Robert Fisk, award-winning Middle East correspondent for the London newspaper The Independent, spoke recently about his decades of work in journalism, starting from when he was a cub reporter with a local newspaper in Newcastle. One thing he said is that what works when writing about a cat stuck up a tree, or a football match, or council elections – giving each side equal time or space – does not necessarily work when it comes to a war or the Holocaust. “If reporting on the Holocaust, would you give equal time to the SS captain?” he asked his audience.
He took the argument to the extreme to make his point, but the same can be said of political reporting in Malta, especially with our state television. Sometimes the Labour Party does something worth reporting, and sometimes the Nationalist Party does. If it’s not worth reporting, don’t report it. And if it should be reported, then report it. Anything else makes nonsense of the news, and giving them equal time insults the intelligence of the viewer. Yes, lots of viewers are intelligent, and those who are not should still be treated with respect.
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From time to time I receive one of those round-robin emails about Muslims taking over Britain, and how we shouldn’t let them take over Malta. That would be difficult, given that the Catholics took over around 600 years ago and haven’t released their clutches yet. What the senders of these emails don’t seem to understand is that the British protests are against the ‘taking over’ of secularism by religion, and the taking over of the Christian way of life by Islam. It’s a safe bet that if British Catholics of Italian, Maltese and Spanish extraction were to behave the same way, they would get exactly the same reaction.
In all the emails, variants of the same pictures are attached of women wrapped in black and bearded men carrying placards calling for death to those who insult Islam. When the messages are from people I know, rather than from people I don’t know, I always reply. I say that I find this kind of thinking as deeply offensive as the sentiments expressed on the ‘death to those who insult Islam’ placards, and would the person in question remove me from that particular email group. Thank you.
The last time this happened was two days ago. My acquaintance emailed back with the usual chestnut that ‘we’ tolerate ‘these people’ in ‘our’ territory and then they behave like that. And just imagine if ‘we’ were to go to ‘their’ countries and behave in the same way. Where does one begin to explain? It would take forever, and in the face of prejudice that has been formed by inadequate knowledge of history, philosophy, geography and current affairs, it’s generally useless.
There are a hundred points one wishes to make, but chief among them is the fact that the west passed through the Age of Enlightenment, which advocated reason rather than religion as the primary basis for authority. Europe is tolerant now despite the full efforts of the Catholic Church and its various Christian off-shoots and breakaway parties, and not because of them. Islamic states, on the other hand, are exactly where European states were before the Enlightenment. God’s rules, or what they see as God’s rules, are the rules of the state. They are theocracies.
The reason the west is tolerant is because it is secular, and not because it is Christian.
States that are religious rather than secular are intolerant whatever the religion. Catholic European states were supremely intolerant – violently and cruelly so. The reason that there is so much intolerance in Malta is because it is only partly secular, but mainly a theocracy. God and the rules of Catholicism remain the first point of reference for legislators and the people for vote for them. The process has been slower here.
David Abulafia has had published a fascinating new book, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus. We all know by now that the Catholic Europeans who first made their way into the New World across the ocean treated the people they found there with great savagery. They were hardly great ambassadors for their religion, but that was of far secondary importance to them when compared to the desire to exploit the mineral resources they found. What most of us don’t know is that not everyone thought or behaved that way – that cruel and savage barbarism were recognisable as such even to contemporaneous observers. Some Spaniards protested, most notably Bartoleme de las Casas, who had witnessed massacres during the subjugation of Cuba. He wrote passionate epistles against this kind of injustice, that are seen as a major step on the way to the concept of human rights and the legislation that followed centuries later.
To give their conquest the merest veil of legality, the Spanish read out a proclamation to the peoples they encountered on beaches and in jungles. They were exhorted, in a language they did not understand, to give up their territory to these strange-looking people wearing alien garb, and to ‘acknowledge the (Catholic) Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world.’ If they put up a fight, they were taken into slavery and told that ‘the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault’.
One Cuban chieftain delivered a damning verdict on the Spanish Catholic invaders who destroyed his people’s culture and eventually annihilated those people altogether through persecution and disease. As they prepared to burn him at the stake for the crime of opposing their wishes, they warned him to accept Christ before death or face eternal damnation. The chieftain asked if heaven is where Christians go when they die. “When told that they did,” Bartoleme de las Casas wrote in a contemporary account of the event, “he said that he would prefer to go to hell.”
If heaven and hell do exist, the chieftain and those who burnt him must have wondered, when they arrived, who got the arrangements mixed up.
