Well, that was quite a weekend

This is my column in The Malta Independent today.

You can have too little news, and you can have a surfeit. My four-day break from all internet use while I concentrated on other matters coincided with the Wedding of the Century (so far – we’re only 10 years in), the beatification of history’s most popular pope, a Nato raid on a Gaddafi family compound which left one of Muammar Gaddafi’s sons and (purportedly) three of his grandchildren dead, and the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan.

And back home on the ranch, there was the Battle of the Divorce Billboards as both the Yes and No promoters tried to outdo each other in terms of idiocy, while Joseph Muscat found himself fire-fighting in a situation where he woke up to find himself with Norman Lowell’s seal of approval.

Oh yes, and he also used the space which the Nationalist Party so stupidly left wide open to him on May Day (while it worshipped at John Paul II’s feet) to talk about sek-yew-ler ish-yews like divorce and working women. Muscat is going to ‘reignite the flame of feminism’ and get Maltese women back to work, he said. He’d better start his campaign on the home front, then, where the missus is doing exactly what 70 per cent of her fellow Maltese married women are doing, and not working because she has children, a home and a husband – the general thinking being that these and paid work are somehow mutually exclusive.

The news about Osama Bin Laden is exciting, but when I read what passes for news on the home front I just want to self-impose another four-day ban on the internet because it’s just so demoralising.

The comments by Maltese pundits and armchair warriors on internet sites have even managed to suck the joy out of the positive news that Osama is dead. The conspiracy theories by people who can barely construct a simple sentence yet who believe they can outsmart the CIA had begun already by Monday morning. At least this time they’re not asking where the oil is, though there was at least one person who queried the existence of weapons of mass destruction, no doubt missing the furore over Saddam Hussein and Iraq and all the fun he had back then.

Why are so many Maltese just so sour and sceptical? Every gift-horse that comes along doesn’t just have its teeth and gums scrutinised; it gets a rectal examination, too.

These conspiracy theorists make much of the fact that a photograph of the dead Osama Bin Laden, shown on Pakistani television, is false. Well, of course it’s false. The only people in a position to take a photograph of the corpse were the US Navy Seals who dealt with it, and their military and political bosses have been quite clear in saying that they have not released any such photograph.

Yet the conspiracy theorists have extrapolated from the fakery of the photograph to the ‘fact’ that the Americans faked it, to the other ‘fact’ that this means the Americans faked his death.

It’s exhausting just trying to figure out how their minds work. The simplest explanation will never do for them, despite Occam’s famous razor. They must always prefer the most complicated one, because it apparently gives them a reason for living.

Bin Laden was buried immediately to conform to Islamic rules of summary burial and also to avoid accusations that the corpse was kept as a trophy. Islam proscribes burial at sea, or so we are told. I have conflicting information on this, just as there is conflicting information on whether Roman Catholicism proscribes the incineration of bodies.

But commonsense – a rare attribute among those sorts of people – should have told the conspiracy theorists why this was done, even before the explanation was given. Once you bury a body, you have a shrine. You have pilgrimages and worship and a focal point for sympathisers and all that goes with this. Just look at Elvis. And despite the shrine, the conspiracy theorists think he is still alive and probably shacked up with Diana, Princess of Wales.

So why hasn’t the United States released the photograph of Bin Laden’s corpse? Again, commonsense should tell the conspiracy theorists – who think that it’s because it doesn’t exist – why not. He was shot in the head and part of his skull was blown off. The photograph has been described, for obvious reasons, as gruesome.

White House spokesmen have said that the reluctance to release it to the media stems from fears that it would inflame emotions. The proof that western conspiracy theorists require would become a rallying banner in the more repressive parts of the Islamic world. And that’s one thing we just don’t need right now. Think Danish cartoons and multiply by ten thousand.

The White House went on record yesterday evening saying that the photographs will not be released at all. One adviser put the situation into context by asking how American people would react if a US general were to be killed by terrorists and a ghastly photograph of his corpse plastered over the media like some kind of trophy.

“Osama Bin Laden is not a war trophy,” he said, pointing out that the real risks involved in releasing the photograph far outstripped any perceived benefits.

For the second time in a year that isn’t even halfway through (you might need reminding already that the first was Libya), God bless America. You have to admire these amazing people in the planning and execution of an operation that is straight out of a Hollywood film – which is probably why the conspiracy theorists are getting so excited about it, because in Hollywood films, the most complicated explanation prevails.

Do you know what I’m thinking right now? That it’s jolly good luck there was no Pakistani equivalent of Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici to sabotage the operation like he did when the Americans tried the same thing on Muammar Gaddafi in Tripoli in 1986. Had he let them do their job then, the world – and more particularly, Libya – wouldn’t have had to cope with the fall-out for another 25 years.