Please read this post on Joseph Calleja’s blog: ‘Defending the indefensible’
Published:
April 8, 2014 at 9:14pm
Maybe all the amoral pragmatists and the lanzit-ridden hodorwho have enraged and bewildered so many others will listen to Malta’s singer-hero where they wilfully deride the disapproving view of ‘dik DCG’.
It’s such a relief to see somebody else get straight to the point about this, and an even bigger relief that it’s Calleja.
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http://josephcalleja.com/2014/04/08/defending-the-indefensible/
Finally some sensible talk. I am tired of telling colleagues to stop defending this guy.
So many think he is the victim and they do not understand that the real victim has crossed over to the other side.
This is an egoistic person who planned it all and hoped to escape justice by fleeing the country.
He decided to probably roll down some hill in the area to injure himself and make it seem as he is trying to make it seem a miracle he is alive.
I really hope justice will prevail and since he said he wants a slow death may the guilt he has to live with be enough for him not to lift his eyes off the ground for the rest of his sorry life.
“I really hope justice will prevail and since he said he wants a slow death may the guilt he has to live with be enough for him not to lift his eyes off the ground for the rest of his sorry life.”
My thoughts exactly. That is if this beast can even feel guilty.
“As yet, the story about the bird killings had literally hundreds of comments and the one about the slaughtered children, which included pictures of the dead children, had perhaps 8 comments.”
This is probably because most of the Maltese have a “Dawk Għarab u jaqq” mentality. Probably because of close-mindedness and too much history lessons about the Great Siege at school.
Hopefully one day he’ll talk about the corruption under Labour, at least, in the cultural scene. As Malta’s cultural ambassador he cannot be complacent.
At last.
So many other actors, playwrights and authors with children of their own.
The buck stops with them.
What is very worrying is not only the fact that so many people are defending this douche bag, but WHO is defending him. Mainly women, between their 40s and 50s, who should know better.
[Daphne – They SHOULD know better, yes, but they don’t. Maltese women in their 40s and 50s are the absolute worst. I live among them: that’s the generation raised by their mothers to claw out the eyes of any other women who might be getting any sort of male attention, even if they’re dead and aged 15, besides being bored out of their wits by doing nothing by moving round the same hamsters’ cage with the same hamster friends they’ve had since the age of five, day after day. They don’t even know it themselves, because they are so alienated from any insight into their psychology and motivation, but they’re actually jealous of poor, dead Lisa Zahra because she’s getting attention. So they claw out the eyes of the (dead) girl and champion the man, thinking it will get some male attention onto them, even if it’s only the attention of a clifftop murderer who’s got most of his screws loose and looks like a five-kilo sack of potatoes. They also believe (they don’t work, or just play at it, so their brains have atrophied) that if they stick up for the man, other men will like them. Il-vera msieken. They haven’t a clue.]
If you read some of the comments they write, you can only feel ‘pity’ for their ignorance. And what’s more disturbing is the fact that they are all united under the same mantra ‘ghax ghandhom il-flus, iridu jkissruh’…Coz if you’re poor then you’re entitled to avenge your daughter’s death, but if you’re rich, then it’s only vengeance from their end towards this idiotic beast.
Goes to show their blickin’ stupid mentality. They shouldn’t be allowed outdoors, let alone defending this scum.
How depressing, your description applies to younger Maltese women too. I’m off to have a bit of a cry.
[Daphne – So sad for you that it’s not any better in your generation, but then again, they were probably raised by the ones I have to deal with as my contemporaries. They make their daughters’ lives hell, turning them into what they think is husband-bait. They even manage to transmit their bulimia and anorexia to the next generation, because it’s not self-starvation, it’s ‘keeping thin’.]
Avenge? Seeking justice is not vengeance.
Calleja’s remarks are very welcome indeed.
He is just confirming what has been obvious for decades.
This so-called country, also because of its ridiculously small size, is teeming with people who are green and completely blinded with envy.
I enjoyed reading Calleja’s post – it was indeed a relief to read something sensible, by somebody other than yourself, about the Erin Tanti crime.
Thank goodness, there are still some normal people left.
It was about time that prominent people like yourself and Mr Calleja speak out and clearly about the real ills affecting our society so negatively and remind people of the real priorities.