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I am more than a little tired of the endless protestations against abortion, which have erupted yet again because of that business with the Council of Europe. The newspapers are filled once more with hysterical letters and articles holding Malta up as the last bastion against this craven evil. We’re not the last bastion, because that’s a dubious honour we share with Islamic states (horrors).
Throughout, I am left with the nagging suspicion that our objection shares its roots with Islam on two counts: religion, and the discounting of women’s dignity and integrity. We talk about the baby, the baby, the baby, bringing forth a mental picture of one of those jolly little things on Anne Geddes birthday cards, all cuddly and pretty and with flowers in its hair. The woman is never factored into the equation.
It’s a little bit harder to feel emotionally galvanised about a couple of cells two days after conception, which is why the most emotionally-wrought among us refer even to this, with biological inaccuracy, as ‘the baby’. It is so far removed from a baby that when two-thirds of these conceptions are flushed down the lavatory, as happens naturally, the woman doesn’t even notice and probably didn’t even know she was pregnant (“Oh, how odd, my period’s late this month. I hope I’m not pregnant.” Oh darling, but you were and you didn’t notice.)
As somebody pointed out elsewhere, if we’re claiming that ‘ensoulment’, a very odd word that my computer doesn’t recognise and which isn’t in my Oxford Dictionary, takes place immediately upon conception, then what we are also saying is that there are more souls in heaven who were never born at all than there are souls who actually lived. This leaves us with another problem for those who believe that they will be reunited in heaven with those they knew on this earth, and who even see these presences in near-death experiences. How is something that leaves a woman’s body naturally and without her noticing it, two days after sexual intercourse, represented in heaven? And how will we women recognise our ‘children’ when we meet them in the afterlife, given that they’ll all look the same – correction, given that we won’t be able to see them without a microscope?
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These legalistic debates about heaven leave me cold with boredom in any case. It’s life on earth, in the here and now, with which a secular state should be concerned, instead of taking to platforms in international forums to behave like Islamic mullahs. And no, there’s no difference; when you represent the state, protesting against legislation, ideas or concepts on the basis of religion is unacceptable whatever the religion. When you’re a private individual, you do whatever you like because it’s your prerogative and you live in a free country. Those who want to speak out against abortion are free to do so – and not because Malta is a Catholic country, but because it respects free speech. Equally, those who want to object to their views are free to do so too. When you represent the state, it’s a different matter.
The time for hysteria, and yes, I know it is an unfortunate choice of word given that it is derived from the Greek for womb, and high emotion is long gone. The government, instead of contributing to the screaming and shouting, must pull its head out of the sand and assess the situation properly and realistically. What we are saying here is that Malta can afford to have no abortion because, in effect, it does have abortion – a brief catamaran ride away with no passport or foreign exchange required. Abortion is actually far more accessible to Maltese women than it is to millions of women the world over, in countries where abortion is legal but where the closest clinic is several hours away.
What this means is that our position on abortion is buoyed up by the immediate availability of abortion and so it is nothing short of hypocritical. There is strong demand for abortion in Malta, and it is being met in Sicily, or London as it has been for decades, with a spot of shopping around it. The mental illness of having an abortion? The depression of ending an unwanted pregnancy? Funny how it is mainly men and women who are divorced from their femininity who believe these things and who talk about them. Real women, on the other hand, know that far more mental illness and depression are caused by actually having babies, even if you desperately wanted them, but especially if you had them against your will.
If having babies were not essential for the survival of the human race, it would be outlawed as a dangerous sport. Instead of talking about the women who should be forcibly prevented from having abortions in case they get depressed, let’s spend some time actually caring for all those thousands of women in Malta who are either coping with post-natal depression right now as you read this, or are still suffering from the fall-out, years later, of post-natal depression that spiralled out of control when the illness wasn’t acknowledged because women who have babies are supposed to be happy. One of my dearest friends killed herself at the age of 30 and left three children behind after developing a mental illness provoked by childbirth. I know several women whose lives and mental health have been destroyed by having children at the wrong time, or when they didn’t want them, or by being unable to cope mentally even though they wanted them. The children suffer, the woman suffers, her husband suffers, and eventually, after some years, the whole thing falls apart.
And in case you were wondering, this is not an argument for abortion. It’s an argument against hypocrisy. It’s an argument against the strange belief that Malta objects to abortion when thousands of Maltese women have had abortions in Italian and British clinics over the years. It’s an argument against the argument that abortion makes a woman mentally unwell but childbirth and child-raising do not. It’s an argument in favour of commonsense and against religious hysteria, which never brought anything other than harm to humanity.
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