There is no doubting the positive social impact of religious public holidays in Malta and Gozo and their unique contribution to both the microeconomics and tourism industry. I have to admit, though, that I have never been a festa enthusiast and the one and only such occasion I attend on an annual basis is the more or less secular and historical celebration with the statue of “Victorious Malta” at Kalkara, though that too has its inferred religious connotations.
Many have rightly been taken aback by the “local” Imam’s call for the Islamic feast, Eid al-Adha, to be declared a public holiday for the Islamic community on the island. It is not just that the feast commemorates another fairy tale, shared with Catholics and Hebrews, in which “a peaceful and loving” God is actually offered a human sacrifice, one’s very offspring, but I cannot, for the love of me, see how Allah or any other god could have been made happy in this crudely cruel way.
The Maltese calendar, anyway, is already replete with such public holidays and religious pluralism should not in any way be expounded so trivially, for it is not a question of how many adherents to a religion there happen to be. The perfect example is, and has been since way back in the late 19th century, the Hindu Sindhi community in Malta. They have feasts too, but they have never called for even one of them to be declared a sectarian public holiday. Instead, they have chosen to keep their celebrations within the community, except for a special public event – started here in 2013 – which in reality is an explosion of bright colours mixed with the fun of throwing coloured powder at each other.
For almost 130 years, the Indian Hindus have lived among us without making special demands. In his 2001 article on the origins and establishment of the Indian business community in Malta, Mark-Anthony Falzon splendidly traces the historical, cultural and commercial nuances of the Indian element in our society, with no hint of requests for special privileges.
And then, of course, there are the Jehovah Witnesses, the Protestant community, the American-sponsored Evangelists and so on. Great for those of us who believe in the right to belong or not to a religion and difficult, I know, for Islamist ears to fathom, but there is every need particularly at this moment in time in the world to avoid creating situations that fuel, rather than curtail social division.
If Malta is to seriously consider re-arranging its annual public holiday schedule, then this should be carried out more in line with what the GWU General Secretary, Josef Bugeja has proposed – for the government to give back Maltese workers all public holidays which fall on a weekend, a measure that had been removed (for which read stolen) by the previous Nationalist administration.
In the GWU’s 2017 budget proposals, Josef Bugeja rightly argues that the removal of public holidays falling on weekends from workers’ vacation leave was only meant to be a temporary measure.
With the economy booming, yes, indeed, those stolen holidays should be given back to the workers, even if, as Mr Bugeja insists, the measure is re-introduced gradually. The re-arrangement would benefit all workers – Catholic, Muslim, atheist and what have you.
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American foibles
Most people anywhere in the world are perplexed at how a great and powerful nation like the US could end up with a presidential contest between two candidates nobody really likes. Even worse is the volatile partisanship that has emerged from having two uninspiring presidential hopefuls while the relevant ones, like Bernie Sanders and the Greens’ Jill Stein, have been well and truly elbowed out of contention via obvious party/electoral systems and insidious corporate clout.
Even more unfortunate is the realisation that this American tendency for foibles has re-appeared, if it ever left, in the international realm. My American friends always react strongly to my insistence that the US cannot expect to police the whole world, but the idea of “protecting” the world has long been cemented into their psyche with comics, super heroes and Hollywood movies. In response to this reaction, I am quick to insist that the argument is completely based on a political standpoint and is certainly far from being the fruit of some form of anti-Americanism. As an internationalist, I cannot subscribe to such thinking, thank goodness.
Two very recent events continue to show the present state of mind of Americans in general.
1. Two US spy planes fly within a mile of Iranian airspace and inevitably receive warnings of a potential shoot-down should they breach it. Fair enough, but US military officials say Iran behaved “unprofessionally” and “unsafely” during the stunt – even the very word rankles – designed to “test” its reaction. Does this make any sense to you?
2. A US Navy P-8A Poseidon aircraft flies over the Black Sea – practically on Russia’s frontier. There is furore in the Western media because two Russian Su-27 fighters are scrambled and manage to fly to within 10 metres (good old Murdoch’s Sky said 10 feet) of the US plane. The Americans again cried foul while ignoring the fact that the American plane was flying with its transponder switched off.
You tempt fate and then complain about being caught. These have been well-publicised occurrences, God only knows what has been and is still happening elsewhere in the world, including Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and other far-flung places American motivation for “peace and democracy” have reduced to a state of lawlessness, death and destruction.
In case you’re wondering, no, I don’t like Putin. Even less than I do the Incredible Trump and the Clinton wannabe.
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Globalisation misfiring?
Figures released by the campaign group “Global Justice Now” have revealed that the world’s top 10 corporations, including Apple, Shell and Walmart, have a combined revenue that is greater than the combined income of the 180 poorest countries out of the world’s total 195 sovereign states.
The figures further expose the fact that Walmart, Apple and Shell alone are now richer than Belgium, Russia and Sweden. No wonder the shock and disbelief on the part of such imperial, sorry, global corporations and their political sugar-daddies in the US and elsewhere, including their Irish patrons, to the European Union’s demand that Apple pays back billions in tax due to Ireland. As top journalist Neil Clark wrote recently about the oblique concept of US “exceptionalism”: how dare the EU demand US companies to pay more tax!
Today, 69 of the world’s 100 top economic entities are corporations instead of countries – a rise from last year’s staggering figure of 63. Out of the top 200 entities in the world, a whopping 153 were found to be corporations, mostly of Western derivation of course.
Globalisation misfiring?