Terror does indeed have a face

It was Wednesday night and I was watching the news. The funeral of the victims of the Madrid bomb attack was the top item with the Spanish royal family leading a very emotional congregation, including our own President Guido de Marco whom I met at a book launch at the Palace only hours later and who related first hand what it was like. To say he was deeply moved was an understatement.

To return to the news, what shocked me terribly was a news item about a 14-year-old Palestinian boy who was intercepted at a checkpoint in Israel and who was found to be a suicide bomber. The guards made him undress in front of the cameras. His entire torso was wrapped in explosive devices. The look of horror on his face was electrifying. You may be sure that this bit of newsreel will make its way into the growing collection of indelible ones like the one of the Palestinian father shielding his young son from the crossfire in an alcove and their death before our eyes!

We need not be reminded of the amount of blood Our Lord has shed in Mel Gibson's film because if one is a true believer, as I am, I am fully aware that all this bloodshed here on earth has made those sacred wounds flow far more than can ever be caught on celluloid.

Yes, at last, we have actually seen the real face of terror. The Palestinian boy removing the explosives and then his clothes had such a look of horror on his face that I will remember it as long as I live. This boy was ready to sacrifice his life for a cause. He was caught just in time.

Just imagine if he were your son or mine.

I believe it was Lord Palmerston who, referring to the Schleswig-Holstien question, said that only three people knew what it was all about; the Prince Consort who had died, a Swedish professor who had gone mad and himself who had forgotten it. The Palestinian question has probably killed, maddened and brainwashed far more people than that since the establishment of the state of Israel after WW2.

Just imagine this scenario.

In 1551 Dragut invaded Gozo and took its entire population into slavery. The Order repopulated Gozo with Sicilians, who, by and large, are the ancestors of the present-day Gozitans. This is fact. Nobody knows what happened to those poor enslaved Gozitans.

Now suppose that those Gozitans were placed together in some remote corner of the Ottoman Empire and after its fall at the beginning of the last century these Gozitans started buying up land in Gozo and living there cheek by jowl with the Gozitans of today. Imagine if one day the rest of them were all airlifted to Victoria and the State of Gozo was declared! Imagine the Siculo-Gozitans forced out of their homes and off their land. Need I go on? I am sure you all understand precisely what I am going on about.

This is what these people are fighting against. This is why the boy was ready to end his young life in such a horrible way.

Because of this cause we have seen mounting terrorism all over the world. Two Christmases ago the Church of the Nativity was just about to be pulverised! Osama bin Laden claims to be fighting for the Palestinian cause too. Can one actually buy that? A Jewish prime minister was assassinated by one of his own compatriots because he came too close to a settlement with the Palestinians. What have we had since then is blood, blood and more blood!

The head of Hamas was cold-bloodedly assassinated by Israel and the majority of the UN condemned this act, which follows the maxim of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The world has gone completely berserk.

His successor was interviewed and declared that the Palestinian people are desperate and will continue to fight. Does this mean that Palestinian terrorism has the sanction of the UN? Nobody has come forward as yet to mediate.

The Allies, who were quite happy to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, the first to find those elusive and practically mythical weapons of mass destruction and the second to extract the equally elusive bin Laden, have abandoned the real theatre of war, which is what we would like to call the Holy Land.

It is an artificial situation born out of conflict and sealed with the approval of the post-war victors to firstly salve their consciences for the little they did to stop the holocaust and to secondly find a solution as to where all the displaced Jews were to go besides America. Too many Europeans had either collaborated or turned a blind eye to the Nazi genocide.

Two wrongs do not make a right.

What is happening now is the displacement of a people who have lived in relatively rural obscurity since the Diaspora in AD 79. It simply is not right. It is a crime against humanity as much as the holocaust was. This does not mean that Palestinian terrorism in Israel nor bin Laden's stranglehold on the world will help matters but somehow the civilised world must seek a solution before the inevitable cataclysmic conflagration actually happens. We may be sure that it is more imminent than we realise.

This is why we saw a sobbing Queen Sofia literally embracing the bereaved families during the funeral. This is why we saw that poor brainwashed terrified boy removing the layers of explosive from his immature body. Has this one life been saved or will he try it again? If he doesn't there are hundreds like him who will.