Our man on safari in Birzebbuga with his wife and his mum – an exciting tale of bravery in the face of violent niggers, while protected only by a bull-bar
"On Saturday, 4 August, at 2115hrs, I was driving to Birzebbuga from Hal Far Road to 'Tal-Gebel' Road, with my wife and my mum in the back seat. Suddenly, three immigrants stopped in the middle of the road ahead of me, and I had no alternative but to stop and ask them to move, while locking the windows of the car and flashing the lights. Two of them did move, but the third one held on to the bull-bar of the car and stood there for a while, then moved to the side of the car and started hitting the bonnet with his fist. Since it was a feast day at Birzebbuga, I had to park the car at the outskirts of the village and walk to the police station. After my family and I explained this traumatic experience to five Maltese policemen, the first question I was sarcastically asked was: "Am I ready to go to Hal Far barracks and identify the persons involved? I am convinced that there are few persons on the island who could identify coloured people at 1000hrs in the morning, figure out at 2100hrs at night, in the middle of a road with no lights at all. After a report was drafted I was asked to go back on Wednesday after 2100hrs to the Birzebbuga police station so they can have a look at the damages in the car. This did not convince me, so I drove up to the Zejtun Police Station and went through the whole story once again. The very helpful sergeant on duty came to look at the car and noticed a lot of fingerprints, which, in his opinion, could help to identify the perpetrator. Back at the station, the sergeant contacted the Birzebbuga police station and advised the police there that he had inspected the car so I did not have to go back on Wednesday. He also contacted the police inspector on duty and asked him for permission to take fingerprints from the car, and try to match them with fingerprints of the migrants stationed at Hal Far. For reasons that I still do not know, the sergeant told me that his superiors advised that there is no need for all this, and asked me to come back on Monday, pay Lm3 and collect the report, which I have to give to the insurance agency so that they can handle my claim. This is really unjust! I am a Maltese citizen who has been paying taxes for the last 35 years. My property was abused and damaged in front of my family, and I now have to pay for the damages done deliberately by a foreign person for whom I also pay taxes to provide him with food and shelter. In return, local police treat us like second-class citizens. I cannot understand this, and that is why I am exposing all this to the public. After a sleepless night, the first thing I did this morning was to contact Police Headquarters. After listening to the military marches on the telephone-operator service for over an hour, I was passed on to the forensic division. The sergeant on duty patiently listened to my request but informed me that he could not help me out unless he is authorised by the inspector of the southern region. He also told me that I am 100% right but (quoting) 'try to avoid Birzebbuga and Marsa, as after sunset both places do not belong to us anymore." Once again this is unfair, unjust and simply not right. Such words from a police officer raise lots of questions. I hope that this letter is read by people in Parliament and some sort of action is taken. While talking about the incident with people living in Birzebbuga, I confirmed that such accidents are being repeated day after day. This is simply not on. I am a 52-year-old person who has tried to live according to all the laws and regulations throughout my life, and as from today I say that the law administrators taught me a lesson.
I ask you God - do not let me go through this again.”
Mario Mamo
You may not believe it, but this is a real letter that appeared on the Labour Party’s news website, maltastar.com, promoted as a sensational news item – a reader’s real-life experience. Mario Mamo – he went into the niggers’ den armed with little more than his wife, his mum (in the backseat, rather than on it) and a bull-bar, and came out alive to tell the tale.
The letter was e-mailed around the whole of Malta. Most of my well-wishers at National Action and the National Republican Alliance (I translate their names into the language of the despised coloniser to get up their silly noses) sent it to me, wondering sarcastically what I might think. Oh boy, they shouldn’t have asked. What I think is this. When a bunch of men set fire to our home with us asleep inside it, those men had Maltese passports. They weren’t black, they weren’t immigrants, and they didn’t come all the way from the Hal Far camp to do it. Punching a car bonnet doesn’t even begin to figure alongside trying to burn a whole family alive in their beds.
A punched car bonnet is nothing. It is not even what can be called a problem, still less the national disaster this fool has tried to make it out to be, driven by what is obviously racist paranoia. A punched car bonnet is a minor inconvenience like all the other minor inconveniences we all have to put up with most days. If the man involved in this entirely insignificant incident had been Maltese, it would have passed by unnoticed. But because he is a black immigrant – and that is just an assumption because immigrants do not have their status tattooed on their foreheads – it has been magically transformed into a horror story called Attack of the Niggers.
Some people really do need to get a life. They need to open their minds, think about things, get about a little in the world, read something other than maltastar.com and the newspapers published here, broaden their horizon, and just grow up. Only an irrational person would believe that he is entitled to demand the mobilisation of the police force and the forensic laboratory to find out who grabbed his bull-bar and punched his car bonnet, when he is insured and won’t be paying for any repairs himself. You would only need to know something like that if you think that the person means you ill and might strike again, but still you wouldn’t be justified in dragging out the police force.
We know that Mario Mamo is insured because he collected a police report to make a claim. This means that his God-almighty fuss is about an excess payment and the loss of his no-claims bonus, always assuming that he had one. Yet further down in his letter he shouts for our sympathy by saying that he has “to pay for the damages done deliberately by a foreign person for whom I also pay taxes to provide him with food and shelter”. Ignore the appalling grammar, and ask yourself instead which one of these is the lie: is he making an insurance claim, or is he paying for the damages himself? It can’t be both.
