The Scapegoat is a wonderful painting by William Holman Hunt. It shows a goat, red garland draped over its horns, looking quite lost and forlorn in a wild landscape. As the name suggests, it’s the expendable animal that is banished into the wilderness bearing the sins of the people.

No such luck for Emmanuel Navarro, who last Tuesday was sent to prison without as much as a garland to keep him company. Navarro was one of hundreds of people who went on a Facebook rampage following Roberta Metsola’s speech in the European Parliament. His post went as follows: “Intom specjalment int ja Traditura ta pajisek muwx kundana haqkom imma naharkuwkom hajjin demmel” (Your kind, and in particular traitors like you [Metsola] who betray their own country, deserve worse than words – you trash deserve to be burnt alive).

Not exactly Flaubert, then, but enough to make certain people reach for their Shocked and Horrified masks. Metsola tweeted her outrage that ‘Labour trolls’ could say such things with impunity, “knowing that they’ll get a pat on the back” because this was “the Malta that Joseph Muscat and his politics of division had fuelled”. David Casa tweeted on that Navarro should be arrested.

And arrested he duly was, presumably by people wearing Zero Tolerance masks. Two days later he was charged in court with having threatened Metsola and instigated serious offences. No pat on the back was forthcoming, and he was denied bail. He is now in prison.

Now I happen not to share Navarro’s view that Metsola is a traitor, nor do I think she deserves to be burnt, alive or dead. I also find the common habit of firing nasty missives on Facebook extremely tiresome. Even so, there are many reasons why I think that what happened to Navarro was out of proportion, cruel, and a textbook case of scapegoating.

But first, language. Navarro’s was not a threat, but rather a hyperbole of sorts. To say of someone that they deserve to be burnt alive (or hanged, or decapitated, or such) is an unnice but common expression in Maltese. It’s rather like saying, in English, that someone deserves to be taken out and shot. The last was one of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s stock phrases, much to the horror of some. She routinely accused them of being literal-minded and linguistically-challenged, and she was right.

Likewise, it should be obvious to all but the very stupid or the very deceitful that Navarro’s was not a statement of intention, but rather an idiomatic expression. I don’t suppose he was planning to stock up on a stake and some straw bales. Hot air was the only thing he had a plentiful supply of.

Navarro is in prison because of one thing alone: politics. He happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time

Nor was Navarro in a position to instigate anything. He is no King Henry, whose few harsh words cost Thomas Becket his head. Navarro is powerless and was until recently unknown, and it is unlikely that his Facebook posts were about to fire up the masses to go burn a few MEPs.

Navarro is in prison because of one thing alone: politics. He happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is a spot where three currents meet that have reduced politics in Malta to an endless round of self-righteous moralising, cynical posturing, and legerdemain.

The first comes from within the PN. It is made up of people who believe that party politics in Malta is a struggle between absolute good and absolute evil. This, incidentally, is the Manichean drift that is threatening to drown Adrian Delia, who presumably is evil. It’s also a current with a very short memory, but never mind.

The second is also very Nationalist, and includes those who have perfected feigned moral indignation to a fine art, especially in the wake of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination. As is, Facebook sees to it that there is no shortage of Emmanuel Navarros to keep the morality blaze alight.

The irony is that all of this ends up instrumentalising and trivialising the main event. Caruana Galizia was not assassinated by Labour trolls, hate speech, or ‘a society that tolerates violence against women’. Her killers most likely do not spend much time posting on Facebook, nor did they terribly care about her gender. Caruana Galizia got in the way of a lifestyle that was most unlike Emmanuel Navarro’s, and that was that.

The third current is the Labour government at its most scheming and cynical. Joseph Muscat is a master at playing off the two Nationalist streaks against each other, and against the public. I was not at all surprised at the way the full force of the law came down on Navarro. That way, Metsola’s barbs about pats on back and Muscat’s politics of division were neutralised. On the contrary, the plot goes, here is a government that is zero-tolerant and takes such matters very seriously indeed.

Halos have never come so cheaply to the powerful, nor have they ever come at such high cost to the expendable. If Hunt could produce a second painting, it would be called The Sacrificial Goat.

As if that weren’t enough, what happened to Navarro fits very nicely within Machiavellian Plan B. The Maltese language is never more than a few feet away from the word ‘miskin’, and the badly-dressed, semi-literate, and autumnal Navarro is the ultimate miskin. Even as it parades a government that means business, his imprisonment invites a broad popular sympathy and indignation. Except government had no choice, you see, it was the PN that brought this up.

Emmanuel Navarro has already spent more time in prison than the people who killed Daphne Caruana Galizia.

mafalzon@hotmail.com