The Giant Brain of Forum Zghazagh Laburisti's secretary-general
My name is Alex Saliba and I don't understand why prime ministers can't stop journalists writing stuff the Labour Party doesn't like.
If Nikita Zammit Alamango and FZL sec-gen Alex Saliba are shining examples of future (and present) Labour politicians, we have lots to look forward to. Here’s Alex Saliba on Facebook, taking to pieces with wit, logic and literary skill my argument that a progressive politician would never send his children to a nuns’ school, where they will get the precise opposite of a progressive education. Nor should a socialist with a decent income seek to take two free places at a private school by entering his children in a lottery where they compete with the children of financially deprived parents who can’t afford to send their children to fee-paying (and progressive) schools.
Alex Saliba, Forum Zghazagh Laburisti secretary-general, writing on Facebook
Vomiting at her hatred…surely a 100% scum bag … How does she dare to attack 2 innocent angels just for the sake of tarnishing their father’s reputation… Gonzi must take prompt action now!!! Gonzi if you boast so much with your Valuri… STOP HER … Eddie would have surely controlled her but you don’t have the guts to do so!!!
Stop me how, Alex? And more to the point, why? It might be hard for you to understand, brought up as you were by parents who doggedly voted Labour even in 1987, that my right to criticise the leader of the opposition’s decision to enter his children into a church schools lottery to be educated by nuns, while calling himself progressive, and to compete for free places with the financially deprived, while calling himself a socialist, is protected by the Constitution of Malta and the European Convention on Human Rights.
You might inhabit a parallel totalitarian world in which the prime minister can summon a journalist and stop her writing (how – by threatening to send his thugs to beat up my family?), but I don’t.
And nor do most of the ‘floating voters’ your party of wackos and weirdos is doing is damnedest to attract while frightening them off instead.
Here he is again, mouthing off like an educationally deprived 14-year-old:
Alex Saliba
I choose to ignore her during the last couple of weeks because she is not even worth mentioning… but attacking two young girls just because they are the children of the leader of the opposition is far from acceptable!!!
YOU ignore ME, Alex Saliba? Well, excuse me. As the donkey said of the mosquito buzzing at its ear in one of those interminable Latin exercises, “Ubi est?” The only reason you interest me at all is as a prime example of just how trashy and ignorant the Labour Party is, and how very low its standards are in choosing its representatives. If you are a shining star of Progressive Labour, what are the non-stars like?
‘Attacking two young girls’? How – by criticising their father’s decision to enter them into a lottery for free places at church schools? Come off it. This from a representative of the political party that put my son on a rolling loop on Super One in the general election campaign, making him a target for the mob, all because his mother – a journalist, not a politician, might I remind you – is seen by Labour as Public Enemy No. 1.
Now here’s that other mohh ta’ tigiega, Pia Micallef of Maltastar, egging him on with a giant non sequitur.
Pia Micallef
Funny… I was certain she went to st. Dorothy’s (a church school) as a child…
No, Pia, I actually went to ‘st. Dorothy’s (a church school)’ as an adult, because it’s more fun that way. And just in case you take me literally – yet again – no, I did not. I went to St Dorothy’s from the age of four to 15.
But guess what? No lottery was involved, my parents did not compete with the financially deprived for free places for their four daughters because there weren’t any, they paid full fees, and they wouldn’t have been so cheap anyway. And there were no fee-paying independent schools except one for boys, called St Edward’s, to which my cousins were sent.
Another thing: don’t even think of using me as an example of how good St Dorothy’s was because all I am is despite my schooling, which was terribly inadequate but the government schools were a hundred times worse, and not because of it. I learned nothing at school which I still use today and had to teach myself almost everything by reading independently, during my school years and afterward.
29 Comments Comment
Leave a Comment
If Malta’s future socialist prime minister wants to show us how truly egalitarian he is, he should not hesitate in sending his daughters to a state school. The upholders of equality that they were, when Labour won the election in the 1970s a few MLP members of parliament decided to transfer their children from church schools to state schools since it suited them to show that they were as one with the people who voted them in.
Jo, you must not forget how in the 1980s the Labour government threatened to close the church schools. KMB, then as Minister of Education, before becoming Prime Minister, had even coined his ridiculous socialist phrase “Jew B’Xejn Jew Xejn” – meaning that if the Church schools did not remove their fees, his Labour government would close them down.
And I do remember a period in the mid-80s when several church schools were officially closed and lessons were organised in private homes.
Dr Muscat, who holds a PhD, who served as a distinguished MEP, and who now leads the Opposition and drives around in an Alfa saloon, should be able to afford to pay for the education of his children, not win it in a lottery.