I have two daughters: 5 and 4.
This heart-wrenching tragedy has left me feeling very vulnerable.
I have come to learn and realise as a parent, that I not only have to teach my daughters about the ugly and dark dangers of internet abuse, but also from soliciting strangers, friends who lead them astray and media and peer pressure.
I now find that I have to teach them not to trust or lean on their teachers – this disgustingly manipulative buffoon could have been their teacher and they would have been at the mercy of his dark arts and fantasies.
What solace, what comfort, what succour can there be for a father who lost his spouse, and who saw that little toddler flower into an uncertain and vulnerable beautiful young lady, only to be snuffed out by a truly cruel master of the dark arts, who knew how to find his way to the heart and soul of his trusting pupils and how to wrench their life out of their body?
What sleaze, what sewage, must there be in the man’s heart?
My thoughts exactly Conservative. Which reminds me, we have not heard anything from the poor victim’s school, or indeed the teachers’ union. Yes, St. Michael’s have a lot of questions to answer to.
‘I now find that I have to teach them not to trust or lean on their teachers’
As a teacher who knows the ins and outs of this profession let me straighten out some misconceptions please.
To start off with, in order to be employed as a teacher, a person has to have either a permanent or a temporary warrant. No one is allowed unsupervised inside a classroom unless they are in possession of this warrant.
If St Michael’s Foundation employed Erin Tanti without first ensuring that he had a warrant, they were breaking the law. And if it was his first year teaching someone should have been mentoring him.
As a matter of fact, when they had a similar case with Mark Vella Gera, it transpired that he had not provided them with the special permit issued by the Curia that is needed by all teachers of Religion.
He kept putting them off and the permit never appeared. And no one bothered to call the Curia to double check this man’s credentials. And they still allowed him to take up teaching duties.
To the rest of us in this profession this is stupidity on an unimaginable scale.
Why this school persists in flouting the law and closing an eye when it comes to employing young men with shady pasts is beyond me. Frankly I think there must be someone on the employment board in there who has a soft spot for glib, ‘cool’ men.
That Erin Tanti made it into a classroom is a pure fluke. Like a butcher’s boy who impersonates a surgeon at the hospital and kills a patient.
In the normal way of things, when a new teacher joins a school they are observed and mentored by the Head or Assistant Head, or a specially trained teacher mentor for a year.
Reports or complaints by the children are taken with deadly seriousness and if found to be true the teacher is relieved of his or her duties there and then and never seen again. This, of course, is what happens in proper, well-run schools.
Someone mentioned the case of a PE teacher who was dismissed because he gave an insolent boy a well-deserved thrashing. Our sympathies were with the teacher because we have all been at the mercy of a child who knows our hands are tied.
However, it should show the rest how a serious and well-run school behaves in such a situation. The bottom line is that we do not take risks around children.
Teaching your child not to trust their teachers is counter-productive. If a child does not like his teachers he will not learn from them. In fact, as teachers, we strive to develop a good rapport with each student because otherwise the child will resist the subject.
Do yourselves a favour, don’t get over-excited in the heat of debate, and don’t use Erin Tanti as an excuse to revile all teachers.
And Masquerade too.
The entire system us screwed up. We have heard endless talk about warrants, but nothing at all about the warrant system.
If Tanti had been arsed to apply for a teaching warrant – approved in principle by the teaching council – how would that have protected his victim?
There are no controls to prevent people like Tanti becoming teachers. He taught at Masquerade too. Has anyone asked THAT institution for its comments?
@Pat Zahra
What complaints could have been filed against Tanti? Even though she had died in Tanti’s presence after he’d used her for months, Zahra’s “friends”, classmates and acquaintances flocked to his defence.
Primarily how and why was he hired when he had no warrant to teach. I believe that teachers’ unions and the poor girl’s family should and must demand an independent investigation followed by concrete actions.
Is it too hard to expect the management of this school to resign? Like hell would l put my child in this place.
Surely the parents of children attending this school at the moment are concerned. Apart from the lack of diligence in taking on Tanti, the comments which have been made by some of his pupils reveal an education which has seriously gone wrong. I refuse to accept the sweeping statements that “this is a new generation” and “teenagers nowadays are different”. We were all teenagers, and most of us knew almost instinctively what was morally wrong and unexcusable at all costs. Why would this have changed now, a mere 20 years or so on?
