A couple of people asked me why I wasn’t at the St Julian’s demonstration for Charlie Hebdo. The primary reason is that I was running a fever and unable to leave the house. But I wouldn’t have gone anyway, because I have nothing to prove. I don’t think it can be more obvious where I have stood on the matter of the freedom to offend, for the last 25 years. Even those Maltese people who have never read a word I have written in all this time, because they are barely literate or don’t understand English, or because they are simply not interested, know where I stand. They know because they have been told repeatedly that much of what I write is offensive, that I am offensive in and of myself, that ‘they’ – the government, the police, the courts, people with jerry-cans of petrol and a box of matches - should stop me.

So there was no point in my standing around in public for the cameras with a print-out saying Je Suis Charlie Hebdo. I left that to others who, apart from really very few exceptions who understood that this is about the freedom to cause offence to others and went along anyway, are quite obviously more than a little confused about the matter. Some of them thought it was all about Christianity versus Islam. Others thought that it was about Europeans versus ‘Arabs’. Others still that it was about the freedom to offend Islam because we are in Europe and Islam is alien, but God help anyone who offends any cause dear to their heart.

I noticed a few people at both the St Julian’s demo and the press demo in Valletta who accept without question the harassment of journalists by the police and by politicians using law suits, in Malta. I saw a few, in the photographs, who were absolutely scathing about me when a senior officer from the Homicide Squad and another from the Criminal Investigation Department turned up at my home at night with an arrest warrant because I had uploaded a couple of YouTube videos about Joseph Muscat on the eve of polling day in the general election.

I even saw one or two men who, between three and two years ago, went on at me to stop writing about Franco Debono and Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, because those two individuals, who had a seat in parliament then, had threatened to react by causing even more trouble if I continued to write about them. My response was that it is the worst possible course of action, for practical reasons, to give in to threats and blackmail by terrorists, but that it is also fundamentally wrong to do and this on a matter of principle; that I am not responsible for the government, the government is not responsible for me, but we are all responsible for upholding the guaranteed right to freedom of expression, which includes criticising and causing offence to politicians and other holders of public office.

So I found it quite entertaining to see these people at the Charlie Hebdo demonstrations. Clearly, they couldn’t see the parallel between Franco Debono and Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando threatening to wreak destruction on the government of that time if it didn’t stop me writing about them, and the agents of Al Qaeda threatening to blow up anyone who causes them offence in the newspapers.

I was equally amused to see that a particular woman contemporary of mine was one of the many who had replaced her Facebook profile picture with the words JE SUIS CHARLIE HEBDO. In these situations, you just have to wonder whether it is stupidity, hypocrisy or a complete failure to understand what the issue is about. I rather suspect it is the first causing the third. A couple of years ago in the election period, when many of my contemporaries had regressed en masse and were behaving as though they’d joined the Moonies or had signed up to that 1970s man in Guyana and were busy knocking back the Koolaid, chanting the mantras of a sect called Taghna Lkoll led by a stout man from Burmarrad who waddled and spoke really badly (at least Charles Manson had the looks), this woman had openly chastised, on Facebook, a mutual friend for posting links to my articles on his Timeline. “I’m surprised at you, publicising that sort of thing. I expected better from you than giving exposure to what she writes,” she commented on his Timeline, as though I’d been promoting the illegal drugs she spent years swallowing and injecting during another of her cult phases. Given what the mass bullying atmosphere was like at the time, he immediately gave in and stopped posting links. But now, of course, this woman has spotted another bandwagon and elle est Charlie Hebdo.

The profileration of JE SUIS CHARLIE HEBDO pictures on Facebook and some of the things being written in the press and on social media about the subject make it evident these individuals see absolutely no inconsistency in their protest that we are free to offend Islam but those who offend them should silenced.

I rather suspect that many of these vacuous people have jumped on the ‘Je Suis Charlie Hebdo’ bandwagon in pretty much the same way they jumped on the back of the Malta Taghna Lkoll lorry when it drove past marked ‘something fashionable’. If they were actually to look at a real, live copy of the publication – do they even know it is one? – their reaction would be entirely predictable: “This is so disgusting. These things shouldn’t be allowed. You shouldn’t offend the Pope and write about Jesus like that. And those jokes about willies are so uncalled for. Maaaa, what hamalli. This kind of thing should be stopped.”