We had to be tutored at our P.E. teacher’s home, just because KMB closed our school. I still have nightmares when I see KMB’s face so traumatic was the experience.
Could you please stop referring to church schools as the schools for the poor? Quite frankly they are the best schools around. It wouldn’t even cross my mind to send my children to a school like St Edward’s or even worse St Martin’s Sixth Form….and yes, I can afford to do that despite not having a double-barren surname.
[Daphne – Church schools ARE schools for the less financially comfortable (not poor, because the poor go to state schools), whether you like it or not. This was the entirely foreseeable result of removing fees AND discretionary selection. People who can’t afford to send their children to a fee-paying school but who still want a private education for them flock to that lottery in vaster numbers than those who would have traditionally sent their children to a church school anyway. The way lotteries work is that those with a heavier presence are most likely to get pulled out of the barrel. Hence, church school pupils are now predominantly working-class and mittilkless because there are more working-class and mittilkless children in the lottery system than there are middle-class.The parents of mittilkless children can afford the fees at independent schools but they still think a church school is aspirational and they haven’t yet made the mental leap into spending serious money on education. Incidentally, your jibe about a double-‘barren’ surname reveals a lot more than you think. No, church schools are not better than independent schools. I went to the former and my sons to the latter and I assure you that there is no comparison, not even with the present-day version of the church school I went to. Coeducation is crucial to socialising a child properly, and that’s part of education. It’s no coincidence that you mention St Edward’s as one of the educationally weaker independent schools. I actually think there’s a direct link between this fact and the fact that it is the only independent school which is not coed.]
If I may jibe in, I personally am in favour of public schools and think they’re doing a fine job. Send my daughter in fact. I believe in community schools.
Naturally parents should supplement the school curriculum as much as they can.
[Daphne – I assume yours is the American, not English, meaning of public schools.]
Well, to be fair there are church schools and church schools. Some are a lot more demanding and far better then others.
By the way, when I went there at least you could never tell that St Edward’s was not a church school. We had mass every single week, unlike most church schools which had it once a month (or so I’m told).
Plus, when KMB closed the church schools, St Edward’s was closed too, for some reason, and stayed closed longer then any church school.
@ Jo
Not quite precise, Jo. The MLP parliament members of whom you speak were forced, I repeat forced, in the 1980s to take their children out of church schools by their Leader and then Prime Minister KMB and to send them instead to schools set up on purpose as government prepared to close down church-run schools.
Those who remember those horrible times would recall the notorious slogan “Jew xejn jew b’xejn”.
I personally know children of members of parliament who have never forgiven their fathers for uprooting them from their schools to send them to these contrived schools directed by “rabble”.
Lest we forget!
@ Cannot Resist Anymore! says:
I agree with you completely except on one count. They were forced to uproot their children by the Leader and PM KMB. He was nothing more than a puppet on a string. Leader di factum was Dom Mintoff. In fact his two nephews namely Wenzu Mintoff and sadly the late Laurence Mintoff were both uprooted from St. Aloysius College.
Alex Saliba and the rest of those imbeciles show that the words freedom of speech, fair comment, public persons, reality, and the likes, just don’t exist in their vocabulary. They don’t even seem to fathom the concepts.
They show that their existence is moulded around words like control, silence, intimidation, blackmail, arrogance and stupidity.
You said “nor do most of the ‘floating voters’ your party of wackos and weirdos is doing is damnedest to attract while frightening them off instead.”
Oh, how right you are.
These twits just don’t get it. Guess they haven’t read the book, “How To Get F**cked and Shafted on Facebook”. So stupid.
X’biza’ dawn in-nies. Dawk li ghandhom xi dubbju mhux lejn il-lider taghhom iridu jharsu imma min qeghdu hemm u min iridu hemm. Hasbu ghax jilbsu glekk saru nies u cioe jafu jghixu civilment. L-anqas jafu x’inhi socjeta ahseb u ara liberta’, drittijiet u obbligi. Alan if you were a floater, float no more and call a spade a spade. The Nats may be nasty at times but at least they let you breathe freely. Do you think Labour as in any way evolved? So – pass the message to people like you.
Very funny. Not long ago the Bidnija journalist had written that she went to the Sacred Heart college run by Sisters of the Sacred heart, now suddenly she was wrong because she was educated at Saint Dorothy. So she says.
Which is which?
[Daphne – I never wrote that I went to the Convent of the Sacred Heart. Why would I do that, if it isn’t true? I went to St Dorothy’s School in Sliema and to St Dorothy’s Convent in Mdina. It’s your friends over at the hate site who I assume I went to school at what they would almost certainly call is-Sejkrit HaRRRRRRRRt, because in their arrested minds, tal-pepe = Sacred Heart.]
