I was accosted by a woman as I came to work this week. “The migrants have started fighting in Germany. Half of them are terrorists.”
I was stunned as I had not heard this on the news.
On reaching my office I switched on all the news portals I could find. And of course the story was not there.
Then, as I surfed Facebook, it suddenly hit me.
This woman had been absorbing all the fake news put up on Facebook by extremist organisations who tell you “This is the news television does not tell you”.
Add to this misinformation also a good dose of ignorance.
The footage of people fighting in Germany, I found out later, were Kurds fighting Turks. In Germany. No Syrians were involved and this fight took place months ago.
Another video, which also came with warnings about migrants, showed Arabs or dark-coloured people fighting the police. Careful attention to the details would have shown the woman that this riot was taking place in Paris and a cross-check with the news would have shown there were no riots in Paris this week. Again the warning about migrants.
All this has been producing a tsunami of terror on the more impressionable of our people as they see the footage on the news of Syrian migrants snaking their way into Europe.
The migrant trail that passes through Malta seems to have cooled somewhat after so many deaths at sea. The trail now prefers land, at least after the small stretch of sea between mainland Turkey and the Greek islands. The Greeks are accommodating, so are the Serbs. Hungary made a stand with barbed wire and walls.
From comments Hungarians gave to the international media, they are even keener than their fiery prime minister to keep them out. They believe many of the migrants are secret terrorists and/or carry diseases and/or will take the jobs and livelihood of many Hungarian people, poor as they are.
As for us, people must realise that not all news providers can be trusted. There are enough mainline news providers who offer news 24/7 with a variety of points of view and usually take care to provide alternative points of view for good measure.
But moving out of Europe carries its risks. Al Jazeera for instance registered significant developments in news stories in the past, at the time of the Arab Spring, but its point of view rests in the Gulf. The Russian RU definitely has a very different point of view but its stories are generally unreliable. The Chinese news portals are far more reliable, except on China itself.
And there are many that are plain rabble-rousing, xenophobic, not just Eurosceptic but also No Global, websites with a definite take on the migrant story, mostly against integration and against taking migrants in, mainly against solidarity with migrants.
Into this tinderbox came the story of the young Libyan who slashed at people with a knife last weekend in Paceville which exploded with devastating force. It was quite simply an accident waiting to happen.
The news was already on the news portals on Sunday morning following the police press release, but it was only during the course of the day and built on the back of Facebook posts that the full impact of the event developed.
It was no fight, as the police had said in their morning press release.
Some papers followed it up, others contented themselves with the police statement and buried the story on the inside pages.
Then, by Tuesday, when the story’s impact broke and all Malta was talking about it, the paper that had almost nothing on the story came back and attacked those who gave the story due importance, condemning them for saying that 25 people had been attacked when only six people were so grievously hurt that they went to hospital.
Obviously, the real importance of the story lay elsewhere, not in the number of people injured – the nationality of the aggressor, the unprovoked attack; the words against Malta uttered in bad Libyan Maltese.
None of this mattered to the paper which had missed out; only the number of the injured. But this was the paper that has not yet apologised to the Maltese man arrested in Libya which the paper said at the time had a huge amount of cash on him – a story which seriously jeopardised that man’s life.
The moral of the story is how important it is to ascertain the facts and how absolutely essential it is to gain credibility not through pandering to people’s prejudices but through the careful assessment of the truth.
Even though, as said, the migrant flow seems to have chosen other paths, Malta is a tinderbox with people under stress who never before had to live in such close relations with people from all over the world at a time of huge unprecedented migrant flows.
And at a time, I add, when our security forces are woefully understaffed and under-armed. There is a video put up by iNews of the immediate aftermath of the aggression (including the alleged aggressor continuing his anti-Malta rant and bad language) which shows how the elite forces of our police are ill-equipped to defend us. The RIU on the spot had only one taser gun between them, l-Orizzont said. And they seem to have subdued the alleged miscreant only because he thought the guns were … guns.
I repeat what I have been saying over the past months: the security forces, not just the police, are seriously understaffed and lack proper tools, proper protective clothing and armour, and proper training.
It is the knowledge that we are so defenceless, which in turn hypes up the concern and worry that fuels all sorts of stories filling up Facebook. People simply believe anything because they are afraid.
I expect, we all expect, the coming Budget to address these issues in a serious manner.
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