Britons profess “shock” at a now-daily phenomenon.

On Saturday afternoon, a three-year-old boy was sitting in a stroller at a Home Bargains store in Worcester, England, when some kind of corrosive liquid – later described as a “pungent pink chemical” with “an astringent kind of smell” – was “thrown or sprayed” at him, causing serious burns on his face and arms. The boy was with his mother; news reports make no mention of a father. One suspect, a 38-year-old man, was apprehended on the spot and is in police custody; three others were arrested in London on Monday morning. One shopper said she had heard that the first man to be picked up was “a skinny white guy”; the others, seen in CCTV footage, look rather swarthy. This assault, as it happens, took place on the same day as an English Defence League rally in Worcester against the construction of a new £3 million mosque in that city and of counter-protests by an array of Muslims, students, trade unionists, and Antifa types.

At first rumors were rife that the assailants were EDL members, but this seemed unlikely: genuinely racist though the EDL is – Tommy Robinson quite admirably quit the group on that account – and despite its record of violence, causing grave harm to small tots isn’t part of its usual M.O. Still, savagery begets savagery. Not until Monday did the police rule out any EDL or gang involvement and, while withholding the names of the suspects, say that the child had been “deliberately attacked” and describe the assault as part of a “dispute in communities.” This sounded, of course, very much like one of those awkward euphemisms the British authorities insist on using whenever the subject is Muslims. (If the culprits were ordinary English guys, the cops would likely have said something like “neighborhood dispute.”)

On Monday evening, the Telegraph stated that one “theory” (presumably a police theory?) was “that the mother and child had recently moved to Worcester and that the attacker, or attackers, followed her there.” This crumb of “theory” may seem enigmatic unless you’re familiar with the many horrifying anecdotes about brave Muslim women in Europe who have managed to escape from their forced marriages to abusive husbands and relocated to different cities in hopes of starting new, Westernized lives, only to be tracked down and assaulted – or even murdered – by their husbands (with or without the aid of relatives or friends) for having committed an offense against the family honor. A friend of mine suggested that the mother might well have been at the Home Bargains store to buy items to furnish her new home.

Not until late Monday evening did the Mail fill in the important blanks. The mother of the acid victim is “Middle Eastern” and “was fleeing a family dispute and living in a safe house at the time of the attack and was the intended target.” In addition to the three-year-old victim, she had two other children with whom she’s been living for the past eight months after “difficulties within her family.” According to a police source, “the parties she was in a dispute with found out where she had moved to and that’s how this horrendous incident has happened.” Also, the caustic substance “was targeted at her. The child just happened to get in the way.” In other words, same old same old.

Anyway, back to Saturday. When the news of the acid attack (an umbrella term for assaults involving a wide variety of caustic substances) reached the local authorities, the responses were predictable. The city’s MP, Robin Walker, called it “horrific.” City Council leader Marc Bayliss said it was “pure evil,” adding that “Worcester is not that sort of place. We are a quintessential small English city.” You mean like Rotherham, Oxford, Rochdale, and Newcastle, where hundreds if not thousands of non-Muslim girls have been repeatedly raped over a period of decades by Muslim “grooming gangs”? (As it happens, the mayor of Worcester is a fellow named Jabba Riaz, while the deputy mayor is Allah Ditta. Yep, right out of Agatha Christie.) A police spokesman stated that the assault on the toddler, whose motive at that point was “unclear,” would “rightly shock the local community.”

Shock? How could anybody in the UK be shocked by this? As the Sun notes, there were no fewer than 601 recorded acid attacks in Britain last year (although there is reason to believe that the actual number is considerable higher). The Washington Post even reported on the phenomenon last August (while, predictably, whitewashing its uncomfortable religious and sociocultural aspects). Nor is the three-year-old in Worcester the first child victim of such an assault in the UK. The fact is that, in a country that prides itself on its severe gun controls, corrosive liquids – sometimes in the form of pure nitric or sulfuric acid, sometimes in the form of ordinary household products such as bleach or ammonia or drain cleaner – are increasingly familiar weapons.

To be sure, there is a long history, in backward cultures and subcultures around the world, of people throwing corrosive liquids in other people’s faces. When I was a kid in New York in the 1960s and 70s, there was an investigative journalist named Victor Riesel who often turned up as a commentator on local TV news programs. He was totally blind, the consequence of a 1956 acid attack ordered by Mafia leaders intent on stopping his crusading coverage of mob influence in the garment unions. (You know, unions like the one celebrated in the 1979 film Norma Rae.) Courageously, Riesel responded by doubling down on his work, producing yet more explosive exposés of gangster activity and official corruption.

