Daily Bale Lies About “Missing Girl”
Posted: 04/02/2014 | Author: The Political Idealist | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Amy Hamilton, BALE, Daily Bale, equality, hate crime, Media, multiculturalism, news, Racism, social justice, society |Leave a comment »Several months ago, the fascist propaganda blogging and social media group BALE (Britons Against Left-wing Extremism) was exposed by local newspaper Croydon Advertiser as committing an insensitive hoax. Through their blog, the Daily Bale, the group distributed posters about a made-up missing girl, Amy Hamilton. Their “appeal” for information on her whereabouts said:
It is believed that Amy was kidnapped by an Asian grooming gang.
And yet, despite the Croydon Advertiser story, thousands of well-intentioned social media users shared the poster, unaware that they were propagating a hoax. Only now has the matter reached the national press, and I hope BALE gets the hostile scrutiny it deserves. The sheer irresponsibility of diverting public attention from genuine missing people for the purpose of building racial tensions- and so soon after the Rochdale grooming case- is utterly breathtaking.
BALE is unapologetic for this, saying that the move was necessary to raise “awareness” of Asian sex crime gangs. As if the media were not active enough in discussion the terrible crimes of multiracial groups of criminals that they report have been active in several British towns and cities!
There is little that is more depressing than the ability of fringe groups to work themselves into such an ill-informed funk that they seriously believe that ethnicity determines somebody’s behaviour and “place” in the world. Racism may be (almost) socially unacceptable in mainstream society, but we cannot allow it to fester in pockets of extremism: one person with the wrong ideas can cause a lot of damage, as the Utoya massacre shows. We can educate our children and implement the most sophisticated measures to boost multiculturalism, tolerance or whatever you term it (and no, I think the two concepts are distinct), but the existence of groups like BALE, the British Freedom Party and the ashes of the English Defence League are the symptom of a social disease.
It is a social disease in which a large sector of the population sees their lives getting harder due to forces they can barely see, let alone control. They feel removed from the opportunities and comforts that others take for granted. That’s all too common. What is, thank goodness, less common is the attribution of the consequences of economic and social problems to the big change that many can see: the increased presence of ethnic minorities. I think that racism would be a lot weaker across Europe, and the whole developed world for that matter, if it was harder to be “left out” by society. A world free of groups like BALE would be a more pleasant one, but we’ll have to work hard for it.
