They say that you should not pay the ferryman until he gets you to the other side. Chris de Burgh wrote a song about it in the early 1980s. But what do you do if the ferryman is hooded and carries a gun? He can take your money with or without your consent, at any point of the journey.

He can take your money when you are 20 miles away from the nearest shore, the sea is freezing and he is threatening to kill you if you don’t jump in and face drowning or death through exposure. At gunpoint, he can rob you of any cash you might be carrying, over and above the agreed exorbitant fare. Who’s to stop him, when you are entirely at his mercy? And if he shoots you or kills you with a blow to the head, he can strip your pockets clean before pushing your corpse overboard.

Scratch many ordinary Maltese – even your friends, neighbours and relatives – and you will find an embryonic Norman Lowell sympathiser or rather, somebody who would be happy to endorse his views if he didn’t come across the way he does. So of course, we have had the seemingly inevitable reaction to the murder of Chinese immigrants by purportedly Maltese ferrymen: “U ajma, they were just a bunch of Chinks. What a fuss. It’s their fault for taking such a stupid risk and breaking the law”.

Fortunately, the people who think like this do not go around shouting out their views but only express them in private. Yet still they make one sick to the stomach. It’s pointless going to Mass and sending your children to duttrina if this is how you think.

The general reaction, though, appears to be a shocked one. While we can stretch our arguments like bubblegum to excuse the behaviour of the soldiers who beat up black immigrants at the internment camps, we cannot do the same for murder, no matter how much we would like to do so, and regardless of the extent of our hatred and suspicion of anyone who does not look like we do.

At least we have the good sense to keep our mouths shut and to say the right thing. I notice that there are no letters to the editor, in any of the newspapers, from readers seeking to justify what these murderers have done, as they justified the hammering that some soldiers gave to others. I suppose a line is drawn between one kind of behaviour and the other, though precisely where these people draw it in their consciences remains a mystery.

* * *

I will never be able to understand why these ferrymen bother to take their human cargo almost all the way to Sicily, only to kill them or to force them into the water when they could not possibly make it to shore, even if they were champion swimmers. Why don’t they just kill them 15 miles off Malta and save on fuel? The only way I can explain it is through using, what I call, “Maltese logic”.

Indeed, it is this warped logic that is one of the surest indicators that the ferrymen are Maltese. It is a way of absolving themselves from guilt, blame or responsibility and we see it all the time. People dump their unwanted dogs at Ta’ Qali instead of taking them to be put down because in this way they see themselves as not being responsible for killing the dog, while at the same time giving it a chance of survival either as a stray or in the home of somebody who picks it up.

Try and tell them that dumping dogs in this way is grossly irresponsible, far more cruel to the dog than simply having it put to sleep and that it places the burden of “doing something about it” on others who find the dog. They simply cannot understand. As far as they are concerned, taw cans lil-kelb.

It’s the same with the dreadful story of the Chinese forced into the water. If the scum who ferried them were capable of killing some of them with blows to the head, if they were capable of forcing the others into the icy water at gunpoint, 20 miles from shore, then they have no conscience to speak of. They are of the ilk that made the Maltese notorious as criminals – hatchetmen, pimps, drug-runners, the lowest of the low – in London in the 1950s and 1960s, and throughout the Mediterranean before that. With such a small population, we have somehow succeeded in producing a criminal class of the worst kind of ghastliness.

It happens in most port cultures and Malta was the port culture par excellence – but still. This begs the question: why didn’t these ferrymen just shoot the lot of them, push the bodies into the water and have done with it? What kind of perverse, warped mental wrangling caused them to arrive at the conclusion that it would be better to force them into the water when they had no chance of swimming to shore? Or to kill those who refused to go into the water by whacking them on the head?

We know they had a gun but it wasn’t done to save on bullets. It was that unspeakable Maltese logic. By pushing them into the sea – a slow death rather than an immediate one – they could rationalise it as “giving them a chance”.

They wouldn’t see themselves as responsible for killing them. They pushed them in, but – heqq hej – they died by drowning. Jien x’ghandi x’naqsam! It’s just a far more horrible version of what goes through the minds of those who dump their dogs in public places.

* * *

Some of them did get their chance – yes – and it was literally a chance in a million that a passing Turkish boat saw them floating and picked up those left alive and the corpses of the others. Hopefully, they will now use their chance to nail the bastards who did it, though given the confusion of culture and language and the fact that these criminals kept themselves hooded and wouldn’t have used their real names, it’s going to be next to impossible. At least the wife got her balavostri and her new linef.

* * *

Well, we all have to keep up with the cost of living. I suppose there are some who see their role as the ferryman across the River Styx as just another job – albeit one that puts a flash car in the garage, a flashier boat down at the marina and irham everywhere at home, including the garage floor.

* * *

It unnerves us to know that, on such a tiny island, the criminals who do these things might very well live on the next street. We don’t like to think that we might bump up against them in the supermarket aisles or that our children might play with theirs.

Such abhorrent acts must be concealed from society, not just because of fear of the law but also because of the disgust and horror they engender, so those who operate in this line of business are careful to disguise the source of their income.

People appear able to accept drug dealers and those who pimp Russian women, as long as they come from the right sort of families, but something tells me that it would be more than a little different with those who make their money by ferrying desperate immigrants to Sicily and killing them before they get there.

Yet the indications are that this is a booming business and that plenty of people are involved in it. It’s pointless blaming the “Chinese mafia” – whatever that may be – or other foreigners, just so that we can feel better about ourselves. It should be obvious that no outsider can operate in Malta without help from insiders.

Those insiders are Maltese. For years, Malta’s best-known export was its criminals but with the closure of immigration to Britain and other parts of the old colonial empire, Maltese criminals, like everybody else, had to find outlets for their skills and talents here in Malta. They find a gap in the market and they go right ahead and fill it.

* * *

Alfred Sant appears to be very confident of victory in 2008. He bases this confidence on the fact that he forms part of a “winning team” once more. I will spare you the details but the gist of his argument is that he and his winning team have won “three elections in a row”.

What are these elections, I hear you ask? The last time we looked, the winning team of Alfred Sant and Manwel Cuschieri had lost three elections in a row, not won them: the 1998 general election, the 2003 referendum and the 2003 general election.

Still smarting from those burning losses, he would now have us give credence to what he sees as his three successive wins: one bout of local council elections, the MEP elections and another bout of local council elections. Like Alternattiva before him, he makes the mistake of extrapolating from this kind of election to forecast the result of a general election.

That would be a gross mistake even if the general election were to be held next year. I would say that public opinion about Alfred Sant and his policies has been more than amply expressed, and in the forums that truly matter.

Too much counting of unhatched chickens never did anyone any good. For a start, it distracts them from the real objective, which is to make sure that the party is capable of forming an effective government for five years and that its leader is capable of performing as prime minister.

I would hazard an informed guess that the majority remains unconvinced as to the Labour Party’s abilities in this direction, let alone those of its leader.

Because we are content to give them the reins of Fawwara or Qormi, or to let Joseph Muscat jump onto the gravy train in Brussels which he fought so hard to miss before 2003, does not mean that we are going to rush out and vote for Alfred Sant to install himself in Castille.

The stakes are rather different, wouldn’t you agree?