So did you do gym in the basement in Mdina? My wife did.
[Daphne – Gym? Basement? This is the first I’ve heard of either.]
The only time we ever got to see the basement in Mdina was when my sisters and I (and a few other girls) spent hours baling out knee-high water following the October 1979 floods.
As far as I recall, the basement was never used for any lessons. Then again, maybe you meant Tal-Virtu, rather than Mdina.
[Daphne – I wasn’t one of those baling out water, Mand. I’d be damned. I’d have been delighted to see the entire place submerged once and for all – but without the nice nuns, of course.]
No seriously, in my wife’s time there, late eighties – early nineties, gym was held in the basement – at Mdina.
There was just a little window opening at street level through which she showed it to me.
For the nuns, gym was a waste of time. The only sort of P.E we ever got was having to walk all the way to Howard Gardens and play netball down in the ditch. And boy did we love that very brief breath of fresh air away form the mouldy classes. X’gym, gym, David , the nuns would have probably told us it’s a mortal sin.
There was no basement at St. Dorothy’s Tal-Virtu’ and students did not have access to the basement at the Mdina Convent.
Joseph Muscat was seen touring one of the independent schools lately, and I thought to myself at least here he seems to be making a good choice for his two girls.
Having myself been brought up in one of the nuns’ convents, I would never have dreamed of sending any daughter I may have had there, no matter how progressive they make themselves to be, and how many state-of the-art-schools they build, the bad memories I’ve had with the nuns for thirteen years of my life will never, ever be forgotten.
[Daphne – Well, Janine, we were in the same class, so we sing from the same hymn-sheet on this one.]
Go to 05:58 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f49-tDSxSCM&feature=related
Watching Daphne take on dimwits like Alex Saliba and Pia Micallef gives me the impression of watching Diego Maradona playing football with the boys at the Oratorju pitch. Don’t they realise they are punching way way above their weight?
Nope. Too stupid.
Maybe he’s suggesting that Gonzi “stops you” Lorry-Sant-style.
Alex Saliba, we’ve come a long way since then. You should count yourself lucky that you’re too young to remember what those times were like.
What’s the difference between church schools and private schools? Both are fee paying schools and children come from all classes.
[Daphne – You may not have noticed, Carm, but the situation has changed a little since the days when I and your daughters were at St Dorothy’s. There are no fees for church schools. You get a request for a donation but you are free to ignore it and nobody can pressure you into paying it, with the result that thousands of children have over the last two decades acquired a private education for 11 years without their parents paying a cent. Because you know how it is in Malta: people don’t pay if they can get it for free. As for there being children of all classes in both – yes, but the vast majority of children in church schools are now definitely working-class, while those at independent schools are mittilkless and middle-class, and what passes for Malta’s upper class, because it stands to reason that if you have a middle then you have to have a top.]
@Grezz If he is not bothered with history there isn’t much he can count himself lucky for. I did not live through the World Wars but I do know what the effect of wars is.
I agree with you Daphne and Janine. I went to St. Joseph and I vowed at 16 never to send any daughters I might have to a nuns’ school.
I think a lot of blanket statements are being made about schools. In my opinion and experience, what children get through their schooling is a mix of what their parents, their teachers, their peers and their background in general have to offer.
Each class is different. You have good and crap teachers everywhere. You have good and crap students everywhere. You have large classrooms and smaller ones. You have great heads of schools and idiots. You have schools with excellent facilities and others which are lagging behind.
I was at St Edward’s and have only praise for the school except for the food they fed us. Again I don’t know better, however I was involved in the education sector for eight years and have seen the state sector making leaps and bounds.
Of course the state sector will always have the burden of those who come from families who do not care for their children’s education and I’m not referring to ‘poor’ people but those who don’t care and give no value to education.
The state system is slowly eliminating its shackles and that’s good news for everyone. I think the church schools suffered from the lottery system. It is true that the church should open its education to all and in particular to those from deprived backgrounds, but that has definitely resulted in loss of prestige and the church also lost recruiting ground.
Well, well, times have really changed!
In the old days Labour when Is-salvatur ta’ Malta Duminku MIntoff was in power, parents who sent their children to church schools were ridiculed incessantly.
The numbskull Alex Saliba would not and could not have made it in these schools as he would have felt like a fish out of water.
I have one thing to add – thank you mum and dad for sending me to the Convent of the Sacred Heart and, later to St. Aloysius College.
I don’t know what game Joseph Muscat is playing here but recently he visited a state school and told the headmaster that he will send his children there.
YAY for st.dorothy’s ex students.