While acid attacks occur everywhere, however, they’re most common in south Asia – Bangladesh, Pakistan, India – where the victims are usually women, the perpetrators usually Muslim men, and the motives usually honor-related. In Britain, acid has become an especially popular weapon of choice in London, especially in the borough of Newham, which has the kingdom’s second highest percentage of Muslims. (Tower Hamlets is first.) In recent months, as has been reported around the globe, London Mayor Sadiq Khan has responded to his city’s skyrocketing homicide rate by trying to add to the ban on guns by cracking down on knives, too. “There is never a reason to carry a knife,” he declared idiotically. But the “Asian youth gangs,” to borrow the British media’s term of art, are way ahead of him, having increasingly traded knives for acid over the last few years.

Which is not to say that they’ve completely given up on knives. On the contrary, the number of knife-related crimes committed in England and Wales rose 22% in 2017 to just under forty thousand. France24 (which you might think had enough immigrant atrocities to report on in its own country) ran a segment on it on July 20, and Boris Johnson, having resigned as Foreign Minister and returned to his job as Telegraph columnist, made it the focus of his first post-cabinet contribution to that paper. In an article posted last Friday at the website of the British Medical Journal, Nic Madge suggested that, with the ghastly knifing statistics in mind, the British government should “consider further regulating all sales of long pointed knives and replacing them with rounded ends.” Madge, who has served as a judge in Luton Crown Court, world-famous as Tommy Robinson’s Muslim-heavy hometown, explains that he’s presided over trials involving boys as young as twelve who’ve been “charged with attempted murder or wounding with intent” using “eight or ten inch long pointed kitchen knives.”

There’s been another change on the acid-attack front. Whereas a few years ago they were largely confined to Britain’s “immigrant community,” with one gang weaponizing acid against another, or a brother using it to punish a sister who has harmed the family honor, acid has come to be used more and more against infidels – sometimes in conjunction with petty street crimes, and sometimes as a full-fledged part of the arsenal of jihad, employed for no other reason than to maim, frighten, and intimidate. Like the suicide bomb that took 22 lives at the Manchester Arena in May of last year, and the truck that was used in the murder of eight people on London Bridge a month later, acid has become an instrument of terror in the West. This past Saturday, it was reported that a currently incarcerated jihad enthusiast named Sayful Islam had managed to get a message to Tommy Robinson’s prison cell in which he threatens to kill him and to throw acid at Robinson’s wife.

But never mind: if you listen to the experts, a solution is at hand. We’ve seen Mayor Khan’s and Judge Madge’s answer to the knife problem: regulate knife sales! Similarly, in a 2017 Vice documentary which pointed out how easy it is for anybody to walk into a store and purchase bleach or ammonia or some other such substance, Simon Harding, a professor of criminology at the University of West London, offered the following modest proposal: “I think we need to get to a place where there are no cash purchases.” Not just on bleach and so on, mind you, but on all merchandise, everywhere. “Things are only purchased using a credit card. There’s maybe even a register that you have to sign.” Harding admitted that even this kind of drastic adjustment wouldn’t put a total end to acid attacks, but at least, he said, it would be “a start.” (He also suggested that tougher sentencing might be in order.)

Of course, few if any experts – or police, or other people in authority – dare to mention that acid attacks, like the ubiquitous gang rapes of infidel children, would still be a virtually unknown phenomenon in Britain if only its leaders had not pursued a suicidal immigration policy over the last several decades. Nor do they acknowledge that the proliferation of acid attacks in today’s UK, like the spread of honor killing, female genital mutilation, and other practices too barbaric for Brits of two or three generations ago to imagine, is a result of the insanely irresponsible immigration policies of one postwar UK government after another – period.

And no matter what restrictions the British government might decide to place on the sale of knives or corrosive liquids or other items – infringing ever further, in good nanny-state fashion, on the basic rights of law-abiding subjects – such actions, needless to say, won’t keep Muslim gangsters and jihadists from doing their thing. If they don’t have bombs or guns, knives or trucks, bleach or ammonia, they’ll find something else. There’s always something else. As the British authorities never seem to realize, the problem isn’t the weapon. It’s the perpetrators – and the brutish thinking and antediluvian ideology that leads them to drag Britain ever further from its glorious, civilized heights into the pit of primitivism.