A 26-year-old unemployed man who was sentenced to nine months in prison for blinding his girlfriend in one eye has now been ordered by judgement in a civil suit which the girlfriend filed to pay her almost €270,000 in compensation. How is he going to pay that? There is no justice in this case and her wound will remain permanently unhealed. He smashed a drinking-glass into her eyes when he returned from a job interview, telling her and his mother that he turned down the job because it wasn’t well paid, and she became angry at him, telling him that he should take any job until he was in a position to get something better. Perhaps Konrad Mizzi will put him on the state payroll to lower the unemployment figure further. He can help Miss Lindsey Gambin with the Minister’s press releases, in return for €58,000 a year plus petrol allowance, car and perks.
If we can’t keep the Muslims out, then we can at least stop them from worshipping in garages. They’re so terrible for the moral standards and cultural integrity of this island. Ask the short, fat, ugly, stupid men at the United Maltese Patriots, who are busy preparing ham sandwiches for their next protest demo against a garage used for prayer. But please, whatever you do, don’t ask them about the Maltese man, raised as a Roman Catholic in this land of fine and proper values, who whose prosecution began yesterday for the rape of two of his nieces, both of them minors, while their older sister, also a minor, was forced to watch. The United Maltese Patriots need reminding that depravity knows no borders and no religion – that religion, in fact, has nothing to do with it.
I admire Caroline Muscat for giving up her well-respected career in journalism to become campaign director for the Nationalist Party. Ms Muscat is an excellent journalist, one of the best people working for the Times of Malta and The Sunday Times. She has broken so many stories, most of them related to the environment or development issues, that I have lost track. It was she who broke the shocking story about the government having ‘expropriated’ from its crony Mark Gaffarena a partial share of a house in Old Mint Street, Valletta, and compensating him with several pieces of real estate, of his choice, which far exceed the value of that share.
Ms Muscat is not a partisan person or small-minded political person. I have known her for some time through our work in journalism, and I can testify to that. I also understand only too well her motivation in taking a stand now, because I have felt the same way for several years. This is not about partisan politics. It is not even about politics at all. It is about evil, and the fight against it. Those who don’t take a stand, even if it comes at a great cost to themselves and those around them, are complicit.
Caroline Muscat has resigned from her job in the newsroom at Allied Newspapers – and what a loss it is to that organisation – and from her position at the Institute of Maltese Journalists. Journalists are born, not made, and that must have been the most extraordinarily difficult decision for her, because once you leave journalism to become campaign director for a political party, there is no going back, and the position of campaign director has a sell-by date. And though some might be cynical about her motivation, I am not one of them because I feel exactly the same way: that this is not about politics but about the fight against bad people, the fight to keep them out of power, the fight to boot them out of power. Bad people, corrupt people, have no place running the country.
Ms Muscat, who started her career in journalism writing only about environmental issues, said in a statement: “Throughout my life I have always avoided being partisan because of my role as a journalist, but I now feel that I must take a stand. I am giving up my journalism career because I have been left with little doubt that this government is riddled with corruption.”
Good for you, Caroline, and as my Irish forebears (come on, can’t you tell by my typically Irish appearance?) would have said: “May the wind be always at your back.”
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