Were you to apply the same criteria Daphne Caruana Galizia suggests you and other editors should use with letter writers to your papers, such articles like her “Sorry to be the one to break the news, but we’re coloured people” (TMIS, 14 August), would never have seen the light of day.
What an arrogant, ignorant, bigoted person Mrs Caruana Galizia has turned out to be, after all the promise she had shown in her early years as a columnist. What happened? Has she fallen out with her mentor? Has she lost her guru?
Who does she think she is anyway? Ever pontificating in dogmatic manner on any topic under the sun, professing to know it all. Recounting personal experiences, fictitious as these may be, to press her point home.
Shame on her for writing such insolent drivel. Shame also on you for allowing such nonsense to be published. Do you believe the cause against racism and xenophobia will be advanced by such contempt of the Maltese? You ought to do something about her, unless you wish to see your Sunday readership decimated.
Doesn’t Daphne know that Danes are Scandinavians? Does she know that our Latin blood is shared with the French, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese and others? That’s practically half of Europe. Will she now suggest that these peoples are also coloured? Doesn’t Daphne know that we have a good sprinkling of Anglo-Saxon and Irish blood on our veins, in many cases going back to the third and fourth generation?
Perhaps, more importantly, Daphne doesn’t know that race isn’t determined by skin colour, but mostly by facial features and build. You would normally tell a Pakistani, Indian or Arab from a Maltese or other Europeans.
I am not particularly white-skinned, but on several occasions I have been taken for an Englishman or some other European, by Maltese and foreigners alike. I don’t recall ever having been mistaken for a Pakistani or a Moroccan. This of course applies to most Maltese.
Daphne must have a very vivid imagination to claim that “almost every Maltese woman has natural curly hair”. Most women I know have lovely straight hair. Sometimes, as is most women’s wont, they have it curled just for kicks.
It is stupid to believe, as Daphne seems to do, that Arabs or Pakistanis are considered inferior to us because of their darker skins. I suspect that most Maltese do not accept these alien races, including blacks, not because of their skin colour, but because of their strange and peculiar (to us) cultures, which they try to impose wherever they go.
Contrary to what certain foolish columnists think, Maltese intolerance of illegal immigrants has nothing to do with skin colour. It arises because the Maltese do not wish to see their country overrun by disease-ridden adventurers who come here, take on work, disrupt our economy and impose their way of life on us.
Alfredo A. Camilleri
SLIEMA