Comments on: And then some people say that Africans will corrupt our values

By: Marku

Marku — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 13:24:21 +0000

Emanuel: boy do I not want to meet you. You are racist, xenophobic, Christian fundamentalist and anti-Semitic on top of that. I bet you were doing somersaults when Josie came along.

By: Moggy

Moggy — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:37:27 +0000

[Emanuel Muscat – They did kill Jesus Christ and since Christianity became the dominant religon they have been suffering for it ever since.]

A pretty lame point of view, if you do not mind me saying so. One instance when Jews suffered greatly, and when it certainly wasn’t due to the fact that they “killed Jesus Christ” was during the Holocaust. Do you really think that Hilter ordered the death and suffering of millions of European Jews because he was a Christian? Do (or indeed, should) real Christians really act that way? He did it because he was a fanatic – fanatical about creating a perfect Aryan race. Just as fanatical as people who profess other creeds are when they do unspeakable things in the name (but only in the name) of their religion.

It was definitely not the Christian religion (or the fact that Christ was killed by the Jews) which drove Hitler to do what he did, but fanaticism and a pretty hefty tendency toward psychopathy and megalomania.

By: Moggy

Moggy — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:21:31 +0000

[Antoine Vella: Where did you get your information that one out of every three Africans suffers from AIDS? According to UNAIDS, the incidence of HIV (not AIDS) in sub-Saharan Africa is 6%, still higher than the world average of <1% but a lot less than your 30%. (http://www.unaids.org/en/KnowledgeCentre/HIVData/GlobalReport/2008/2008_Global_report.asp – Chapter 2 Tab. 2.3)
This is how misunderstandings are needlessly caused: when a person states “facts” based on hearsay, without checking them out first.]

Not hearsay at all. The prevalence in urbanised areas, not surprisingly, is higher than the over-all incidence, which involves lots of people who live in tribes and in remote regions. In urbanised areas the incidence is much higher (and this varies from country to country), sometimes even surpassing 30%, with percentages of mothers booking in for antenatal care sometimes even surpassing 50% (varies from country to country).

Now the people who come here are obviously from urban areas of their countries, and not straight out of tribal Africa – hence from the areas where the incidence is rather high (again, bear in mind that this varies from country to country).

Read around and you will find the relevant statistics and graphs.

By: Amanda Mallia

Amanda Mallia — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:46:53 +0000

Daphne – Wasn’t there an entrepreneur-turned politician who went on holiday to Holland, and came back impressed after seeing Anne Frank’s house? – The fool thought that the “clever” Dutch people created the house as a tourist attraction following the success of the book entitled “The Diary of Anne Frank”, which he thought was fiction.

By: Antoine Vella

Antoine Vella — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:13:53 +0000

moggy
“But it also depends, does it not, on the prevalence of a disease within a given population? If the prevalence is 30% (and no, Antoine Vella, this is not racist, wishful thinking, but sad fact)…”

I did not say that it is racist to mention the incidence of AIDS in Africa or any other fact. What is racist is whether the information being quoted is correct and whether it is used to justify discrimination.

Where did you get your information that one out of every three Africans suffers from AIDS? According to UNAIDS, the incidence of HIV (not AIDS) in sub-Saharan Africa is 6%, still higher than the world average of <1% but a lot less than your 30%. (http://www.unaids.org/en/KnowledgeCentre/HIVData/GlobalReport/2008/2008_Global_report.asp – Chapter 2 Tab. 2.3)

This is how misunderstandings are needlessly caused: when a person states “facts” based on hearsay, without checking them out first.

By: Emanuel Muscat

Emanuel Muscat — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:31:31 +0000

Daphne
I have a lot of admiration for the jewish people but you also need to understand the reasons why things happen to certain people:the jews have almost always done away with their so called prophets either by killing them or have others kill them and they were the first to adhere to the ONE true GOD while all other peoples had many gods.They did kill Jesus Christ and since Christianity became the dominant religon they have been suffering for it ever since.They do not integrate well with other people which has its good and bad sides to it.They also tend to form their own mafia which everybody does when he feels threatened but this eventually alienated further more or less all europeans and we all know about the holocaust and the purges they suffered in many countries.
It was not difficult to read about the holocaust even in the sixties:I remember reading Hitler’s Ovens by Comer Clarke at 16 and about the japanese atrocities in other books.

[Daphne – Why am I not surprised that this is your view?]

By: Marku

Marku — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:23:30 +0000

Daphne: We are indeed about the same age and I can easily relate to what you were saying. What really gets to me is that even in this day and age there seems to be no effort to improve what kind of history is being taught at a primary and secondary level. To be fair to the teachers, they are not finding much help during their own training. There is in fact very little effort to address such important historical themes at university level. The History Department’s courses are disproportionately focused on Maltese and European history. Even then, several non-Maltese history courses deal with traditional themes such as Renaissance and Reformation or Europe between the World Wars. Now I understand that an academic trained as a medievalist cannot be expected to teach the Holocaust or the Chinese Cultural Revolution, but at least there should be some effort to, where possible, incorporate these themes into pre-existing courses or even to hire someone who specializes in non-European history.

By: Moggy

Moggy — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:02:27 +0000

@ Marku: No, we never learnt about the Holocaust at (Church) school. I, too, learnt about it at home, thanks to my avid reading, and thanks to the fact that my mother had a few books about the subject on her bookshelves. I was horrified by what I read, and up to this very day, I buy books about the subject.

If you read Anne Frank, try and find her Tales from the Secret Annexe. Some very sweet stories written by the girl herself. She was such an intelligent girl. On reading them one finds oneself silently weeping for the waste of a life which was so promising.

By: Marku

Marku — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:01:32 +0000

The Emigrants’ Commission’s report is definitely a case of ‘what were they thinking?’. Most of the comments posted by the Times’ readers are a sad reflection of the poor level of education in our country. Incidentally, I’ve always wondered how – if at all – our schools commemorate the EU’s Holocaust Day. Have any of our public or private schools ever asked students to read Primo Levi or Ann Frank? I have my doubts. For sure I never heard of the Holocaust when I was at school (and I went to a Church school).

[Daphne – No, because you’re about my age from what I gather and we were at the tail-end of the ‘Jews killed Jesus’ approach to Catholicism. My mother’s prayer book for the Seven Visits on Good Friday when we were children contained a reference to the ‘cruel Jews’ which was supposed to be read at every church visit – seven times in one day. She would make a point of refusing to read it, telling us kids ‘this is bad and wrong – Jews are not cruel’. Before we had racism, we had religion-sponsored anti-Semitism. We weren’t taught about the Holocaust at school, either. I learned about it at home. I imagine that those girls who grew up in different sorts of homes and who never bothered to find out for themselves never learned anything about it at all.]

By: Daphne Caruana Galizia

Daphne Caruana Galizia — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:29:28 +0000

By an amazing coincidence, Sybil, Google has just alerted me to the fact that an international women’s rights forum has picked up my articles on Paul Vincenti’s and Tony Mifsud’s plans for pregnant women and posted them with links to this blog….along with news of oppression of women in your favourite African and Middle Eastern countries. Check out this link.

http://womensphere.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/keeping-pregnant-women-under-house-arrest-in-malta/