Pastor Jack McKee, from the nearby New Life City Church, is part of the rescue mission. As he is tending to those members of his congregation he has helped to safety, I take the opportunity to speak to him. He is furious.<\/p>\n
“These members have been with us for 20 years. They’ve been put out of their home,” he tells me.<\/p>\n
“They are good Christian people and they are getting put out just because they are black.<\/p>\n
“You are hurting innocent people here. There are men, women, and children living in fear.<\/p>\n
“I am angry. I am disappointed that this is the response of people in our community.”<\/p>\n
McKee doesn’t expect them to return to the place they’ve called home for many years.<\/p>\n
I have covered disorder in Northern Ireland for more than a decade now, including last summer when rioting erupted in Ballymena.<\/p>\n
I have watched the police come under attack, a leisure centre being set on fire, and I have heard racist language used by people of all ages.<\/p>\n
This week was the first time I witnessed people fleeing from their homes after being targeted because of their ethnicity.<\/p>\n
The disorder was sparked after footage of a knife attack in north Belfast on Monday night was shared widely on social media.<\/p>\n
Hadi Alodid, a 30-year-old originally from Sudan, appeared in court on Wednesday charged with attempted murder over the attack which left the victim, Stephen Ogilvie, with serious injuries.<\/p>\n
I was also sent to Antrim and Ballymena this week to cover the protests there and it is important to say that they passed off peacefully.<\/p>\n
The disorder was restricted to pockets of Belfast and other towns, but the whole of Northern Ireland suffered with schools and shops closing early, and public transport shutting down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pastor Jack McKee, from the nearby New Life City Church, is part of the rescue mission. As he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":635908,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-635907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=635907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635907\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/635908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=635907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=635907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=635907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}