Cyrus Engerer at the European Parliament said that we should fight partisan hate together. He complained that he tried to attend a vigil for Daphne Caruana Galizia the day she was killed but was made to feel uncomfortable because “due to partisan political reasons he was not welcome there”. He did not elaborate. “Our challenge is to fight hate, classism and the belief that opinions are superior to others.”
What a load of bollocks, and I’ll proceed to say why.
For one thing opinions are not of equal merit or quality. The belief that they are is a hegemonic attack on freedom of thought. We all have a right to an opinion, even the wrong opinion. But having an opinion does not make us right.
Pointing out where others are wrong is neither “hate” nor “classism”. Classism is the belief or the system emanating from the belief that people are born with unequal entitlement. If Cyrus Engerer thinks he’s indicting people who do not agree with him with that charge it is because he has an enormous chip on his shoulder that weighs him down.
I have no idea why Cyrus Engerer was made to feel uncomfortable when he went to the vigil that gathered the day Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated. I wasn’t there myself and I never heard of the detail of his unwelcome presence before today.
I do remember that at a demonstration in Valletta the following Sunday there were Chris Fearne and Helena Dalli and I do remember hearing they left before the whole thing finished. It could have been that they decided to sneak away when I started talking because they did not like the sound of my voice. Or they could have waited, to their regret, to hear me say that Daphne was killed by a dark, covert relationship between politicians and criminals.
They probably would have told themselves that I was being “partisan”, that I was “bickering”, that there was “hate” in my speech, or that, presumably because they know nothing about me, because they think I think I belong to some sort of class which is above them.
But that’s just the lies they tell themselves because they prefer to think I am partisan and I am bickering than that I am loudly and clearly pointing out that their continued association with criminal politicians, assuming they are none, is complicity in the crimes of those criminal politicians.
I must ask Cyrus Engerer exactly how he tried to address the issue of partisan bickering since that allegedly unsuccessful attempted 5 years ago to the day of attending a vigil after a journalist was killed?
He was and is a man of influence in his own party, certainly much more than, say, I am. He was a beast of burden for Joseph Muscat for years. He was compensated with sinecures when he was forced out of an election candidature because of his own criminal actions. Those actions were eventually forgiven and mostly forgotten, and he did acquire elected office on behalf of the Labour Party.
If he has, in all this time, done anything to encourage his own party not to indulge in “partisan bickering” he certainly did not mention it in his speech of yesterday. His record of being non-partisan started and stopped at his alleged guilt trip the day a journalist was killed by car bomb.
I’m going to assume he did nothing since.
On the assumption I’m going to conclude that the only bickering Cyrus Engerer has in mind is the bit where anyone disagrees with him and his party. That it is for us dissenters to shut up just in case anyone might be alienated by a plurality of opinions in this country.
Who is the entitled partisan now, Cyrus Engerer?