It's all about them
Nationalist MPs Beppe Fenech Adami and Charlo Bonnici at yesterday's anti-Gaddafi demonstration in Valletta. There were no Labour MPs present.
It is unfortunate that Moviment Graffiti see every protest as an exercise in self-promotion. They have become Malta’s ‘rent-a-protestor’, the sort you see outside every summit meeting or Downing Street, whether it’s global warming, blood diamonds or the invasion of Iraq, wearing the universal uniform of the breed: dreadlocks, a large knitted hat, a vast cotton scarf and some shapeless clothes knocked together by somebody’s great-aunt in Nepal.
Yesterday’s anti-Gaddafi demonstration in Valletta was organised by Libyan people who live in Malta. They did not wish to make any statements about Maltese politicians, and that wish should have been respected.
Their decision to keep Maltese partisan politics out of it was the proper one, because they wanted demonstrators to raise awareness about the suffering in Libya, not score political points off each other, the government and the opposition. That sort of thing can be left to other forums, or to the organisers of other demonstrations.
Besides, it is quite possible for people of all sorts of political beliefs to have in common a hatred and fear of the Tyrant of Tripoli, and that is why the organisers and several of the demonstrators, me included, became so irritated at Graffiti’s stupidity.
By putting up their battery of ‘Shame on Gonzi and Muscat’ placards, with their photographs of the prime minister with Muammar Gaddafi (but no photograph of Muscat in the same position last August), they were asking fellow demonstrators to march beneath a declaration with which they might not agree. That was unfair to the organisers and to fellow demonstrators, a few of whom left rather than walk beneath a ‘Shame on Gonzi’ photograph when they were there to show support to the Libyan people and protest against Gaddafi not Gonzi.
Whether we vote Nationalist, Labour or AD – perhaps Graffiti will now vote for the revived Communist Party – all of us there shared a common sentiment against Gaddafi and that was the only statement we should have made, out of respect to the organisers. Perhaps here I should point out that though two Nationalist politicians turned up to the demonstration, Beppe Fenech Adami and Charlo Bonnici, there were no people from the Labour Party.
I could have easily turned up with a hundred placards emblazoned with slogans inspired by the Golden Years of Gaddafi, Mintoff and KMB, and handed them out. It’s not as though I don’t have a wealth of material filed away. But I didn’t, because that wasn’t the point. The point yesterday morning was Gaddafi’s behaviour towards Libyans, and not the prime minister’s (or leader of the opposition’s) behaviour towards Gaddafi. Those grudge-against-the-world people shouldn’t have taken their enormous Graffiti banner with them, either, because it’s the height of rudeness and stupidity to make yourself the focus of attention in an attempt at distracting others from those who really should be the focus: in this case, the Libyan people.
The hysterical abuse and insults by members of the Moviment Graffiti who were asked, politely, to replace their Gonzi/Muscat placards with something more appropriate to the demonstration were only too believable, sadly. People like that are terribly self-involved and one soon comes to see that they don’t really care what they are demonstrating about as long as they are seen to be demonstrating with a large Graffiti banner.
The individuals with whom I remonstrated seemed not to understand that if one wishes to join an organised demonstration, rather than a free-for-all, then one has to subscribe to the wishes, messages and sentiments of the organisers, and not come along with your own personal messages and try to impose them on others there who have different ideas. “It’s a democracy,” one of them told me, as I resisted the temptation to tell him that yes, I saw that democracy born and he didn’t, so I was more likely to know that for a fact.
Instead I tried to explain, to no avail as his anger mounted, that a democracy allows the Graffiti Movement to take its posters and placards elsewhere, there to stage its own protest demo. Democracy allows it, too, to try to hijack and gatecrash somebody else’s protest demo, but then democracy allows the organisers to ask them to use different placards or refrain from marching with them.
The trouble with the Graffiti Movement is that it doesn’t understand democracy, because people of the extreme left are as inherently totalitarian as those of the extreme right. The only freedom they understand is the freedom of everybody to subscribe to Graffiti’s views.
The Graffiti Movement should have the wisdom to understand that it does no good to any cause it supports publicly, but rather the opposite. When the Graffiti Movement turns up, others leave. They are about as welcome as Norman Lowell and Arlette Baldacchino. And that is exactly what happened yesterday. Some left, while the rest manoeuvred themselves away from Graffiti’s banner and Gonzi/Muscat placards.
Despite seeing the discomfort and annoyance of other demonstrators, including Libyans who don’t like to be involved in Maltese partisan politics, the dreadlocks and traveller-outfit brigade persisted defiantly. That convinced me they weren’t there because they care about the suffering and oppression of our neighbours, but because they care only about themselves. They’ve always got to be the main story.
Childishly – but then you would have to be childish to be involved in a group like that – a couple of them took great care to tail me through the demonstration trying to place a Gonzi/Muscat placard behind my head for the cameras. Because most of us carried posters about human rights and depictions of bloodied hand-prints, and wore normal clothes and no dreadlocks, this only made them look pettier and weirder.
As a friend remarked, you can’t take those Graffiti people seriously. Today they’re here with their placards protesting against Maltese politicians’ relationship with Gaddafi. But tomorrow, should the EU or the UN decide that military intervention is necessary to take Gaddafi out of the mix, they’ll be out with their anti-armed forces placards because they want to have it both ways.
This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.
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With respect – I think Graffiti have been given undeserved publicity by the above truthful remarks. But being so narrow minded, they feel that the publicity is good.
It is a good thing that Labour stayed away from the demo. The jigsaw pieces are now falling into place – have you read KMB’s piece in today’s The Sunday Times? Well, read it and you can be sure that Labour’s stance is with the murderer Gaddafi.
The great pity is that any newspaper or any other medium wastes space on a these few unimportant anarchical rebels without a cause, who do not represent anybody except their own inflated egos, and whose silly antics against everything and everybody would not attract any attention if the press ignored them with the contempt they deserve.
There’s always an agenda behind Graffitti’s (sp – as they spell it) “protests”.
Always.
They’re too stupidly naive to know that we can see through them, because they are about as opaque as a glass fish.
Let them live in delusion, fools.
I agree with red nose. If only the press would ignore Graffiti once and for all, they would disappear once and for all.
A photo of the last Gonzi-Gaddafi summit is okay on a blog, but not, it seems, stuck to a placard during a demo.
The justification? The Libyans who organised the demo are afraid of irking Gonzi.
[Daphne – No, Husband of Sharon. The Libyans who organised the demo come from a culture where it is absolutely not done to insult your hosts. They wore themselves out thanking the Maltese who turned up. And the Maltese who supported them knew that potential demonstrators would be put off if Gonzi and Muscat were brought into the mix. Perhaps we should have taken a tip from your wife and turned up in a cow outfit. Use that brain, because at this rate it’s going to atrophy.]
On a different level, talk of military action is already up there at Malta Today – http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/news/national/military-action-could-place-malta-on-the-front-line
[Daphne – Yes, and they’re taking the Labour line, I trust you notice. But then you’re not going to say anything about that, are you, because you’ll have to hide in the lavatory with your laptop to do it, ma jmurx taqbdek Sharon tghid xi haga kontra KMB tas-CNi.]
The EU-frontier argument is back. Hopefully, the crescent-and-the-cross scenario will not be resurrected.
Ara veru l-papra milli jkollha ttik…
What I notice is that your gung-ho attitude is discriminate because you only open your mouth when such things happen in our backyard. This essentially means that the ‘backyard’ bit is more important than ‘democracy’, so it’s either a matter of hypocrisy or downright ignorance.
[Daphne – No, Kevin, it’s called a natural human interest in the things in which you and your country are involved, because they are more relevant. Libya is OBVIOUSLY going to be more captivating than Tibet if you are Maltese, unless you belong to the Graffiti Movement. It was the point I made myself when the Tunisia crisis broke out: I wondered why people took so long to wake up to it given that it was happening next door. Turns out we feel closer to Tripoli than we do to Tunis, and that’s because there is a HUMAN RELATIONSHIP.]
Kev, just one comment – referring to Europe as “the cross” shows how you’ve been wasting your time in Brussels. Even from down here in Malta (aka Liliput in your book) I know that Europe is wholly secular and would never enter a conflict for religious reasons.
Antoine Vella, read Samuel Huntington’s book ‘Clash of Civilisations’ (1996). Or better still, read an article in the 5 September 1993 edition of The Malta Independent on Sunday.
Kev, read Edward Said on Huntingdon’s ‘clash of civilisations’.
Ragun-Bazwi – I am not espousing either Huntington or Said – or Fukuyama, for that matter, since Huntington was reacting to Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ fallacy.
You should have read Antoine Vella’s Ragunament Kuntestwali before troubling us with your clown’s worth.
Kev, what have you done about all this apart from firing off salvos from the safety of a spare toilet in a Brussels suburb?
[Daphne – He’s cheesed off because I was right about the return of the Mirage jets: no visas and no permission to land, the most obvious solution, which is in fact what happened.]
No, Daphne, you were not right because you are still missing the point. My point is that Gonzi is only being categorical in relation to the pilots (the easy part).
Even at the press conference just two hours ago he did not have the courage to state categorically that the planes will NOT be returned. Then, when asked specifically (again) – he said “l-arjuplani [sic] are still here…” The Times reported his reply incorrectly – but I don’t need The Times because I heard what he said.
[Daphne – Kevin, you are exhausting. He will not say, and especially not categorically, that the planes will not be returned. This is because he has said already that the planes remain the property of Libya and will be returned when the time is right. That means they will be returned, just not when Gaddafi is still around to use them against his own people.]
I am not saying he will return the planes – I pointed that out three days ago. What I am saying is that the planes issue has been a major headache because Gonzi is afraid of Gaddafi’s actions.
[Daphne – Yes, Kevin, he was afraid of Gaddafi’s actions and still he did the right thing and refused landing permission to the pilots flown here to take them back. That is leadership and moral courage. Your lot, on the other hand, would have sent them right back with the pilots who brought them here, and would also have included a couple of Maltese soldiers to keep a gun to their heads all the way to Tripoli.]
‘My lot’ follow no party.
[Daphne – Il-lot tieghek mhux ta’ Ellul? Dawk tal-Labour minn sa guf ommhom, Kevin. Sorry if you had to find out through me.]
I ask, did Graffiti exist in the early eighties?
[Daphne – No, and they don’t care either. One of them was quoted as saying that he doesn’t care about Mintoff and KMB because he is only 20 and doesn’t remember them. One despairs.]
I was there yesterday morning and it is a pity how Graffiti tried to manipulate the event. What is even more disappointing is The Times coverage which drew the readers’ attention away from the whole purpose of the protest and focused solely on the arguments sparked by the Gonzi poster.
I’m no friend of the commies…but they had every right to direct the protest towards Maltese politicians!
[Daphne – They should have staged their own protest demo then. As they said, it’s a free country. They didn’t have to gatecrash an anti-Gaddafi protest to protest against the government. As somebody remarked on timesofmalta.com’s comments-board – there were so many anti-Graffiti comments beneath that story yesterday that it shot straight to the top of the most-commented list – “kieku kont naf li l-protesta se ssir free-for-all minhabbda dawn in-nies, kont nigi b’kartellun nipprotesta kontra l-kunjata, il-kappillan u l-kontijiet tad-dawl u l-ilma.” They would probably have had a bigger turn-out with an anti-Gonzi protest than there was for the anti-Gaddafi one, this being Malta.]
Yes, Maltese politicians are to be shamed for having endorsed and supported the Gaddafi agenda ever since we engaged ourselves into a special relation with the terrorist Libyan state!
Dom Mintoff, KMB, Eddie Fenech Adami, Tonio Borg, Lawrence Gonzi, Joseph Muscat….they all have their hands stained with blood too!
Why you people walked with those brain-dead nutters is beyond me, I would have asked the police to remove them with the suggestion that they stage a SEPARATE protest against Gonzi.
[Daphne – I’m glad everyone knew better than to do that. Imagine the fuss and the headlines: Police remove anti-Gonzi protestors at the request of Bondi, Caruana Galizia u qabda Arab who should go away and protest iN tHiEr oNe cOuntri.]
It’s not the organizers’ fault that they misunderstood what the protest was about and live in a world of their own.
Also, they are the last people to talk about democracy and freedom of speech. Any talk about it is pure bullshit, because as communists they do not believe in it.
“As a friend remarked, you can’t take those Graffiti people seriously.”
And yet you waste your Sunday article on them. Heart over head?
[Daphne – It’s called setting the facts straight. I’m damned if I’m going to let that lot get away it, given that The Times gave them so much attention yesterday (the comments made interesting reading for once) and I knew that some female genital organ at Malta Today would trot out a set of lies, as indeed happened, despite being the only news organisation in Malta without a reporter there.]
You forgot that members of Graffitti like to pose with books by Camus in the most inappropriate situations.
“wearing the universal uniform of the breed: dreadlocks, a large knitted hat, a vast cotton scarf and some shapeless clothes knocked together by somebody’s great-aunt in Nepal”
so true :)
I didn’t know about the demonstration yesterday. I would have loved to be there.
I cannot stand Raphael Vassallo, Ralph Cassar, Michael Brigulio, Claire Bonello and Jaqcues Rene Zammit trying to make fun of you on Facebook. A bunch of losers.
[Daphne – Oh, I wouldn’t worry about them. They’re the equivalent of the nerds in the school playground, bitching about the girl they want to be, and if they can’t be here then can she at least give them the time of day and pretend to be their friend? Sorry, no, she can’t. She is not interested. I wouldn’t even stretch as far as calling them losers. To be a loser you’ve got to have had something to lose in the first place.]
Aren’t Graffiti all gay?
[Daphne – As if. Would they be dressed like that if they were? You’re thinking about Super One. Their dress sense is just as appalling (think Jason Micallef’s snazzy suits and Robert Francalanza’s frightening approach to hair) but at least they take a shower and have spared us the dreadlocks, which always look terrible on whiteys, especially whiteys with that tofu-eating pallor.]
Easy mistake to make – a bunch of attention seeking whingers, whom I’m sure I’ve seen in the Gay Parade, hence my confusion – apologies.
Now, let me remove my tongue from my cheek.
I am not going to comment about graffiti’s actions but rather think that someone who calls such actions childish would know better than to act childishly themselves and make numerous prejudiced remarks about their dress sense or hair styles. Stick to the matter at hand, it will look better on you.
[Daphne – Descriptions of Graffiti’s attire and hairstyles are not fatuous or irrelevant to ‘the matter at hand’ because they are an integral part of their message. The way they dress and do their hair is the international protestor uniform, a cartoon and a cliche.
http://www.google.com.mt/imgres?imgurl=http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2378/2402038364_c56acda976.jpg%3Fv%3D0&imgrefurl=http://flickr.com/photos/dgjones/2402038364/&usg=__MlVruRGhtesUL6JkCPDLpvBS3bs=&h=500&w=333&sz=113&hl=mt&start=99&zoom=1&tbnid=CESBsXoRcciDLM:&tbnh=129&tbnw=82&ei=AOVqTfO7IIbj4AaRs9DfCQ&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dprotestors%2Bin%2Bdreadlocks%26hl%3Dmt%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26sa%3DG%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-GB:official%26biw%3D1440%26bih%3D707%26gbv%3D2%26tbs%3Disch:10%2C1628&itbs=1&iact=rc&dur=537&oei=0ORqTeG3CcSCOo6ygP4K&page=4&ndsp=33&ved=1t:429,r:10,s:99&tx=44&ty=68&biw=1440&bih=707 ]
David Friggieri
It’s high time that our generation told the coterie of 70s and 80s politico-journalist cabal that THEY DON’T GODDAM OWN THIS PLACE
7 hours ago · Like ·
Ralph Cassar, James Debono, Mark Camilleri and 3 others like this.
David Friggieri they don’t own its morality, they don’t own its intellect and they don’t goddam own us via their outmoded version of reality
7 hours ago · Like · 3 people
David Friggieri ”Tgerrxu n-nies”? “The grown ups”? Ma andate a fanculo!
7 hours ago · Like · 1 person
Daniel Fiott And just think, they are living longer…
6 hours ago · Like
David Friggieri eh oui, Dan, en plus!
5 hours ago · Like
Claire Bonello @ David…best summing up of the situation so far.
5 hours ago · Like
Franco Farrugia Oh come on…. it has nothing to do with ‘generation’ of journalists!!!! I can mention a dozen young ‘journalists’ who are hypocritical, bigots, patronising, the lot! It has nothing to do with age; it has to do with mentality!
4 hours ago · Like
Franco Farrugia U ejja, Ms Bonello! Biex tiskongra trid tkun pur/a!
