The previous edition of this blog made it to the “Most Commented” list that lives to the right of this page (and every other page of the Times’ portal)

It’s gratifying that so many people, some of them elfin, some of them not, take the time to have a look at what’s happening here, and comment and respond to comments responding to their comments and so on.

And even so forth.

The comments make interesting reading – they allow me to gauge the extent to which some provocative comment or other has sparked off an exchange and they give me (and everyone reading) an idea of the depth of feeling (and breadth of intellect) possessed by some of the commentators. I thought that should be ‘commenters’ but the ever watchful Mr Gates scribbled a red line below the word, so I must be wrong in thinking that people who comment but shouldn’t really be graced with a title that elevates them can be described thus.

Some of the comments even give an indication of the strength of that sense which is needed truly to appreciated my art, namely that of humour. I’m not saying I’m Ben Elton or Rowan Atkinson, but when I write, my tongue is often in my cheek, an anatomical arrangement that sometimes escapes the more elfin of my detractors. This is not to say that I am not serious about the subject of my jibes, just that perhaps the deadly seriousness with which the lil’elves take themselves and the object of their affections should not be imposed on the rest of us.

On occasion, the comments also go off at a tangent, as someone who calls himself ‘Ivan Attard’ did on Sunday afternoon. He challenged me by writing that [my] ‘next masterpiece should deal about ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION. Come on don't be a coward any more. Everyone is talking about it and you have a lot of fodder from previous utterings to lend substance to the matter.” He went on to point out that I should “...forget your Muscat obsession for a while ABC, at least until he provides you with another 'gaffe' to rant about.”

The language and syntax are all Mr “Attard’s”, whose name I put in inverted commas in order to signal that I am not sure whether his name is Attard at all and to differentiate him from another Ivan Attard I know, who is not a racist. There is an Ivan Attard on Facebook whose obvious ‘anti-immigrant tendencies’ (just not to call him racist) have led at least two people to click on the ‘report this person’ button, and I’m assuming that this Ivan Attard is the same one who challenged me.

By pure coincidence, I had been mulling over whether to write about what this Attard person calls ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION (his capitals, not mine, I don’t need to shout) and about how this supposedly Christian country handles it. After all, there’s only so much fun that can be had with Joe Muscat’s penchant for mouthing platitudes.

There’s no denying that illegal or irregular or whatever immigration is a problem. The people washing up on our shores are a strain on our resources, if only because we are obliged to accept them and to treat them decently.

This obligation does not, as the increasingly ridiculous AzzNazz seems to prefer to think, arise from some imposition by the EU or because of some international treaty we have had shoved down our throats. It is simply a fact of life that as a civilised country, we treat people decently – or are supposed to – and if it costs us, then so be it, it will cost us.

This does not mean that it is acceptable for the EU to ignore the problem or front(ex) it up with some window-dressing to pretend that we’re not being left, like, frankly, the rest of Europe’s soft underbelly, to fend for ourselves.

There might come a time, in fact it probably has come, for the mandarins perched comfortably astride their trough in Brussels to be told that the people who want to head further North will be given the wherewithal to do so, thus obliging the rest of civilised Europe to sit up and take notice that there are quite a few thousands of human beings who need help.

In the meantime, however, can we put a stop to the overt racism that infests much of our country?

In L-Orizzont last week, a banner headline blared something on the lines of “Il-Pjaga Tkompli Tikber” (the wound grows, loosely translated) over a picture of a bewildered refugee child: I’ll be forgiven for surmising that it was not the wounds that the refugees are suffering that was concerning L-Orizzont, which I’m mentioning only as an example of the way racism, in milder or more virulent forms, permeates our psyche.

I’ve already referred to AzzNazz and its barely concealed desire to keep anyone with a differently coloured skin or cultural background away from sullying the purity of our shores. Echoing these wholly unacceptable thoughts are the comments you hear anywhere you turn, and the failure of many of our leaders, religious or political or social, to condemn racism is in itself as disgraceful as AzzNazz’s jingoistic rhetoric.

It’s as if, if we keep saying that Malta welcomes foreigners (which we do as long as they’re white tourists with money to spend) and that Malta is Christian and that Malta is not racist, this will turn out to be true.

There you are “Ivan Attard”, stick that in your pipe and smoke it and next time you want to call someone a coward, reflect [on] what you’re saying.

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