If they had any brains or education at all, people like this Mario Mamo, and the others who think he is justified in calling for a manhunt, would understand that you don’t expend thousands of liri in man-hours and resources just to find the dastardly criminal who punched a car bonnet. The police would be mad and irresponsible to use up precious time and a great deal of resources to finger-print several hundred men living at the Hal Far camp to find out who might have punched Mario Mamo’s car. They wouldn’t even fingerprint several hundred men in a triple homicide case, because they’d have to narrow down the list of suspects first. Quite apart from the time and expense involved, the police can’t just go about dragging people down to the station and taking their fingerprints unless they have a reasonable suspicion that those persons have committed a very serious crime – and even then, they require the individual’s consent. There’s that little matter of civil liberties and human rights to be considered – but people like Mario Mamo, and all those who rushed to e-mail his letter about, seem to imagine that the police can burst into our homes and take our fingerprints whether we like it or not, just because they want to and Mario Mamo demands it.
Oh sorry, of course not. If the police were to do that to – for example – an entire factory-floor of Maltese workers, just because one of them was suspected of breaking down a door and causing Lm200 worth of damage, all hell would be let loose, and rightly so. It would be a massive infringement of those people’s rights, a matter for the resignation of the Police Commissioner, and something to be hotly discussed in Parliament. But it just couldn’t happen to start with, because it’s illegal. By the same token, the police can’t move in on the people who live at the Hal Far camp and fingerprint them just because somebody dented a car. It would be a massive infringement of their rights, too – and equally illegal. There isn’t one law for us and another for the Hal Far Camp.
There are far more important things to worry about than turning a slightly damaged car bonnet into a nationwide melodrama, so when I read about the behaviour of people like Mario Mamo I begin to wonder whether they have ever had any real problems in their lives, or if they were just born petty-minded. They are without a proper sense of perspective. Mario Mamo ends his letter with the overwrought words “I ask you God – do not let me go through this again” – a plea more suited to a man who has spent a year watching his child die of leukaemia, than to one who has a bruised car bonnet and a battered ego. He tells us he spent a sleepless night after the horrendous experience. A sleepless night, for heaven’s sake – something that well-balanced people experience only when they have truly serious problems like ghastly debt, a heroin-addicted son, a spouse dying of cancer or sleeping with somebody else, or a teenage daughter who’s gone off the rails – not a car bonnet with a dent in it.
After his sleepless night, he popped out of bed at dawn and spent a whole hour hanging on the telephone “listening to military marches” while waiting to be put through to the forensic department at Police Headquarters. Then someone came on the line and fobbed him off with the words ghandek ragun, but “try to avoid Birzebbuga and Marsa, as after sunset both places do not belong to us anymore” (a dreadful literal translation from Maltese). The remark so excited him that he rushed to publicise it, making lots of other people really excited too. I’m beginning to wonder whether this isn’t some new kind of kinky perversion that I hadn’t heard about – thrilling to the dangers of Marsa and Birzebbuga “no longer belonging to us”. I suppose it beats stuffing a satsuma into your mouth and pulling a lady’s stocking down over your head while doing the unmentionable.
* * *
Having failed to mobilise the entire Crime Squad to find the nigger who grabbed his bull-bar and punched his bonnet, Mario Mamo now expects “people in parliament” to “take some sort of action”. This man is labouring under some very serious delusions about the importance of his car bonnet and its significance to the nation.
I rather suspect that he is one of those people who love to get themselves worked up about the dangers of niggers – and yes, I use that word deliberately. Because it goes without saying that he is extremely ill-read, he wouldn’t know that the tone of his letter is virtually identical to the published and reported discourse of redneck Americans in the southern states during nigger-lynching days.
He doesn’t describe them as people but with the detachment that one uses for dangerous animals (“Suddenly, three immigrants stopped in the middle of the road ahead of me and I had no alternative but to stop and ask them to move, while locking the windows of the car and flashing the lights”). He behaved as though confronted by crazed lions on safari in Kenya, safe behind his bull-bar and locked windows, flashing his lights to scare the animals. I have a sneaking suspicion that it might have been the way he asked them to move that made one of them thump the bonnet in protest. Why would he have done so otherwise? I know that niggers are unpredictable and cannot be expected to behave like the Nordic Maltese, but I don’t think anybody said that night: “Hey, come on – let’s go and hang on to that guy’s bull-bar. That should be a fun night out.”
Hostility towards people who attacked his car is understandable, but Mario Mamo’s hostility towards a class of people he lumps together as “immigrants” (black ones only) and “coloured people” is manifest throughout his letter. It’s almost painfully embarrassing, complete with the inevitable spot-the-nigger-on-a-dark-night wisecrack: “I am convinced that there are few persons on the island who could identify coloured people at 1000hrs in the morning, figure out at 2100hrs at night, in the middle of the road with no lights at all.” Oh Mario, you’re so funny – but what’s even funnier is your need to explain to us that 1000hrs is in the morning and 2100hrs is at night, or that your mum was in the back seat rather than on it. I wonder why you keep her there – to make sure the niggers can’t get her, perhaps?
* * *
I feel duty bound to warn Mario Mamo not to put his mum in the back seat and drive her down to St Julian’s for a quick drink with his wife. A Spanish student might use his car roof as a trampoline, a German student might tuck a used condom into his bull-bar, an Italian student might pee against the door, and a French student might vomit on his bonnet. After he’s cleaned it all up, he might find that a Maltese student has stolen the badge and stuck a nail into two of the tyres.