Our government seems to believe that it has won world admiration for its stance on that tanker and the immigrants which it picked up off Italy. It hasn’t. The internet and the press reports have been scathing, even where those reports are required to be strictly factual, the deliberate choice of words indicates what the writers really think.
The reaction to Malta’s behaviour has been particularly bad in Italy, where Twitter has gone wild with tweets from Italians looking down on Malta for its inhumanity, contempt for others, lack of basic decency, and its smallness of heart and mind, not just of size. Come to Malta, where everyone is given a warm welcome and where you can learn perfect English from a nation that is currently polluting Cecilia Malmstrom’s Facebook page with low insults and the inability to spell simple English words or construct a brief sentence or argument in the language.
The problem with Muscat and the party he leads is that they continue to think, talk and behave as though they are still in Opposition. They have not yet made the mental shift, and I am frightened by the thought that they might not actually be able to do so. There is a failure to understand one fundamental rule of communication, for a start: that a message isn’t what you send or think you have sent, but what other people receive. If the message your audience receives is that you are a canker on the soul of human decency, it is pointless claiming that your message was one of toughness and not being a pushover.
Yes, one of Joseph Muscat’s audiences did receive the message he intended, and that audience is his electorate. But this is just what I mean about his not having made the mental or behavioural shift from Opposition. When you are in government, you have another audience besides your electorate: an international audience made up of politicians, diplomats, governments, electors in other countries, journalists, columnists and press agencies the world over and particularly in the rest of Europe.
Muscat may reason that those people are not going to be voting in Maltese general elections so he doesn’t give a damn what they think, but he is wrong. A negative international image for Malta has a cumulative, snowball effect which erodes our credibility in many areas which are crucial for our survival. He has to tackle both audiences simultaneously: ‘home’ and ‘rest of world’.
Even after Italy allowed the tanker to put down the migrants in one of its ports, thereby winning the moral high ground as their saviour and the one who acknowledged the spirit of international law while backward, amoral Malta did not, our prime minister continues to justify his stance. The tanker had instructions to take the immigrants to the nearest safe port, he said. By his reckoning, that nearest safe port was in Libya, so the tanker should not have brought them to Malta.
This kind of deliberately false reasoning, which addresses a home-based audience with the thinking-skills of a particularly poorly educated 10-year-old, is used to deliberately mislead. The nearest port in terms of distance was in Libya, yes – but it was obviously not the nearest safe port because those immigrants had just fled from there. You don’t take asylum-seekers back to the place from which they are fleeing – there would have been no difference between the tanker doing that and Joseph Muscat’s disastrous attempt at pushing another lot back to Libya some weeks ago, for which he was harshly criticised.
The nearest safe port was Malta, so the ship’s captain was wholly correct in bringing here the people he rescued. He had the backing of the European Commission, to which we are answerable, on this. Yet Muscat actually said to the press, turning rational argument on its head, that it is precisely because the asylum-seekers fled from Koms in Libya that Koms was the nearest safe port – because if it had not been a safe port they wouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Yes, it is enough to make you despair – but then only if the madness (or is it stupidity?) of crowds did not infect your brain too in the Malta Taghna Lkoll-chanting insanity of the run-up to the polls, when these kinds of arguments worked even on people who pass exams and have responsible jobs. Our prime minister further sought to pacify his audience with the assertion that “Libya is always ready to receive the migrants”. Who is he kidding – of course Libya is always ready to receive migrants. That’s because it espouses no international requirements and is not a signatory to any human rights convention. It receives them, dumps them, shoots them, beats them, tortures them and lets them go hungry. You won’t find Libya refusing to accept immigrants on the grounds that it has to look after them.
And now, some facts to put things into perspective when we are busy ‘telling Europe’ to ‘share our burden’ and claiming that Malta is ‘invaded by Africans’. In 2011, there were an estimated 1.7 million immigrants to the European Union from outside the EU. Also, around 1.3 million who were living in an EU member state migrated to another one. This includes very many Maltese people who left Malta, and very many non-Maltese EU citizens who came to live and work here. EU immigrants to Malta far outnumber non-EU immigrants, but do we say that Malta is too small for them and that they are taking our jobs and our resources? No, because we are quite happy to take theirs, and because we’re reluctant to use the same arguments against Swedes who look nothing like us and don’t share our religion that we do against Africans.