Joseph Muscat was probably right in barring entry to a merchant ship with a suspected Ebola case on board, given that it was closer to Italy than to here, but while it was legally correct, was it morally OK? I'm only making the point in the spirit of honest debate, not accusing Muscat of immorality.
Surely the proper moral response would have been to accept the request and do the correct humanitarian thing?
After all, the disease, shocking and terrible though it is, is not transmitted by mere contact, bodily fluids have to be exchanged (or whatever the accurate term is) and - unlike the appearance Muscat gives - I am confident that our medical people are more than capable of handling such cases safely.
It is a given, of course, that had the mere idea that an Ebola-infected individual had even sailed by within ten miles of our shores gained currency, the ill-informed and terminally-bewildered would have raised hell and had a major panic, so you can understand, in a real politik context, why the PM grasped the advice he was given with both hands and ordered the vessel to keep on going.
On the other hand, while Muscat probably did the acceptable thing, all in all (though did he have to make such a fuss about it being "legally & morally justified"?) the same can't really be said of MEP Marlene Mizzi's ill-judged, at least as it was reported, exhortation to the European Parlianment on the subject of Ebola.
It was reported that the dear lady said something on the lines of the EU needing to pull its finger out and find a cure for Ebola (like that's a walk in the park to achieve) before it hits European shores.
Excuse me?
The EU, and every other component of the First and Second worlds, should be doing everything possible to eradicate Ebola (and every other disease, for that matter, once we're being Utopian) that's a statement of the bleeding obvious and a half, but what does Mizzi mean "before it hits Europe"?
Are we to understand that for La Mizzi, Ebola can be left to its own devices as long as it only kills people in Africa? That's what her statement to the European Parliament sounds like and though I am pretty convinced that she hasn't a racist bone in her body, she didn't help other people see that in her.
Quite the contrary, in fact.