Last Tuesday night I had just arrived in Brussels where I was going to present a paper during a conference celebrating the Centennial of the birth of Marshall McLuhan. (Is it mere coincidence that the centennial of the great media guru falls in the same year of the Arab Spring, the revolution fuelled by the new media? I will write more on that some other time, perhaps.) Since my presentation was on Wednesday I preferred to spend my time revising my notes and power point presentation instead of going down for dinner in the magnificent surroundings of the Grand Place. As I don't want to sound too stoical, I quickly add that I had dinner at Leon's on Wednesday evening and a bite for lunch on Thursday.
Back to Tuesday night, in my hotel room, where I had planned to tussle with McLuhan, Ong and Innis .... My HTC provided a different kind of entertainment.
The phone rang with the news of the untruth that the Leader of the Opposition, Dr. Joseph Muscat, chose to say about members of the Zwieg Bla Divorzju movement. The discussion was in the contest of the publication of private emails exchanged between Dr. Andre Camilleri, Mr. Ray Baldacchino, Mr. Lawrence Zammit, Dr. Arthur Galea Salomone and myself and published in It-Torca of the 10th April 2011. These were then broadcast during the news bulletins on One TV and One Radio. (Private emails were also published on Malta Today, in more than one edition, but during the programme reference was made to those published in It-Torca.)
As I wrote last week's piece, when these private emails were published Dr. Muscat did not feel that their publication was a threat to democracy. However, he now believes that the publication of a string of emails between himself and an RTK journalist is an attack against democracy! One of the persons commenting on my blog naively suggested that it could have been that Dr. Muscat said nothing in public but raised hell in private. During last Tuesday's Bondi+ , Dr. Muscat revealed the naiveté of this comment.
When asked about this attitude of two weights and two measures, Dr. Muscat chose to add insult to injury. The injury made by the publication and the ensuing invasion of our privacy was aggravated by the insult of an untruth. Dr. Muscat did not try to justify this invasion by referring, for example, to the public interest argument. He did not feel the need to make some reasoned out defense. He just justified this invasion of privacy by saying something completely untrue about us who were involved in the exchange of emails published in It-Torca on April 10. Dr. Muscat said that these emails were leaked to the media by someone who legally possessed them but was not happy with the way things were being done in the anti-divorce movement. This person, then, leaked the emails to the Labour media. (Since the emails published on It-Torca were those exchanged by the five persons I already mentioned he could not have been referring to anyone except us as we were the only persons who legally possessed the emails.)
This incident happened in the beginning of campaign when we were discussing, among other things, the theme song that the Movement was considering to adopt! Was it possible that one of us wanted to use a rap tune instead of the type of music that was being proposed and was so disappointed that he chose to betray all of us? Another issue mentioned in another exchange that was published was about the sons and daughters of separated persons who would be ready to discuss the subject of divorce in a sensible and rational way. This was spinned by the Labour media as if we wanted to use minors in the debate! Ironically minors were then used and insulted on the billboards of the pro-divorce movement!
Last Wednesday all five of us who had sent or received the emails published in It-Torca released a statement saying that it was totally untrue that anyone of us leaked anything. We categorically denied that the published emails were leaked by any one of us. We clearly stated that these emails, which were our private property, were stolen in an illicit manner and ended up being published by the Labour media.
I will, in this blog, write, for the very first time, about another hacked document. Besides the emails in question another document which was in my mailbox and on my hard disc was published in a pro-Labour party newspaper. This was emailed to me by someone who was not part of the Zwieg Bla Divorzju Movement and none of my colleagues in the Movement knew about it. I was the only person who had a copy of the emails published in It-Torca and this document I am referring to in this blog.
What Dr. Muscat said about Andre Camilleri, Arthur Galea Salamone, Ray Baldacchino, Lawrence Zammit and I is preposterous besides being totally untrue. How could a Prime Minister in waiting come up with something like this? Has no one ever told him that when one is in a hole, one should stop digging?