The renowned Maltese-Australian organist Claire Baluci donated her talents and huge amounts of time and energy to a concert that would raise funds for children who are dying in famine-stricken African states. The reaction she got was not a bit what she expected, though it was every bit what I imagined would happen when I saw the billboards and the advertisements.

We are no longer willing to help people in Africa – a vast continent that we view as an undifferentiated mass – because they are now the enemy, rather than the msieken. Nobody helps his enemies. Ms Baluci was more than a little taken aback by the way her fund-raising concert was seen by those who spoke to her about it: as a project to keep those children alive long enough for them to grow up and invade us.

Perhaps Ms Baluci, coming from enormous Australia, is not yet cushioned against the particular norms of life in minuscule communities, where the irrational majority is right in your face and meeting you on every street corner, and where there is no critical mass of rational intelligence – as there would be in a cosmopolitan city – from which to take comfort at the fact that one is not necessarily wrong or obscene just because one is in the tiny minority – but rather the opposite.

Ms Baluci knows in her conscience that it is she who has behaved well, and not those who criticised her. Rather than let it get her down, she should simply take it as yet another lesson in life in a Lilliputian community, wherever that community may be. Lilliput is not just a cipher for size, but for the social behaviour that is shaped by that size, as anyone who has bothered to read Gulliver’s Travels will know.

The thought patterns and behaviour of those who live in very small hidebound communities are remarkably similar, despite the difference in century and geographical location. Ms Baluci told one newspaper: “I was shocked when people told us that we are helping children who will eventually end up as refugees here – so it would be better if they were to die.”

She is shocked because unlike me, she didn’t grow up here. I’m not shocked at all. It is precisely, word for word, how I would have expected this typical thought process to be expressed: we are being invaded by Africans; African children are dying of hunger and disease; if they die, then they won’t get to be an age at which they can invade us; therefore I will do nothing to help them live.

Ms Baluci can take succour from the fact that nobody who thinks like that can ever be right – factually, morally or even logically – no matter how great the majority who thinks this way, or how small the minority who doesn’t. This is one of those cases in which people think wrong or right is a matter of opinion or of personal judgement, rather than a moral absolute. It isn’t. What a fine world we would be living in today if, throughout history, the right-thinking minorities (and they have been inevitably minorities) had allowed themselves to be railroaded by the wrong-thinking majorities.

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We have to keep things in perspective. The few individuals – of whom I am one – who are speaking out against the prevailing current are not “pro-immigration”. Nowhere have I seen or heard the argument made that the floodgates should be thrown wide open and everyone who is not an EU citizen let in to live and work. I can speak only for myself, and not for others who might think as I do, when I say that I am pro-rationality, pro-human rights, and pro-the legal framework that keeps our civilisation in check.

I am anti-irrationality, anti-hysteria, anti-panic, anti-the law of the jungle and mob rule, and anti-hypocrisy. I am also consistent in my outlook and attitudes, which means that no regular reader of my columns over recent years should have imagined that I would have had any other view on the current debate than the one I do have. I am not going to metamorphose overnight into a hysterical and irrational person with no historical, geographical, or legal perspective, who is unable to take the long view and put things into context.

I am not going to wake up tomorrow and write a column which shrieks that the Africans are invading Malta so “Europe” should dispatch its armies to save us. I will no more think or write this than I will think or write that all birdlife, including the pet canary, should be regarded with grave suspicion as a source of human death.

I won’t even begin to tell you what I think about all those people bombarding the health authorities with hundreds of reports every day about dead sparrows and pigeons. Sparrows and pigeons die in their hundreds every day; they haven’t just started to die because people with nothing better to do than worry and panic have just started to notice the dead birds that have been there all along.

* * *

People love a good panic. By this, I don’t mean the sort of real panic that is induced by the police turning up to tell you that your son or daughter has been involved in a serious accident. That’s awful. You would have to be very sick indeed to love that.

I am talking about generic panic, the kind that is not directly related to us and which gives us a kind of perverted enjoyment and a sense of community in panicking collectively. Having something to panic about also puts a form of twisted verve into an otherwise dull and pedestrian routine.

It adds a much needed sense of danger – not real danger of course, like being trapped in a burning building, but pretend danger, the kind that is thrilling, like an illicit liaison that might be found out at any moment. The current bird flu panic (“Shall I murder the pet budgie?” “My God, I just saw a dead pigeon!” “Doctor, my toddler just put his hand in the bird-cage! I cleaned his hands with disinfectant, but should I give him a blood-test, just in case?”) reminds me so much of the Gulf War panic 15 years ago.

Supermarkets sold out of sunflower oil (“Ghax se joghla l-prezz taz-zejt”), people stockpiled jars and tins of food, house prices briefly froze, and madness reigned as though the end of the world was just a month away. We were living in Sliema at the time and I remember walking into my local mini-market to buy some milk and a packet of cereal, and not being able to move for the trolleys piled high with branded yeast extract (no free ads here!), cans of tuna, packets of pasta, tins of tomato pulp, and what have you.

Feeling as though I had landed in some kind of netherworld, I asked the man at the cheese counter whether I had missed something. Had there been a coup d’etat while I was sleeping? Were the socialists back in power with their protectionist policies? Were people stocking up before a return to the days of one kind of bulk-bought rice or tea?

My man at the cheese counter rolled his eyes heavenwards. “Ajma jahasra,” he said, “they’re buying up the shop in readiness for when the Gulf War becomes World War III.” Then he burst out laughing. To enter the spirit of the occasion, I added a tin of kunserva to my cereal and milk, and went home to switch on the television. There was Lily Gruber, telling us how Italians the length and breadth of the Boot were out in force, raiding the supermarkets.

RAI reporters stood wearing expressions of wonder among towering supermarket shelves as panicking shoppers pulled at things indiscriminately and battled over the last packet of nappies, as though they were at the Harrods sale. It was amazing. I made a cup of tea and sat down to watch. “What are the people doing, mummy?” “They think World War III is coming.” “Is World War III coming?” “No, darling, it’s not. There will still be chocolate rice cereal tomorrow, I promise you.” (No free ads here, either.) “Oh good. Silly people.” “Yes, darling, very silly people.”

It’s happening again now, with the Italian and French governments having to issue public notices telling their citizens that chicken is safe to eat, because the chicken-producers are going under. Health authorities everywhere appear to be amazed that people cannot understand a simple message: you can’t get bird flu by eating chicken, not unless you eat raw or drink the blood of a chicken that actually has the virus in the first place.

Even if you cook and eat a chicken that died of the bug, you still won’t get bird flu because the virus doesn’t withstand the heat of proper cooking. But it is not that people don’t understand this message, though many truly do not. They just love a good old panic. Perhaps it’s time we had a real war on our hands, or an earthquake like Kashmir. That would make us put things into context, sharpish.