I have a lot of sympathy for Jeremy Corbyn, the UK Labour leader, as he keeps being accused of anti-Semitism in the current campaign being waged against him by the right-wing tabloids. When the tabloids jump so heavily on a politician he must be making an impact over other issues they prefer to overlook.

That said, however, one does need to be sure about who is being commemorated and who is sitting (or standing) next to him/her at ceremonial activities such as the one Corbyn attended in Tunis to commemorate the Palestine Liberation Organisation victims of a 1985 Israeli air strike. At the time, the attack had been condemned by Margaret Thatcher's government, the US Reagan administration and the UN Security Council. Confusing pictures have been published showing the Labour leader attending the memorial service during which a wreath was also allegedly laid for a suspected protagonist in the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.

The issue has been inflated to such a degree that even the widow of one of the victims of the Munich terror attack and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly waded into the media quagmire, accusing Corbyn of being insensitive. Both demanded an apology.

The whole story took me back to Lebanon in the early 1980s where I had twice gone on journalistic duties, the first time as a newspaperman and then for national television. The PLO was at the time still based in Lebanon before its forced move to Tunis. On both occasions I had been around people (or should I say they were around me?) I took for normal, passionate political aides acting as guides to visiting journalists but who then turned out to have a much more colourful past.

I have previously written about how I had been shown all over the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon by none other than Leila Khaled, the former Palestinian hijacker who had been a front-page sensation in the Western media in the late sixties. The problem was I got to know that only on my way to the airport for my return flight. Leila had, by the 80s, become a qualified professional, married, and was helping out in the PLO's marketing department as some kind of temporary reward for her past heroic deeds. She is, to this day, a much sought after speaker at international left-wing fora. For me, though, it was a great story lost and denied.

During my second visit, this time with a TVM crew for a documentary on the raging Lebanese civil war and the Palestinian situation, we were being shown round by a couple of attentive young men. They kept telling us, politely, when to shoot and not to shoot as we drove around the Beirut streets on our way to an exclusive interview with the PLO's then second-in-command, Abu Jihad, who six years later was assassinated in his Tunis home by Israeli commandos.

Freddie Scicluna, our cameraman with as big a journalistic nose as the rest of us, did manage to shoot some footage on the sly, but I doubt he would have done that had we known who was sitting next to us inside a rackety Toyota van. Back in Malta, we learned that one of the "aides taking care of us" was allegedly one of three Munich Olympics attackers - five others had been killed on the spot - who had been captured and, only a month later, exchanged for German hostages held by the Palestinian Black September movement. I still have the picture (shown here) in which the alleged terrorist is seen, second from right, sitting next to me during a media briefing by a top PLO official.

Did that make me an anti-Semite? I hope not. While I always was and will always be for a free and sovereign Palestinian State, acts of terrorism and the murder of innocent human beings can never be justified, despite the temptation for many to equate that with the struggle of other nations, including the Israelis themselves, which had to resort to violence, war and random death to gain their freedom.

 

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Madonna and the radio DJs

As one ages, one finds ample consolation watching older favourites still at it. I remember the late Lino Spiteri, my editor for three years at the old Malta News, once good-naturedly teasing me in print for having let on I was still playing Sunday football with friends well past the age of 50. My quick retort was: as long as Mick Jagger still appeared on stage, I had the right to go on kicking a ball.

Now that Madonna is 60, all the new senior citizens of the world are agog. Even 77-year-old Raquel Welch has come out claiming she is still game to appearing in the furry prehistoric bikini that made her famous!

There is of course the other school of thought which insists that one should know when one's best days are over and retire gracefully. Women, especially in television, become thin on the ground once they enter that stage, which is hugely unfair.

In some professions, though, there are those who are able to persist and still achieve a reasonable following. Most journalists usually stop writing only when trembling fingers cannot handle a keyboard anymore, while radio DJs continue to find the solitude of their studios exhilarating. We have some really good ones here in Malta and I have always insisted that these people defy the process of ageing by keeping up with the radio scene where they still fill a sizeable music niche.

The conclusion by some broadcasters is always to cast tem off, but those who know the ways of ageing audiences out there can fully appreciate their contribution. Yes, drive-time radio becomes forbidden territory, but it is fascinating to watch the large, shifting audiences which daily follow wherever the old radio DJs go to bang out their blast-from-the-past playlists. And why not?

 

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Idiomatic language

Oh, I see that an Opposition MEP has reacted badly to a social media comment which said, in very idiomatic Maltese, that he should be hanged for doing what he has been doing at the European Parliament. Such expressions do sound crude, but in reality they do not reflect the meaning of the words.

I guess this applied in pretty much the same way as to when the late blogger wrote that someone at Castille should be taken out and shot. Or do we have to act silly every time and interpret idiomatic language as per the individual's political leanings?

Many Maltese still curse the Turks with the expression of "ħaqq it-Torok", which dates back to the time of the Ottoman Empire and its frequent raids on Malta. Today, thousands of Maltese go on holiday to Turkey. Linguistics teaches us words that are not always what they mean.