The (many) children who came out in favour of Erin seem to lack a fundamental part of a decent education, one which cannot be measured in grades and career opportunities. Who cares about grades, when you’re churning out children without a backbone?
Pat Zahra –
This is not used as an excuse to revile all teachers, but some schools really need to take a look at whom they employ, and what goes on on their premises.
One summer, my children attended summer drama school, which was organised and run by an independent school’s (though not St Michael’s) regular after-hours drama school.
One day, the children were asked to wear old clothes (or, I believe, swimwear) the following day. Mine opted for the former. It turned out that their male drama teacher took loads of different fruit to school on the appointed day. He then played various types of music, and asked the children – some aged 11, others a bit older, yet still children – to smear the fruit all over themselves, according to the rhythm, and depending on what inspiration they get from/feel with the music.
Needless to say, my children felt extremely uncomfortable it, without realising the kinky implications, and have not returned to that summer school since. I, on the other hand, had no idea what was going to happen, or would have found some excuse for them not to go that day.
Did I lodge a complaint? No, because I have done so on other occasions, and ultimately it backfires on the children. And also because there have been other occasions were my point of view has been thought of as the weird one in such an ‘open-minded’ country.
The teacher’s idea might have worked with a class of kinky adults. But with children? And (presumably) with his superior’s blessing?
This is the Fat Controller’s take on this case (from his Facebook page):
Joseph Grima
7 April · Edited
KURZITA MORBUZA. XEJN HLIEF KURZITA
Ma naqbel assolutament xejn li l gazzzetti jgibu dawk id dettalji kollha ta kif gara l kaz tas suwicidju u x’intqal bejn it tnejn. Dawn id dettaji qed jigu rrapurtati biex ibieghu il gazzetti, mhux biex izommu lill pubbliku nfurmat. Qieghdin hemm biex jaqghtghu il kurzita morbuza ta sindikajri fost is socjeta taghna.
Fl istess hin is suwicidju jigbed ohrajn warajh fost nies vulnerabbli, ta karattru dghajjef li jkun ghaddejjin minn diffikultaijiet simili u li jidentifikaw irwiehhom ma min ikun ikollu “l kuragg” li jikkommetti suwicidju.
Dawn huma zbalji kbar kontra l-l-parti debboli tas socjeta u l gurnalisti ghandhom responsabbilta kbira li jiddeciedu huma, fl interess pubbliku, x’dettalji ghandhom jghamlu pubblici u x’dettalji ikollhom l obbligu li jhallu barra
Joe Grima
I think the papers should refrain from commenting on obese public officials. It leads to overeating among vulnerable youths.
Not divulging these details only benefits the accused. Divulging them is a public service because they just might open the eyes of some of those misguided parents who, incredibly, were quick to defend the perpetrator. (I can’t even get myself to write his name.)
And Guz, it is not a suicide but a horrific homicide.
It’s interesting that you should flag this post. At one point Calleja says that anyone suggesting that there is a “class aspect” to this crime is going insane.
[Daphne – Read it again, Reuben. His reference is to those very many people who are suggesting that Erin Tanti is being persecuted/prosecuted because he is poor and his ‘opponents’ are rich. It is not a reference to what I know from long experience and observation to be true: that Erin Tanti targeted Miss Zahra because of lanzit towards what he thought she stood for, and because of her father.]
Erin Tanti is not representative of any demographic. His actions are his sole responsibility and in no way characteristic of any particular group’s “mentality” – save when we’re discussing psychological profiling, perhaps. What if it were the other way round, i.e. Tanti’s family were better off than Zahra’s family? Would it in any way mitigate the crime?
