APOLOGY

No, don't worry, I'm not going to start beating my breast and prostrating myself in abject contrition because I offended someone's sensitivities.

My attention was drawn, by an old friend who has taken up the worthy cause of being an ambassador for the animal kingdom, that at some point in my disquisitions on the thug Gaddafi, I called him an animal and that this was insulting. It was, indeed, insulting to all members of the animal fraternity and I withdraw the comment completely and un-reservedly.

Gaddafi is not an animal. Gaddafi is a thug, a petty tyrant whose respect for human life and dignity, to say nothing of the truth and any other construct that attributes humanity and civilisation, makes him unfit to be classified as a member of the human race.

This does not, however, make him an animal, except in the crudest sense and it is unjust to compare animals to him, even in this way.

With some slight respect to remaining in context, I'd like to praise, for a change, the Bishop of Gozo. He pointed out, recently, that it was pretty bad that while people were dying on the high seas after fleeing Libya, such a fuss was being made about bird shooting, for all that this latter activity was not a good thing itself.

I have in the past been less than positive about the way the Church has neglected to state, clearly and unequivocally, that racism and failure to respect the humanity of other people is nothing more than sinful and grievously so. The Bishop of Gozo has approached this and for this he deserves a respectful pat on the back.

Might I suggest, in this spirit, that instead of devoting so much energy to trying to stem the inevitable, the message is driven home, again and again? Perhaps then, the comments sections will not contain so many revoltingly racist remarks that betray many in this country to be proto-Nazis who think that just because they have had the blind luck to be spat out by their mothers into a civilised country they can propose letting people drown because they're not wanted here.