A parish priest and his email: more important than a man’s death after a racist attack

This is part of my column in The Malta Independent, yesterday.

Yesterday morning I heard a radio news broadcast in which the number-one headline item was the parish priest of St Julian’s having had his email account hacked, with begging messages sent out in his name to his contacts list.

The number-two headline item was the death of a man who, a few days ago, was found unconscious and with severe skull injuries in a Paceville street, after having been assaulted.

I’m trying to work out the news editor’s priorities here.

“Maltese parish priest has email hacked/Sudanese man dies after Paceville assault – hmmmm, a really tough choice for the top news item. Let’s run with the parish priest.”

It was bound to happen, though, wasn’t it? When a jury a couple of weeks ago found a nightclub bouncer not guilty of killing a Somalian who died in practically identical circumstances – head injuries after being pushed to the ground – a tacit message went out.

The strongest message, actually, came through during the trial proceedings, with all that dismissive talk of “the black one”, and testimony by shady witnesses like nightclub dancers and a bar owner who had killed another man in a Paceville shoot-out and got away with it. To say nothing, of course, of the creepy defence lawyer, who as irony would have it is now a candidate for the super-liberal, terribly non-racist Labour Party.

Today’s black Africans in Malta are like yesterday’s women murder victims. “She was a whore. She deserved it. She drove her husband wild with anger by taunting him and being unfaithful, so he stabbed her 50 times and poured acid over her. It was her fault he killed her. If she were still alive, we would jail her, not him.”

Only just a few years ago, a man got away with the lightest possible sentence after stabbing his wife 50 times as she lay in bed with their toddler son beside her, then poured lavatory-cleaning acid over her prone and bleeding form as she lay in the balcony, where she had crawled in a desperate and fruitless bid to get help.

The defence lawyers argued that he had been provoked beyond human endurance by her flirtations. Why, he had even found a condom missing from his pack – presumably, he counted them on a daily basis – and assumed that she had taken it to use with another man (presumably because neither she nor the hypothetical other man could buy their own). The whole thing was awful, so contemptuous of women in general and the murder victim in particular, when she lay dead and couldn’t fight back.

Things have changed somewhat in just a few years. I’d like to see a defence lawyer trying to get away with those sorts of arguments today. But with black Africans, it’s still the same, and with no sign of improvement. This was the gist of the arguments used in the nightclub bouncer’s trial by jury:

“He was a black man trying to pick up girls in my bar, and he’d had a few drinks. We can’t have that, so we got hold of him and flung him out into the street. But you can’t prove that this is when he got that fatal knock on the head and died. Either way, it was his fault because you can’t be black, drunk and trying to chat up girls in a bar. That’s just asking for it. If he were still alive, we would jail him.”

BUT BACK TO THE TOP NEWS OF THAT PARISH PRIEST AND HIS EMAIL ACCOUNT

The real news angle to that St Julian’s parish priest story is that so many people believed the fake email messages were genuine. Forty of them rang him to offer help, ‘businessmen’ rushed to give him money and an order of nuns got into gear with their fund-raising.

Isn’t this incredible?

I’d like a peek at the alternative world in which grown men who are mugged in Madrid, and who have their cards and wallet stolen, go to a public library and email their entire contacts list for money to help pay the hotel bill, instead of ringing the bank to stop the cards and make arrangements for a direct transfer of funds, even assuming that there would be any need to do so given that hotels take an imprint of your card as soon as you check in.

If the situation is so perplexing that you need help from home, in the real world you ring a friend or relative, and if you’re a priest you ring your priest-boss.

You certainly don’t email somebody you met at a prayer meeting five years ago, and only a real nut-job would send a round-robin to everyone.

I’ve just got a text message from a British number, telling me that I’ve won a quarter of a million pounds in the latest Blackberry promotion, and that I should call the Cash Office in England to collect my prize. Entirely free! But just as I pressed 1021 for a cheaper overseas call and made plans for a series of round-the-world trips, I remembered just in time that I do not own a Blackberry.

Thank heavens I am more cunning than they are.