At a time when the whole world was still reeling from the shocking news of hundreds of immigrants drowning just off Libya as they embarked on a trip they thought would change their fortunes forever, we still had the handful of idiots, local and foreign, seemingly immune to such human suffering and tragedies. Even worse, they chose to comment in a way that confirms they do not have blood in their veins, but reptilian venom.

The prize for this kind of cold-blooded stupidity has to go to UK newspaper columnist Katie Hopkins who somehow anticipated the whole tragedy by a couple of days when she wrote in her Sun column suggesting the use of gunboats on migrants. Fellow columnists quickly reacted angrily, with one insisting Hopkins' idea actually proved unnecessary, and sarcastically asked: "Why waste the money when you can let people die by doing nothing, for free?"

In the past, the pathetic Hopkins described migrants as vermin, as a virus, and as cockroaches built to survive a nuclear bomb, even embellishing her narrative by liking them to Bob Geldof's Ethiopia circa 1984. In the immediate aftermath of the recent tragedy, she probably and naively thought she was taking a softer position by insisting that the best way to solve the refugee crisis "was not to shoot them once they are in the water", but to "burn all the boats in North Africa".

We should not for one single moment matter-of-factly attribute such heartless tripe to a handful of ruthless, money-grabbing commentators from overseas. We have our very own clowns who are willing to ravish themselves with utter malice for nothing on the social media, even having the temerity of putting themselves in the blasphemous role of "patriots".

One such despicable post on Facebook, for example, had this insipid, little Maltese excuse for a human being expressing fear that with so many immigrant lives lost in the sea, we should all be wary of eating lampuki this year as they may carry the Ebola virus. A more vicious, disgusting and nauseating comment can only be concocted by other sick minds. This in a nation that, for decades, had been losing whole generations of young men and women who sought better futures for them and their families by emigrating to places all over the globe.

The rage on the part of many Maltese, a vast majority of people with a heart, has been palpable. After reading the many racist comments by these "patriots", one irate university lecturer rekindled his once declared wish not to be buried in Malta lest his ashes "would one day come into contact with those of certain Maltese".

On Thursday, however, the Maltese nation was able to show it has the strength and the will to rise and stifle the venom of the few by giving a solemn and respectful burial to the victims of the recent tragedy. For years, Malta has been doing more than her limited resources permit to help save lives and sheltering immigrants until they are processed and hopefully given access to European and other labour markets.

 

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Hypocritical, no other word for it

It may sound shocking, but I somehow feel for these nonagenarians who are still being prised from their deathbeds to face justice for their Nazi past. While many of the leaders and the main perpetrators of the Holocaust were, throughout the decades following WWII, rightly convicted and punished for their horrific crimes, there have remained those who were really not in a position to take decisions, but knew what was going on.

If knowing about it was being an accessory to the murder of thousands of people in Nazi death camps during the war, then the whole German nation could have just been obliterated. I am sure that all those soldiers, officers, all those administrators, assistants, doctors, politicians and all those involved in the whole war machine had families, and all those families had friends and neighbours to tell about the horror and the inhumanity.

What irks me today is to watch someone like 93-year-old Oskar Groening, known as the "bookkeeper of Auschwitz" being taken to a re-trial and re-accused of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people when German prosecutors in 1985 had chosen not to pursue a case against him when they decided there was no causal link between his actions and the killings that took place at Auschwitz. A subsequent request for prosecution was again denied only two years ago.

So where is the hypocrisy? While these nonagenarians are being made to belatedly face justice over their indifference to the horrors then taking place a few metres away from them, real perpetrators of Nazi crimes who had something to offer to the victors were spared such misery and even given the opportunity to start new, affluent lives elsewhere.

No one, for example, ever touted the idea of prosecuting Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun while he was running America's rocket and space programme practically until he died in 1977.  Von Braun was one of the leading figures in the development of rocket technology in Germany and the United States and is considered one of the "Fathers of Rocket Science". He was also, however, an avid member of the Nazi Party and the SS.

There were several others like him, but they were all essential to the West so no Jewish or judicial entity could have them fished out and declared accessories to murder and genocide.

 

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Something's wrong

Forget the weird eagerness to celebrate defeat, something is seriously wrong with the Opposition machine when serious accusations end up like deflated balloons. An Energy Ministry media release the other day hilariously pointed out that two weeks earlier the issue concerning solar energy plans to provide opportunities for small and medium-sized industries had been discussed and agreed upon between the government and their representative, the GRTU. The public had also been informed via a joint release by the two parties.

Inevitably, the ministry statement said the Opposition must have either overlooked that particular news item or else chosen to ignore it by way of persisting in its negativity. It probably was more a question of someone entrusted with shadowing the government on the matter who simply had not done his or her homework.

 

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Your latest trick

Trend-setting Sliema is, not surprisingly, always ahead with social innovation. After the great discovery that it's ok to clean after one's dog as long as you put the poo in a plastic bag and then throwing it away for the street cleaners to reflect upon, it has now become all too customary having to face cyclists using the pavements rather than the roads.