely ignored by the legacy media.

That disparity has somewhat changed today with the publication in some legacy media sources of news of two events. The first, detailed in the Telegraph is the trial of 23-year-old Ahmad Mulakhil at Warwick Crown Court, who has been found guilty of raping a 12-year-old girl near a park in Nuneaton. He was also convicted of child abduction, two counts of sexual assault and taking indecent photos of a child.

Mulakhil had arrived in a dinghy from France in March 2025 and the case has attracted particular local ire as the police, on arresting the man, were up to their usual tricks of not reporting his nationality and immigration status.

The second event is what is described by the Mail as “School stabbing terror probe”, after a boy of 13 launched a stabbing rampage in a school yesterday, leaving two children fighting for their lives in a suspected terror attack.

In the middle of a classroom just before lunch, we are told, a teenager pulled out a knife and stabbed a 13-year-old boy in the neck and back while shouting “Allahu Akbar”, according to witnesses.

Seconds later, a second boy aged 12 was knifed in front of screaming children at Kingsbury High School in Brent, north-west London. Armed police raced to the school, but the knifeman had fled. Now, a suspect, who has not been named, has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after being found hiding nearby around an hour later. Sources say he was not a pupil at Kingsbury High.

Conveniently, because the murderous boy is under 18, he will not be named and – as is usual with such matters – his ethnicity will not be identified. But, since counter-terrorism police were leading the investigation amid suspicions that this was an ideologically motivated attack, and the boy was said to have screamed “Allahu Akbar”, there are good grounds for suspecting that, it’s “them” again.

This, though, is not the only immigration story in the Mail. Published yesterday but still online are details of another horrendous crime perpetrated by an asylum seeker.

In typical Mail style, the headline is very long and almost tells the full story, as it reads: “‘He’s an animal who played the system. The public deserves better’. As a Pakistani immigrant is jailed for raping a teen after court covered asylum status up, how one in ten of all claimants now come from the country – and often stay for decades”.

Retailed by Tom Rawstorne, he tells how Sheraz Malik had barely been in Britain for a year when he raped a vulnerable 18-year-old enjoying a day out in the park. After repeatedly forcing himself on the terrified teenager, the 28-year-old asked her: “Did you enjoy that?”.

But what additionally marks this out is the story of how Malik came to be in this country in the first place. Having left Pakistan a decade earlier, he had apparently first embarked on a tour of Europe, taking in Italy, Germany and France. He stayed so long in Italy – three years, according to police sources there – that he learned the language.

And yet, apparently encouraged by two Afghan men who extolled the virtues of the UK as a soft-touch destination for immigrants, it was here he finally ended up. After being smuggled into the country in the back of a car in July 2024, he began playing the system.

After lodging an asylum claim, it is understood that he was first housed in a government-run hotel before being moved into a hostel for immigrants in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, from which he disappeared for weeks at a time, apparently to work. The rest of his time was spent playing cricket in the local park – where he chanced upon his victim in June last year.

Unsurprisingly, writes Rawstorne, news of Malik’s background sparked outrage following his conviction for two counts of rape last month. But what also emerged was the fact that a judge had stopped the public from being told that he was an asylum seeker by gagging the press from reporting it until the end of his trial.

Equally, if not more troubling, is that Malik’s journey to the UK, and his use of the nation’s asylum system, has followed an increasingly well-worn path. Official figures show that 110,000 people claimed asylum in the UK in the year to last September – up 13 percent on 2024.

But equally striking is the fact that Pakistanis now make up one in ten of all asylum claims – more than any of the 175 other nations from which migrants seek refugee status in the UK. Yet, as far as we are aware, Pakistan is not currently a war-torn hell-hole from which refugees are currently fleeing.

Added to the list of violent incidents is a report on the BBC website which tells of the murder of 16-year-old Shayne Hambakachere “from Chippenham”, and the news that a 15-year-old boy has been charged with his murder and remanded in a youth detention centre.

