However hard you try, it is just plainly impossible to remain neutral over the harsh David-v.-Goliath battle and the heart-wrenching human tragedy that sadly continue to occur in Gaza. The disproportion is so hugely unfair and the odds are so incredibly obvious that one is rightly shocked to still find the usual Western war-mongers talking in terms as if it’s all an issue of “tit for tat”. It bloody well is not.

The imbalance is not just the result of the vastly superior fire-power and the bottomless resources available via the pockets of taxpayers in the United States, the UK and other American satellites in Europe, but as a journalist, I am horrified to also see it in the incredibly biased reporting of most Western news outlets which, like their pay masters, equate the firing of out-of-range, amateur-made rockets falling in the desert with Israel’s ground invasion, indiscriminate missile and mortar attacks and complete disregard for innocent human life.

I am no Hamas admirer and I find myself instinctively allergic to all forms of suicidal warfare that is supposed to send more martyrs, Islamic or otherwise, to heaven – straight and without passing go. But when it comes to the sober arithmetic of the whole situation, it still is a solitary teenage lad catapulting stones at a fierce colony of Transformer-like monsters firing at random and from the hip their instant-killer lasers. Contrary to the Hollywood version, though, these irrepressible monsters kill for real, as we have seen from officially-verified figures of people killed on both sides of the conflict, hundreds upon hundreds on one side, a few dozen on the other, but all of them precious lives.

I have media friends on both sides of the divide and the personal anguish is mutual. But the question remains: What would you do today if you have seen your loved ones – not soldiers, not militants, not screaming mad mullahs promising martyrdom, but simple men and women like you and me, and their children caught in the world’s biggest concentration camp – dying in their homes, their schools, on the beach and inside the supermarket? I would say the same if the Hamas rockets ever reached populated areas and wreaked the horrible havoc they certainly could. But no, the Americans have dutifully supplied Israel with an impregnable, extremely-expensive “Iron Dome” to make sure the one-sidedness in human losses remains.

How can one remain neutral? I find it impossible. Love him or hate him, Malta’s greatest statesman ever, Dom Mintoff, originally a very pro-Israel politician with strong ties with the Israeli Labour Party via the Socialist International, was once fried on the international media pan for saying that if he were a Palestinian, he would likewise have been hijacking airplanes. At that moment in time, Yasser Arafat was still, in Western eyes, a “terrorist” and his PLO was regularly hijacking aircraft everywhere to win the world’s attention, until he was given the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize together with Shimon Peres, who ironically is still peacefully perpetrating the myth of self-defence, and Yitzhak Rabin “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East”.

Was there ever a fat chance for peace? It had then suited the Americans, and of course their Norwegian sycophants (remember the award to Barack Obama before he even knew what his White House desk drawers contained!), to project that image just as much as they want us to believe today that Israel is waging war with an equal.

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Clog it up, Clegg

So the hapless Nick Clegg, the British deputy prime minister who can hardly agree on anything with his own prime minister, has come out saying Russia should be stripped of the 2018 World Cup in the wake of the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine.

Of course this has nothing to do with the sombre fact that no British “national” squad can hope to win that competition ever again, but it is more a part of the Russia-bashing attitude of the UK government which, in humble service to its Washington lords, insists on playing the global policeman.

Clegg said it was “unthinkable” – oh, I see, the man actually thinks – at present that the tournament could go ahead in the country blamed by the West for supplying arms to pro-Russian separatists suspected of shooting down the jet. Of course Britain and the US do not supply arms to anyone. He is, all at once, judge, jury, defendant and prosecutor in a case that is still unfolding, and what proof has been provided by all sides concerned has proved to be contradictory and sometimes even laughably unconvincing.

Thank goodness for football’s world governing body FIFA which immediately ruled out earlier calls from some German politicians for Russia to be boycotted, insisting the tournament could be “a force for good”. Like the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, I guess they could have added.

Again, I am no Putin admirer. In fact I find the man too cold and autocratic for my liking, but to stage a boycott or relocation of that biggest international sporting event on the basis of crass political interests is both ridiculous and undesirable. Of course Clegg can always go to his FA brass heads and ask them to withdraw from the finals of the competition, if they can make it to that stage.

Emm... by the way, I am an avid UK soccer follower, so don’t run away with ideas of local conjecture.

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The ironies of history

For happy reading this summer, I am revisiting books in my home library I have left unattended for some time. It is always fun to do so and a reprieve, really, from the dull offerings of recent months.

Quite by accident in relation to the rather anti-British vibes of today’s column, I picked out Giovanni Bonello’s “Confusions and Conclusions”, Volume 12 of his delightful Histories of Malta series published by Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti.

Bonello is, understandably, no anglophile. His father, Vincenzo, had personally suffered the wrath of British colonialism when he was, with other Maltese citizens, considered too “Italianite” to be trusted and illegally deported to Africa during the Second World War. He still, however, manages to project a feeling of fairness in his writings and is willing to give credit where due while happily applying the machete on the rest.

In true Giovanni Bonello style, his “The Hidden History of the Looting of The Palace” hits the reader right between the eyes. So much so that in his very introduction, Bonello warns “the feature is not for the faint-hearted”.

But why bring this up today, more than two years since the book’s publication? It is because the study of history is an ongoing process and a reflection of mankind at its best and worst. One marvels at the many new ironies that crop up as one reads – and reads again – in such well-researched and documented papers.

One fantastic example: I never knew that Winston Churchill, that very same British politician who had so “kindly” chosen to send back a bust the Maltese people had paid him tribute with in WWII, had in 1920 vehemently vetoed “the preposterous” efforts to obtain the return from England a great palace armoury showpiece, the Ximenes cannon, today still on display in an English museum.

There are literally hundreds of such cases of utter theft and abuse, but all we ever hear about, by way of hopeful or hopeless repatriation, is the La Valette sword and dagger inside the Louvre in Paris. The ironies are as numerous.