Minister Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici on Tuesday announced in the House that he would be introducing a Bill to enact legislation attacking racism and xenophobia.
No sooner did this piece of news hit this website that evidence that it is a sorely needed piece of law was brought into stark relief. Almost without exception, comment after comment followed, condemning the minister and demonstrating that if ever there was a piece of law that was late in being introduced, it was this one.
It would be tedious, not to say nausea-inducing, to reproduce the comments.
The tragic thing about many of these comments was that they invoked freedom of expression and cried buckets of crocodile tears about how this was a measure designed to thwart anti-government comment and opposition to immigration policies the government pursues. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth, as long as a decent sound-bite or comment could be constructed, to hell and back with the truth.
There were a few comments made that stood out by their reasonableness and respect for humanity, but these are traits that the majority of the comment-writers eschew completely, however. For the beasts of the common herd, their right to look down on other human beings is paramount and woe betide any minister who dares express the view that a law is needed to bring them into line.
Well, sorry, people, you’re wrong and you deserve the contempt of the rest of us, we the people who recognise that your “right” to express yourself as you deem fit is proscribed by the obligations imposed on you by the mere fact that you are human.
If having to control your vicious tongues is the price the rest of us have to pay to ensure that we behave like a civilised community, than so be it, I’ll live with that price, especially since you’re paying it, not me.
I fully expect further inane comments to follow this blog. I have no doubt there will be someone who thinks he is amazingly erudite in comparing my exercising my freedom to express disagreement with my peers, and to mock them and to otherwise treat them with something approaching disdain for their ideas and their modes of expression, with racism.
This paragon of logical virtues will probably point at what he imagines is my dislike of Labour supporters and equate this with racism.
Leaving aside the fact that I do not dislike Labour supporters, being rude to people of the same race is not, just in case the point escapes you, racist. It may be rude, snobbish or downright insulting, but unless you believe that you really are part of a separate race or culture, it isn’t racist.
Just for the record, of course, I deny classism or snobbishness – the most crashing snobs I know and the worst purveyors of class hatred, too, are members of the very class I’m often portrayed as hating.
But this isn’t about me and my style of writing, especially since I don’t give a monkey’s and haven’t since I started my column nigh on however many years ago it was.
This is about the racists and xenophobes, the crypto-Nazis and the proto-skinhead louts who infest the country and who have to be made to crawl back under their rocks.
This is about, as well, the many so-called Christians who probably think they’re really great guys, but then employ a Fillipina nanny for their spoilt brats and pay her a pittance to act as nothing much more than a slave.
Only recently, I’ve heard of a couple of cases that are nothing short of brutal. How these people are allowed to get a work-permit for these poor girls and not checked by the relevant authorities as to how they’re treating them is not entirely clear to me.
I suppose that if the law relating to work-permits and visas were changed to allow for inspections on the conditions of employment these people are ensnared into, we’d get all manner of foul cried from the rooftops too.