I find it hard to imagine what kind of person climbs into the parking lot of a school and sets alight cars owned by Jesuit priests – not out of personal animosity because of some perverted act that may have taken place in his schooldays, but because the Jesuits are at the forefront of the fight against racism and xenophobia in Malta. It would be the sort of person, if not the same person or persons, who some months ago wrote vulgar obscenities about me in large letters, using black paint, in a prominent position on each side of a wall on the road leading up to the village where I live. The crudely made suggestion in this threatening graffiti was that I speak out against racism and xenophobia because I have a sexual fetish for black men. At least they spelt it correctly, possibly because none of the words they used, except for my name and the word “black”, was of more than four letters, and so well within their intellectual grasp.

Other women who have spoken out against racism have received the similar treatment, via anonymous letters or e-mails, or through the expression of perverted sexual fantasies on the blacks-and-Jews-hating Internet chat-rooms where these sad and inadequate (mentally and probably also sexually) men conduct their social lives. Their behaviour merely proves the point that men who hate and fear blacks and Jews usually hate and fear women, too. The only people they like are other men with the same passport, but oddly, they also hate gays. They must be terribly confused.

These people cannot suggest that the Jesuits say what they do for sexual reasons, because they fancy black men, so instead they burn their cars in the dead of night. This is hardly the behaviour of brave and ultra-masculine heroes, but then, you cannot expect any different of the truly inadequate, who hate themselves but direct that self-hatred at others instead. They are exactly the sort of sad sacks who would be easily manipulated by a savage and amoral leader like Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, General Franco or Slobodan Milosevic. Normal people ask: but how could so many have done the bidding of those animals? How could they have been so cruel and so unfeeling? Well, now you have the answer: people like this are in the midst of society always, and always hidden, until an amoral leader comes to power and shores up that power by making it possible for these nasty human beings to come out of the closet and act on his behalf. The rest of the time, they know they are unacceptable to society and so stay hidden, doing their foul work anonymously and in dead of night, or in the surreal world of the Internet. There are very many of them, and they do not sport the devil’s horns, but look like everyone else. Didn’t you see all those people paying tribute to Milosevic on television, and those icon-inspired paintings of him depicted as a saint?

You can spot a racist only when you engage him or her in conversation about the subject. Nothing is more likely to reveal a person’s true colours. Views like this are so strongly held that they cannot be concealed or disguised, unless the person is a master of self-control who is also blessed with self-awareness. I have had to rapidly revise my opinion of various people I had previously thought of as kind and pleasant when the immigration was the major talking-point. I was thoroughly put off by some of the things I heard said. This is not because these people hold views that are different to my own, but because of what those views tell me about their character and their outlook on life. It was almost as bad as hearing somebody I liked suddenly say that he doesn’t think paedophilia is that bad, really, because there are studies which show that the children actually enjoy it. Look at David Irving, for example, the disgraced historian who ruined his promising career and bankrupted himself, all because of his irrational hatred for Jews, which provoked him to write books and give lectures (to Nazi groups) denying the Holocaust. How can a serious historian do that without destroying his credibility? How can he hope to come across as anything other than despicable? Yet these racist views consume him just as, further down the scale of prominence, they consume those who burnt the Jesuits’ cars and who scrawled obscene graffiti about me near my home.

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There are people among us who cannot understand that it is completely irrational to hate whole groups of people, or even just one other person, because of skin colour, ethnic group or religion. I can understand hating people on a personal basis, because of what they may have done to you. Even though this is self-destructive and pointless, it is rational and comprehensible. But wholesale hatred based on skin colour or religion? I find it next to impossible to like, understand, or have any kind of sympathy for people like this. Anybody who hates others for such spurious reasons is bound to have something wrong up there. If they hate John because he’s black, or Jane because she’s Jewish, then what might they do to you one day, even though you’re Caucasian and Roman Catholic? I wouldn’t trust a racist in any part of life.

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Perhaps the people who burnt the Jesuits’ cars, who wrote obscenities about me in a public place, and who send anonymous racist missives full of bile to the Minister for Social Policy (dark and a woman, though not Jewish) are among those who denigrated Muslims in general for the violent reaction to the Danish cartoons. Now here they are, behaving in exactly the same primitive way towards those who express views that are directly opposite to their own. What does this say about them? Nothing that we don’t know already. The principle of “live and let live” is alien to them, which is why they are fascists, the core of fascist thought and politics being the need to control everything and everyone and to make them into your own image, destroying them if you are unable to do so.

The Minister for Justice and Home Affairs has described the attack as “disturbing because it is without a real precedent”. Well, I don’t know where he has been living, but I have been here for the past 41 years, and I can reel off a list of precedents as long as his memory is short. The fundamental fact here is not of arson or other forms of violence used to threaten or intimidate those who speak out against racism, but of arson or other forms of violence used to threaten or intimidate those who hold different views, views which the violent see as posing a threat to their interests. Our political history of the past 30 years is replete with such incidents. There have been so many that we remember only the major ones, like the burning down of The Times’ building, the sacking of the Leader of the Opposition’s house while his family was there, and of the Law Courts and the Archbishop’s Curia, the wrecking of the political clubs of the Opposition party, the shooting and beating of political demonstrators, the raiding of the homes of dissenters by the police – shall I go on? This was institutionalised violence against those who held political views that differed from those of the governing party. At a lower level, violent attacks on the property of those whose views are considered threatening to the status quo, personal or national, have been a fact of life for generations: bombs, front doors set on fire, cars burnt, threatening letters and telephone calls. Honestly, where has the Minister for Justice and Home Affairs been living all this time?

As a small society locked on two tiny islands with scant resources, we are insecure, easily threatened by difference, and avid for conformity in all areas of life. The greatest fear about EU membership was that it would bring change, and cause us to be invaded by ‘different’ people. We deal with perceived threats to our way of life by spoken or physical violence. We are as intolerant of difference as any other closed-in society the world over, from the black-bashing small towns of the American Deep South to the French villagers suspicious of a mere chocolate shop in the book (and film) Chocolat. We are ultra-conservative and ultra-conformist, and we view the merest expression of difference as wild eccentricity (if we like the person) or a serious threat (if we don’t like the person). It’s about time we got a grip on ourselves, but that’s easier said than done. If people are not raised from birth to be open-minded and to embrace difference as the very thing that makes life more interesting, then they are going to have to be very exceptional indeed to work this out for themselves in adulthood. Sadly, many of the adults I meet in Malta have minds that are not merely closed, but ossified. It’s too late for them, and because they are the ones who have raised and are raising the next generation, there’s little hope there unless external influences outweigh parental influence. Fortunately, that is beginning to happen.