Back in 1982, one of my Grade 2 classmates arrived at school more than an hour late. The teacher began to admonish him and demand why it had taken him so long to walk to school AGAIN (we lived in a small town).
Benjamin stammered that someone tried to pull him into a van.
At that point I remember my teacher's face turning to ash. You see there was a time in the late 70s through the late 80s when news of people trying to abduct children was frequently on the news and constituted, in retrospect, somewhat of a widely believed urban myth since even then it was far more likely that a child would be kidnapped by someone he or she knew rather than a stranger. The teacher took Ben to the office immediately. Not long after we saw police cars pull up in the parking lot out the window and his mother sprinting into the school, frantically heading straight to the office sobbing all the while. One by one the Grade 2 class was taken into an empty classroom to be questioned by the police to see if we could maybe provide any information. Did we see that van? What color was it? How many people were inside? Where did we see the van?
Wanting to please the police officers who were trying to protect us, we all provided what we thought would be helpful answers.
I told the police officers the van was black with a painting of a girl with a sword in a bikini riding a big cat (remembering that my uncle had a van just like that because, you know, he was a classy fella) and one person driving. One of my friends said she saw a red van by the park with two men and one woman. Another saw a blue van with two people and a dog. All of us, so far as I know, gave the officers what we believed to be "helpful" answers and endeavored to be as creative as possible.
Of course if they has asked where we had last SEEN Ben on our way to school, some of us might also have said we saw him between the Johnstone's garage and fence feeding their pet rabbits as he often did on his way to and from school through the back alley shortcut many of us took and which is why he was often late for school.
It didn't take long for the police to figure this out for themselves. I don't remember much of what happened after, though I do remember Ben being made to stay in the class during recess for a week and his parents grounding him for a month; he was playing outside within the week after his parents apparently relented. The incident wasn't really ever spoken about again until graduation when it was recounted as a humorous anecdote about Ben during the grad dinner a decade later, but other than that it was mostly a forgotten story.
Sometimes children lie. They lie because they don't want to get into trouble. They lie because they want to provide the "correct" answers to people in positions of authority either through subtle or not subtle coaching or through their own form of creative fill-in-the-blanks. They lie because it results in attention. They lie because of psychological troubles. They lie for a variety of reasons. It doesn't make them bad. It just means they are kids who aren't entirely aware of the consequences of their lie. For example, not long ago in Okotoks, AB a young teen claimed to have been attacked at her home and had her throat slashed before the suspect, described as a blond male, ran off. The story made the news
provincially and
nationally and was actually used as an example by some of the Islamophobic bigots and groups ARC covers as an example of Islamic violence since some automatically assumed the suspect was a Muslim:
However by November 24 the police had determined that the young girl
had made up the story. There was no follow-up in the news after that and people promptly forgot about it though I remember some people express sympathy for both the girl ("she needs psychological help and I'm praying for her") and her family ("oh, they must be so embarrassed!).
Similar sympathetic attitudes were not expressed towards the 11 year old girl who claimed to have been attacked by a man who cut up her hijab or her family who, once the realized
the story wasn't true, soon
apologized "to all Canadians." (though this act of contrition was not expected or demanded of the Okotoks family previously mentioned):
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| Lee Down is the Toronto chapter leader of the Northern Guard |
In the world of Islamophobes, guilt is assigned to the group. An 11 year old child lied, so that means all Muslims are complicit:
That last claim by Myatt isn't exactly an original one. On January 29, 2017, Alexandre Bissonnette is alleged to have entered the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City where he then opened fire. As a result six people were killed and others injured. At the time of the tragedy, the groups and individuals ARC monitors had three primary reactions to the tragedy:
- They celebrated the attack and hoped for more.
- They accused Muslims of killing Muslims (and again, some were very happy about this as well).
- They claimed it didn't happen, that Bissonnette was a patsy, or that it was a "false flag."
