So who is undermining Malta's international name - the Nationalists by taking part in a European Parliament debate on human rights (in which PES also took part) on the anniversary of Daphne's death, or Robert Abela proposing three cronies for the European judge posts to see them all thrown out by the EU?
That is what political debate has been reduced to. And not just our country. Giorgia Meloni made just the same charges against Elly Schlein in the Italian Parliament the other day. "You go outside Italy and throw mud against the country," she fulminated.
Beyond the shouting, beyond the charges, one must analyse and see who is right and who is just posing. This being pre-election time each side tries to score points but some arguments are valid and some are just tricks to trap the unwary and the gullible.
Another case in point is just waiting for the Budget Speech in yet another ritualistic key moment in the political year.
If I look at myself and those on pension around me, I am forced to admit that when one stops working and is forced to depend solely on the pension, one finds oneself reduced to poverty, real poverty, perhaps for the first time in one's life and to have to do without what one was used to have in other years.
The announcement, as is being reported, that pensions will be increased by under €5 a week by the Budget, instead of making us grateful as the government expects us to be, makes us livid with anger after a lifetime of paying taxes and not running off to hospital, health centres and polyclinics as one sees so many others, especially migrants, doing, at the slightest cold.
Do not get waylaid by the fake agreement between the two parties to come to agreement on a mass transport system. It will never happen and there are other priorities. Finance Minister Clyde Caruana is right and Prime Minister Robert Abela (and Alex Borg) are wrong.
And how come Justyne Caruana, as The Shift is reporting, has been given a new €78,000 government contract?
This will go down a treat with those who are finding themselves in unusual poverty.
Note of history
A window on Muslim traders in the Mediterranean through Maltese archives
Joan Abela writes that the main concern of this paper is to try and offer a picture of the Mediterranean where different cultures and religions, apart from clashing, found it also opportune to move along each other's shores to trade despite their traditional enmity.
Malta, the official base of the Knights of St John, and as such considered the epitome of the Christian fight against the Muslim, offers an excellent example of this paradox.
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