Immigration and religious imposition

Maurice Mizzi (Illegal Immigration Is A Force To Be Reckoned With, November 6) has accused me of trying to ridicule his writing. How depressing. I thought I'd succeeded. In any case, how could I remain silent? His letters to the press, besides borrowing from the structures of porridge, are always laced with non sequiturs, rhetorical fallacies, untested assumptions of agreement, contradictions, and out-and-out inaccuracies. If fair interpretation of events and clarity of thought could be measured in miles per hour, Mr Mizzi's letters would be collecting barnacles on the sea floor.

He asks me: "Do I take it that he [yours truly] has embraced the Muslim religion, since that is what the Muslim community in England is trying to do - muzzle the press and free expression?" Is Mr Mizzi referring to the disruption by protestors of BNP's Nick Griffin's appearance on BBC's Question Time? That was merely a bad PR decision. Somebody should have briefed those people on the perils of taking on the media in its own turf. No, it's not Muslims who're muzzling the free and fair exchange of opinions. Pluralism and freedom of the press are being bled white because the media is being run like any other commercial enterprise, with revenue and ratings as its bottom line. This commercial media will, to this end, select news and organise debate supportive of agendas and programmes of the privileged. They will not provide the unbiased information and opinion that would permit the public to make choices in accord with its own best interests. Their job will be to show that what's good for the elites is good for everybody, and that other options are either bad or do not exist. That is why the plight of the immigrant is so often ignored or misrepresented. It just doesn't make for good TV.

This leads us to one of Mr Mizzi's most show-stopping gaffes: "I respect all religions provided that they do not dictate what we hang on our classroom walls, what women should wear or take off (bras) [Maurice, you lack ambition], what our school curriculum should contain and what new laws should be promulgated." It might come as a surprise to Mr Mizzi, but most of our vice laws, nudity laws and so-called indecency laws are all Church laws. All of them have been enacted and instituted by Christian fundamentalists on strictly religious premises.

Mr Mizzi is "shocked to see where Britain is going. The Muslim community is continually asking for more rights, and now want Sharia laws to be embodied in the British legal system. Parts of Sharia Law, for the information of this correspondent, go against human rights." How awful. Don't we have Church Tribunals in our country applying Canon Law? The human rights' track record there is stellar, of course.

"As long as they are on our islands, these people should be treated with the utmost respect and kindness," says Mizzi. And then abandoned to their luck? Kindness should be made of sterner stuff.