[Daphne – Nobody ever said that Erin Tanti is representative of a particular demographic, but the reason he sees people like Tony Zahra and his daughter as ‘the other’ is BECAUSE he comes from a particular demographic. Somebody like me would never think of Tony Zahra in terms of rich or powerful. He would just be somebody we happen to know, a person. And we would certainly not be excited at the thought of violating his home behind his back, or even get a thrill out of being in his home in any context. This is all about a boy who thinks of himself as being from the wrong side of the tracks targeting the symbol of what he would have liked to be but who he hates because he wasn’t. Men destroy women/girls who stand for what they despise in precisely these sorts of ways. Dom Mintoff did the same thing, remember, except that he destroyed the symbol of the British Empire and the aristocracy by marrying her and proceeding to treat her so badly, leaving her even without the means to buy food, that at one point she ran away to England.]
Forget bleeding Mintoff for a minute.
[Daphne – Why? He’s the perfect example of the mentality I’m trying to describe to you, a mentality you clearly don’t understand or think even exists because you have never experienced it yourself or think it possible. Yes, there exist men whose way of ‘conquering the enemy’ is to seduce and ill-treat their women. Why do you find it so strange: it has always been one of the main tactics in ugly wars, right up until the present. Outside a war situation, you get one to become your ‘love slave’ and then proceed to demean her in every way possible.]
The point is that the difference in the social status of the “players” in this tragedy is neither here nor there.
[Daphne – Not in terms of the criminal proceedings, no, but most certainly in terms of his motivation in choosing this particular girl and behaving as he did towards her.]
I don’t think anybody in his right mind (besides a burglar) would get a thrill in being in someone else’s house when the owner isn’t in … or something like that.
[Daphne – Oh you have led a life of innocence, haven’t you. Not only do certain kinds of people get a thrill out of being in the houses owned by specific people (especially when the owner isn’t there and they are there as guests of the offspring), but some of them then proceed to do as much spiteful damage as they can. I was at one party, when I was 16, when a few boys and girls who we had always thought of as being all right (16-year-olds can be very inclusive) trashed the entire place and were clearly enjoying pouring drinks on the carpets, burning holes in the sofas, and smashing the glass of cabinets ‘by mistake’. I certainly had a moment of epiphany then: I remember thinking, ‘My God, they’re doing it because they’re jealous, and because they hate their hosts for what they’ve got while pretending to be their friends. And they’re most definitely not one of us.’ I suddenly saw those individuals as the rank outsiders they were, and it was their envy and simmering hatred that marked them out, when suddenly placed outside the usual context of a bar or the beach, and inside a house owned by The Others instead.]
This is exploitation of a vulnerable adolescent at the hands of a manipulative person. Don’t read anything else into it because there’s nothing else to read.
To borrow a phrase from Palahniuk (he of “fight club” fame): “fixation isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind”.
[Daphne – That too, of course. This is not an ‘either or’ situation.]
“Yes, there exist men whose way of ‘conquering the enemy’ is to seduce and ill-treat their women. Why do you find it so strange: it has always been one of the main tactics in ugly wars, right up until the present.”
That reminds me of that scene in Braveheart when the King of England used to grant his noblemen “Prima Nocte” – the right of the lord to have sex with a subordinate woman on her wedding night. This was done out of spite to the Scottish. It has been around since at least medieval times.
I think it is straining the evidence rather too far to say that Erin Tanti was motivated by class envy. He was, after all, firmly established among the new intelli-cool class. Hardly bottom of the heap.
[Daphne – As we used to say 30 years ago: you wish.]
Perhaps. I just think he’d had to have a foothold among that class if he was dating one of their number.
[Daphne – Definitely not. He got his claws into her because he was her much older teacher and impressed her with his ‘glamour’. Three years on, and he wouldn’t have stood a chance.]
Anyone who’s really socially disadvantaged (me in my youth, for one) knows that rich, posh girls are out of our league. But then maybe times have changed.
[Daphne – They’re not out of your league. But they are out of his: for reasons other than his social background, viz. he’s ugly, stupid and very irritating. And seriously unpleasant. Plus he has no prospects and never did, which is a major factor. You, on the other hand…]
Baxxter’s fan-club spans the generations, literally.
Erin Tanti is not a boy, and hasn’t been one for five years.
So let me get this right…the police will be investigating a company owned by the Chief of Staff of the Minister responsible for the Police. Sounds like the plot of an episode from the TV series “Yes, Minister”.
This was a comment beneath the story on the prime minister’s ‘temporary blindness’, on Times of Malta.