Joseph Muscat has made, at last, an impassioned speech about hatred, forgiveness and something strange which he called ‘political racism
Perhaps impassioned is the wrong word; this man delivers every speech as though he is reading it off a monitor without first having been to method-acting classes. He invariably sounds wet, flaccid and only mildly interested, while wrestling hard against his Burmarrad vowels.
It wasn’t exactly the speech we’ve been waiting for, the one in which he hangs his head and begs forgiveness for the hatred, violence, human rights violations and supreme nastiness of the Labour Party in government during what Karmenu Vella called the Golden Years of Labour. Nor was it an apology for the vicious character assassination and venom spewed out by Super One television and radio, Stalin style, day after day. Muscat didn’t even touch on the vulgar, ugly spite churned out by his supporters all over their Facebook walls and the walls of others, or the Facebook groups and pages set up by his followers to incite violent and aggressive sentiments against those champion different political ideas.
No, Muscat’s speech centred on throwaway remarks made by a 30-year-old local councillor for the Nationalist Party, and which became public only because somebody he trusted pressed ‘record’ on his smartphone. Can Muscat really be serious? He should remember that a significant part of his wider audience is made up of people like me, who have perfect recall of current Labour heroes Joe Grima, Karmenu Vella, Joe Debono Grech and Alex Sceberras Trigona in the cabinet of government when Labour mobs ransacked the leader of the Opposition’s home and physically attacked his wife, set fire to a newspaper building with staff still inside, destroyed Opposition political party clubs, sacked the law courts and the Archbishop’s Curia, and created a climate of fear and violence so great that we are still suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder today.
The sentiments which created that climate of fear and violence are still there, and you can see this by reading the sort of things supporters of Joseph Muscat and his Labour Party post on the internet. They are humourless, vicious, rife with envy and the salivating desire for revenge, and really no different in their thinking to their fathers and grandfathers who rampaged with those 1970s and 1980s mobs. The violence and anarchic behaviour didn’t stop after 1987, either. When the prime minister, Eddie Fenech Adami, turned up to serve as witness to a church wedding in Zejtun, he was shot at. That’s right: They shot at the prime minister (and got away with it). That’s the sort of society in which we lived only 25 years ago. And under the direction of Dockyard Boss Sammy Meilak, these savages towed an oil-tanking vessel across the mouth of Grand Harbour so that a British warship on a courtesy call couldn’t get in and had to moor off St Paul’s Bay instead. You know, because Labour didn’t agree with visits from British warships and even though Labour wasn’t in government anymore, the mob still did what it liked. So, with all this and counting – because they’re still at it on the internet – Joseph Muscat decides to turn into Francis of Assisi, quoting the famous ‘Where there is hatred, let me sow love’ prayer (to the bewilderment of his befuddled audience, who didn’t get the reference) because of something a Sliema local councillor said. The dissonance between what he says and what his party does is beyond belief.
Perhaps he went to the cinema at the weekend and took inspiration from Margaret Thatcher, who quoted from St Francis when she entered Number 10 for the first time in 1979. If Muscat thinks of himself as a sort of Thatcher for Malta in the 21st century, this makes for an interesting thought: Muscat the Iron Lady, leading his solders of steel. But oddly enough, the only visual image which comes to my mind is that of the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz.