Sophie of Dundee: Scourge of Anarcho-Tyranny in the UK

My only regret is that the UK's gun laws are so restrictive. Had she had a gun, there might have been a different outcome.

From The European Conservative

Rod Dreher

If the state will not protect girls from migrant men, and native-born British men won’t either, what choice do the Sophies have but to arm themselves? 

The image, a screenshot from a smartphone video, became an international icon overnight. 

In Dundee, Scotland, a male migrant whose face we don’t see, but whose accented voice we hear off camera, videotapes two young teenage Scottish girls. The girls tell him to leave them alone. One girl, whose name we now know is Mayah Sommers, brandishes a knife in one hand and a hatchet in the other. She yells at the man holding the camera, telling him that he is “f***ing battering kids, mate… You’re f***ing kid bashers.” Her companion screams at the migrant, “Don’t f***ing touch my little sister! She’s only twelve! She’s only twelve, and you’re f***ing badgering me!” 

“Show the knife,” the foreigner says. “Show the knife.” He moves toward them, apparently trying to goad the frightened children into doing something that will get them in trouble. In the 44-second clip, we glimpse two male adults standing nearby, unwilling to come to the girls’ aid.

Get them in trouble it did. The weapons-wielder—blonde, pony-tailed Mayah Sommers—was arrested by Scots police and charged with having blades. 

That’s right: the British state, unwilling or unable to protect little girls from migrant sexual predators, arrested one who tried to protect herself and her sister. If there is a more potent image capturing the utter shame and disgrace of Britain today, few of us could bear to see it.

The clip not only disgraces the British authorities, from local police up to Parliament and the prime minister, but all men of that disintegrating country. How can it have come to this, where a girl has to carry a knife and a hatchet to protect herself from being raped by migrants? Do the British—especially British men—have no hearts? No courage? No basic decency?

True, we do not know what events preceded the clip posted by the migrant creep online, but it is undeniable that when his presence caused the girls intense distress, he did not leave them alone but continued to approach and tease them. The unidentified man might not have intended to do sexual violence to them, but he was very clearly harassing them. It is difficult to imagine a situation in which that unseen man is entirely innocent.

It is not possible to determine the extent to which migrants, asylum seekers, and people of foreign, non-British backgrounds attempt sexual assault. British authorities do not record the ethnicity of the accused. Nevertheless, Britain has been shaken to its core by the Pakistani rape gang scandal, in which thousands of young working-class girls like Mayah Sommers were systematically abducted, drugged, and gang-raped by Pakistani Muslim men. Police authorities, elected officials, and many in the media either looked the other way or downplayed the incidents. 

Multiple testimonies by victims of the Pakistani rape gangs claimed that their abusers smeared them with terms like ‘white slag’ as they were being raped, and told that white girls deserved to be raped. British media tend to shy away from such cases out of fear of “inflaming community tensions”—a euphemism for making white Britons angry over what Muslims are doing to their children. Yet, thanks to X, video clips of older brown-skinned males attempting to kidnap or sexually harassing white English girls are widely available.

The horrific stories emerging from the scandals have many British children and parents on edge. Last year, when I was visiting a family in East Anglia, their 12-year-old daughter and her schoolmate ran into the kitchen from the street, telling their mother that “an Asian man was following us.” (‘Asian’ is a British term that includes Pakistanis and others from southern Asia.) The man might have been guilty of nothing more than walking down a sidewalk, but given the magnitude of the rape gang crimes and that they target young white English girls, paranoia is a reasonable response.

What happened to Mayah Sommers—now dubbed “Sophie of Dundee” online—evokes a primal response in all morally healthy men. Rape has forever been a weapon of war. Soldiers sexually violating the enemy’s women is part of combat, a method designed to humiliate the vanquished. If the Pakistanis raping English girls were Vikings that came ashore in longboats to pillage Saxon villages, Britons would know exactly what they were. 

Similarly, if the hundreds and even thousands of fighting-age young ‘Asian’ and African migrants landing in dinghies on England’s south coast were carrying guns, they would be shot as invaders by the British Army—and would deserve to be.

But these men understand that the British people today have been disarmed by sentimental humanitarianism and the terror of being called racist or Islamophobic. That, or they are afraid of being sent to jail by their government, which acts as if the real crime in these matters is disapproving of foreigners coming illegally to Britain and breaking the law. 

Last year, Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in prison over an angry tweet about migrants, which she soon deleted. She was released recently after serving 40 percent of her sentence. Meanwhile, activists have highlighted multiple cases of migrants and asylum seekers convicted of rape or other serious crimes who have received sentences less than or roughly equivalent to the sentence Connolly received for tweeting hurty words. 

Public trust in British institutions is at a historic low, especially among younger Britons. A July survey by YouGov found that 90 percent of Britons favor an official inquiry into the rape gang scandal, but most Britons do not trust authorities to be fair and honest in doing so. 

Will Sophie of Dundee be a tipping point for the frightened, furious British people? John Robb thinks she might be. The prominent U.S. military and counterterrorism analyst describes the iconic image of Sophie as an “empathy trigger”—an image or story that stimulates instant solidarity in individuals or groups and has the power to mobilize them quickly for action. About Sophie, Robb wrote: 

They see her face, her desperation, and they instantly recognize the same face they had, or a friend had, when they stood up to a relentless bully who targeted them while growing up. A bully nobody would protect them against. A bully they took desperate measures against. However, they aren’t just seeing her, they feel her desperation inside themselves, emotionally and physically. It connects them at a deep level and they form a bond. Her enemies are their enemies now. Her anger is theirs now.

She is a brave child who was prepared to stab or hack away at a grown man she feared was threatening to rape her. In a normal world, girls like her would be able to spend their days playing in the park. But Britain today is not a normal world. It has imported several million immigrants—many legal, others not—since Sophie was born in 2011. These migrants arrived to a culture that has become entirely demoralized and unwilling to defend itself and its people. Would it be more depressing if vigilante gangs arose to protect these girls, or if they didn’t? Hard to say. 

Britain today lives in a state of what the late American political theorist Samuel Francis called “anarcho-tyranny,” which he defined as the condition in which the state fails to enforce basic order, while at the same time imposing oppressive control over law-abiding citizens. Young Sophie of Dundee, as they call her, is the face of anarcho-tyranny. If brave little Sophie’s plight does not shame to the core the men of the UK and rally the British to outrage and action to solve the migration crisis, what on earth will? 

If the state will not protect girls from rape at the hands of migrant men, and native-born British men won’t do it either, what choice do the Sophies of that soul-sick nation have but to arm themselves?