Once again, the age bar comes in so we will never know the name or the ethnicity of the alleged murderer. Statistically, the greater chances are that this is a “black-on-black” crime, so the likelihood is that “it’s them again”.

The same applies to a more prominent report of the conviction of a 15-year-old boy, who has been sentenced to at least 13 years in custody for the murder of Leo Ross, 12, in Birmingham last year.

Leo was stabbed in the stomach as he made his way home from his school in Yardley Wood on 21 January 2025 and later died in hospital. But, as always, the 15-year-old, who cannot be named for legal reasons. He had previously been “engaged in a campaign of violence against several people” and it would not be at all surprising if “it’s them again”.

What was particularly devastating about the report was the comment of Leo’s mother, Rachel Fisher, who said the 13-year minimum sentence was “a joke”. “Thirteen years is a complete and utter joke, and it’s just going to keep on happening and keep on happening until something’s done about it”, she said, adding that: “These kids aren’t scared. They aren’t scared of the sentence. They’re not worried. The local authority and the police have got a lot to answer for”.

This slaughter of the children (when they’re not being raped), now seems to have become an almost routine feature of modern Britain. A fortnight ago, two teenage boys were charged with the murder of a 15-year-old in Guildford, making their first appearance at Guildford Crown Court.

As always, the teenagers, a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old boy, cannot be named because of their age. In addition to the murder of Luis Gabriel Guembes, they are also charged with conspiracy to rob, and possession of a bladed article.

So normalised are such events that even the more egregious of cases only make short-term headlines and quickly disappear from the legacy media.

And there is the difference. While the legacy media dips in and out of these reports, the flame of outrage is being kept burning in the social media, as with Rupert Lowe’s efforts which are getting considerable traction.

One thing Lowe told us yesterday was that Britain needs to understand the sophisticated level of coordination between the rape gangs.

It goes far deeper than anybody realises, he wrote. These is a national crime network of the most depraved kind, with his inquiry finding evidence of advanced links between dozens and dozens of towns and cities. This is not simply dispersed groups of savages, he adds.

This is coordinated, right across the country. The tactics are well rehearsed, and well drilled. They know exactly what they are doing. Nothing is off limits to these people – nothing. And there is zero appetite in Westminster or the media to even discuss it.

My response to this was that a lot of people do realise and have been saying so for some time – but Lowe, with others, hasn’t been listening. The (largely) Mirpur Kashmiri rape gangs are distinguished from most of those engaged in child sexual exploitation by treating it as structured business enterprises within the matrix of family-orientated crime syndicates (baradari).

Children are groomed and sold on as sex-slaves to associates and customers, but this activity is invariably just one of a suite of criminal activities which most often include drug-dealing (and smuggling), money laundering, tobacco smuggling and wholesale/retail sale of illicit tobacco, visa fraud, people smuggling and fencing stolen goods (including high-end luxury cars).

The range and depth of these baradari crime syndicates is such that they have penetrated local and national politics, have bribed or corrupted local officials and the police, and have infiltrated public services at local and national levels.

They operate on a cross-border basis, with close ties back to Kashmir and the Pashtun regions of Afghanistan and are easily equivalent to the Mafia organised gangs which took root in the United States.

That they remain invisible to government law enforcement agencies, the media and national government, is one of their greatest successes, enabling each of their criminal enterprises to be looked at in isolation – including their organised CSE. But the so-called grooming gangs are just the tip of a huge criminal iceberg which operates freely in our midst and almost completely escapes notice.

At least this is now getting said, and we even have a weak piece in The Times from Paul Goodman telling us that “Islamist hate has gone unchallenged for too long”. With extremism in British mosques and signs of sectarianism growing, government urgently needs to get a grip on the problem, he writes.

Government needs to do a lot more than that – but, of course it won’t. And neither will the legacy media. But the flame of anger is burning very bright, and it isn’t going to stay confined to social media forever.