Cyrus Engerer is a soldier of steel. Cyrus Engerer is a victim of persecution. Cyrus Engerer will receive the full backing and support of the Labour Party. These are the bemusing remarks made by Joseph Muscat on Friday night in a raucous speech during which the Prime Minister, seemingly consciously, licked the bottom of a splintered barrel.
Cyrus Engerer was as of last Thursday a convicted criminal. If there is a victim of persecution in this case, it is his ex-lover. This is the kind of person Malta’s Prime Minister has chosen to treat as a hero, though whether he really has the full backing of the Labour Party grassroots is a question that needs to be answered by more than a few stage-managed sycophants at an EP election campaign meeting – who stood up and applauded right on cue.
What Mr Engerer did was not mentioned by Dr Muscat. So let us remind the Prime Minister. The man he backed to the hilt sent (effectively stole) naked and highly compromising photos of his ex-lover to the latter’s employers.
“Everyone makes mistakes,” Mr Engerer said in the prelude to Dr Muscat’s speech. A truer word could not be said.
But in the performance of this heinous act there was no sudden and temporary loss of self-control which is at times recognised as a mitigating factor in a crime. This was a calculated, premeditated act that required thought and malice. It was a move that not only risked ruining his ex-lover’s career prospects, but potentially also his entire life.
Amidst Dr Muscat’s wild gesticulation and Mr Engerer’s tears (for himself, it must be said), one sentiment was horrifyingly absent from the proceedings: solidarity with the victim of a crime. One word was shockingly absent from their vocabulary: sorry, for what they have done to him. We use the word ‘they’ because by glorifying Mr Engerer in the way he did, the Prime Minister also owes the victim an apology.
In an effort no doubt to conceal his gross error of judgment in welcoming Mr Engerer into the PL’s ranks when it was known he had committed this crime – the Prime Minister is being wholly untruthful when he says the charge was trumped up by the PN; it was purely and simply as a result of a justified complaint from the victim – the Prime Minister probably figured that the best form of defence (even in the face of the indefensible) is to attack. So that is what he did.
Yet in doing so even his arguments did not make sense. He tried to mask this issue as one of gay rights and equality. It is no such thing. It’s about a despicable crime – pure and simple. The adoptions section of the Civil Unions Act is not about equality either. It is about the rights of children, which Dr Muscat has attempted to gloss over with this fiction.
If Dr Muscat would like to consider one true definition of equality, it is accepting human beings with a different skin colour on our shores when they arrive in tragic circumstances.
If there can be a worst of all in this, it is for a Prime Minister to implicitly accuse the judge in this case, Mr Justice Michael Mallia, of somehow being part of a political plot to undo Mr Engerer.
Not that it matters, but the appeal was filed last June – after Labour came to power. And, in any case, heaven help us if we have a Prime Minister who thinks the judge had political motives; or a Prime Minister who will support anyone - irrespective of their actions - as long as they support his party.