4 hours ago · Like
Un Identified Organise a Facebook protest and take Valetta man for God’s sake. The paramilitary will definitely support you. I know Joe and Frank myself.
about an hour ago · Like
David Friggieri Biex tiskongra ma tridx tkun pur, that’s another lie we were made to swallow. Total bullshit when you think about it.
30 minutes ago · Like
[Daphne – I take it that’s the ‘I hate the influence I think Daphne has but I wish I had it instead’ brigade whining on their Facebook wall. Pathetic. You’d never believe they’re all middle-aged people in their late 30s. They sound like a bunch of socially challenged 18-year-olds. David Friggieri appears to have decided I am an Enemy of the State. He’s been known to tell people that I must be stopped because it is dangerous for one person to have so much influence. Apparently, this one-woman-with-a-website setup is more dangerously influential than the Labour Party’s and Nationalist Party’s entire media empires, more dangerously influential even than The Sunday Times and Malta Today and The Malta Independent. F**king ridiculous, if you will excuse the language. Because I loom so large in the consciousness of these stalkers and fixated obsessives who are forever snapping at my heels and policing my every move, their sense of proportion has gone AWOL. David Friggieri himself described the reasons for the stalking obsession in one of his articles for Malta Today (what else?) last year: it’s because we have no rock stars. I look at them discussing me obsessively and sniping like jealous girls in the playground and they just look so …unbalanced. I mean really, how cracked do you have to be to develop an obsession with somebody who writes a newspaper column and this website? As for David’s references to ‘that generation’, perhaps he is trapped in the notion of perpetual youth. I am 10 years older than him and 10 years younger than Lou Bondi, which would make me either his generation or Lou’s, depending which way he wants to slice it. ]
When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, I was a permanent fixture, along with my friends, in front of the American Embassy.
Subzero temperatures or not, there we were in our Che beret, drainpipe jeans, Doc Martens and facial hair, protesting against anything from US intervention in El Salvador or Grenada or Bata’s investment in South Africa. We loved it.
Being capitalism’s well-funded students we would then take a taxi to Hernando’s Mexican restaurant and spend the rest of the day talking about how we were changing the world over nachos and beer. But the hottest topic of conversation each and everytime was whether the CIA had taken pictures of us.
The political titillation of being in the CIA files was pure ecstasy. How embarassing it all sounds today. The only consolation is that I was just 21 then.
I am rather tolerant of Graffitti’s misjudgement. It comes from overzealousness, young age and a misguided passion for change. After all, I was Graffitti in Toronto three decades ago and on balance it did me a lot of good. What is much, much worse is for grown men and women with professional careers, families and money who, as Libya burns and 2000 bodies are already stacked up, remain driven by the pettiest local concerns.
The provincialism of these men and women knows no bounds, defeats any university education and climbs over any mountain of books read. And most of all, it is fully portable.
Did you see what “C Zammit” wrote about you?
“I see an ironic and sad resemblance between what happened last Saturday in Valletta and the events in Libya –Government bullies doing their utmost to shush a handful of peaceful anti-government demonstrators. These PN thugs, who – shockingly enough – also happen to call themselves liberals (yes, you read that right), probably are not aware of the universal right to free expression and assembly.
So, what’s the difference between the Bondi-DCG twosome and Gaddafi’s mercenaries? The latter use automatic weapons. The former, well, other kind of weapons.”
[Daphne – Yesterday I was a woolly sheep. Now I am a government thug and like a Gaddafi mercenary. I have attracted people with a stalker fixation all my life – I don’t know what it is about my behaviour that triggers off this level of obsession, which is now at last visible to others through the internet so that they no longer think I am exaggerating or imagining it. There was one person in that mix (and don’t assume it was a man) who wrote somewhere on the internet “I have vivid memories of her aged 19 sitting on her husband’s motorbike at Fortizza and I wasn’t impressed.” The vivid memories have lasted almost three decades but s/he wasn’t impressed. And almost three decades later, s/he went into an internet chat room to talk about it. It’s really extraordinary how these obsessed individuals always find some way of turning me into the story. Libya in crisis? Let’s talk about Daphne. Power cut all over the island? Let’s talk about Daphne. They’re sick and they don’t know it. They belong to the class of person who shoot their love-hate objects when their illness gets out of control. If there were only one of them I would find it menacing, but because there’s a whole gang of them, a sort of ‘Let’s love-to-obsess-about-Daphne’ club, instead I just find it desperately sad.]