After Aisha Gaddafi circling overhead (perhaps it's a fantasy they have), more lies from Malta Today

Anti-Gaddafi demonstrators in London - they stuck to the point and didn't wave placards showing Tony Blair crawling to Gaddafi

Raphael Vassallo of Malta Today has produced a splendid piece of utter rubbish which his editor has positioned on page 3.

The headline is “Anti Gonzi placards torn at Libya protest”.

He writes:

“A number of placards criticising Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi’s recent meeting with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, held aloft by members of leftwing NGO Moviment Graffitii, were snatched away and ripped by angry onlookers during an anti-Gaddafi protest march at Valletta yesterday morning.”

And then he quoted a Graffiti activist:

“There was quite a lot of confusion. Some five or six people grabbed some of the placards and tore them up.”

Really? Well then, they must have had pretty big hands to do it with, given that the placards were made of wood.

Tosh. Bollocks. I was there right from the start and not a single print-out – you can’t rip up a wooden placard – was torn or sequestered. Not one.

Graffiti activists were politely asked by the organisers, and others including me, to please carry anti-Gaddafi, anti-bloodshed posters like everyone else there. We even offered to give them some. When they refused, and insisted that they wanted to protest against Maltese politicians, we suggested – again politely – that they might then hold their own demonstration elsewhere and stand outside the Auberge de Castille or parliament.

But apparently, because it’s a free country, they felt entitled to gatecrash a protest organised by others and scare away people who are anti-Gaddafi but not anti-Gonzi or anti-Muscat, and so they became defiant and aggressive when it was pointed out to them, by the grown-ups, that they had no such entitlement.

But as I remarked later on to a friend, you have to be extreme leftwing to confuse freedom with imposition of your views on others who wish to have no part of them.

Had somebody attacked Graffiti or torn their blessed placards, my dear Raphael, then somebody else would have it on film. There were photographers and cameramen from every news organisation in Malta, except Malta today, with their cameras focussed on the argument.

Unless he was heavily disguised as a placard, Raphael Vassallo wasn’t there either, and so was in no position to report on the event. If he were there, I would have noticed him, because I have known him since he was born. So his is certainly not an eyewitness account, but a terrible piece of reportage strung together by somebody sitting in an office while speaking to only one person: a member of Graffiti.

Though he has all my contact details, claims to work for an independent newspaper, has known me all his life and has no qualms about calling in this relationship when he needs something – like one of my articles when he couldn’t be fagged to search the archive himself – Raphael Vassallo didn’t pick up the phone and ring me to see if Graffiti’s claims were true.

He tried to make his readers believe that I objected to the placards out of partisan support for Lawrence Gonzi, because I have uploaded several similar photos on this blog showing Gaddafi with Labour leaders.

Because it didn’t fit in with his lies, he conveniently failed to mention that, besides being the first journalist in Malta to begin drawing attention to the unfolding crisis in Libya – starting last Sunday on this website, when he and his stable were nodding off – I was also the first one to criticise the failure of judgement and of diplomatic intelligence which led to our prime minister and foreign minister visiting Gaddafi on 9 February.

I have continued to criticise that decision in no uncertain terms, and properly and seriously, unlike the yah-boo-last-European-leader-to-see-Gaddafi childishness of the Raphael and Labour crowd.

Raphael Vassallo, having apparently lost my telephone number and awareness of the fact that he can obtain it from umpteen family members, mine and his, somehow managed to root out the telephone number of a Graffiti activist, who told him: “It’s my right to be able to criticise my government. This is a democracy.”

Exactly. The demonstration was not against the Maltese government or even the Maltese opposition. It was a demonstration against Muammar Gaddafi. If Graffitti wished to protest against the government or the opposition, they could have run along with their placards and stood outside the Auberge de Castille or the Grandmaster’s Palace while the rest of us did our thing.

Graffiti told Raphael Vassallo that the demonstrators asked them why they weren’t showing pictures of KMB and Mintoff with Gaddafi, and that they asked us in return why we didn’t turn up with them ourselves.

But they failed to tell him our answer, or perhaps they did and Raphael chose not to report it: that we didn’t go to the demonstration with placards showing KMB and Mintoff with Gaddafi because it wasn’t the place for them. Being grown-ups, we knew that.

Two decades on, Rapahel Vassallo is still stuck in the Graffiti mindset. Perhaps he should tell us why he wasn’t at the demonstration yesterday. It can’t be because he was busy writing, because when he was employed at The Malta Independent I never noticed him doing much other than producing a single opinion piece once a week while employed to work between 9am and 5pm. Maybe he was working on stories, who knows. I certainly don’t.

What I do know is that between Karl Stagno Navarra’s fantasies about Aisha Gaddafi circling overhead, Matthew Vella’s extreme leftwing hatred of anybody from my kind of background (strange, given that half of the company which pays him his salary is owned by the exact same sort of person from the exact same extended family) and Saviour’s myriad obsessions, you just can’t believe what you read in Malta Today anymore.

No wonder it’s become the newspaper of choice for the Hdura and Lanzit Brigade, but I don’t suppose that lot care as long as somebody buys it. Too damned bad most of them scan it on line rather than paying for the print version.