I refer to Alfred Gauci’s contribution (December 6) to the  effect that Eddie Fenech Adami in 1986 was irresponsible to go ahead with the Żejtun mass meeting in view of the violence threatened by Labour thugs.

This argument is both fallacious and pusillanimous.

The Constitutional Court had ruled that the Nationalist Party had a fundamental right to hold a meeting anywhere in Malta, that there were no no-go areas, and if anything the police had a duty to control those who defied the law rather than those who exercised their legal rights. There exists a right, the court said,  to hold a meeting not to disrupt it.

Fenech Adami rightly decided to go ahead with that event, rather than following a servile appeasement attitude which is the most fertile ground for the dictatorial dominance of the strong and the arrogant.

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