Deep down in everyone of us is the intuitive welcoming host. All of us shudder reading The Guardian’s headline “MEPS disturbed by trip to Malta”.
We have thought of many adjectives to describe these islands. I have seen no glossy posters saying ‘Visit Disturbing Malta’.
This is where Joseph Muscat has brought us to.
And he does not realise what he sounds like when he says the MEPs are “biased”. Of course they are. Anyone reasonable would be. Anyone neutral in the face of this has no moral and ethical compass. That is why to forced neutrality of TVM is part of the state’s infrastructure of oppression: because ambivalence or neutrality between good and evil is evil.
Consider this post by prime minister’s staffer and Labour Member of Parliament Glenn Bedingfield about the MEPs’ visit. “It is now obvious that the MEPs who talk of rule of law need to be better versed in the spirit of the law. The law which state we are all innocent till proven guilty.”
Of course we’re all presumed innocent. But that doesn’t mean we walk away from crime. If no one is arrested, no one is arraigned, no one is accused and no one is tried, no one can ever be convicted. That means we are all innocent.
But that is not how the rule of law, which Glenn Bedingfield presumes to teach to the rest of the world like he knows the first thing about it, works. If someone is suspected of a crime they are presumed innocent but even as they are, they are investigated, arrested, tried and if found guilty no longer deemed innocent.
That is rule of law. It is disturbing to anyone with a basic understanding of that notion to even visit a country which doesn’t have it. Let alone to live in it.