It’s just that life is short, and time is running out.

My dear Baxxter,

Alas, I am not a woman, I am not single and I am not 18-35. I should think that firmly puts me outside of your sphere of conversational interests.

Wormfood, I think you will find that islamophobia is not an invented word, but can actually be found in the dictionary.

“Dislike of or prejudice against Islam or Muslims, especially as a political force.”

Taken from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/Islamophobia

I will take this definition any day over one from someone who calls himself ‘wormfood’.

I have no problem with debating Islam. All religions should be challenged, criticised, ridiculed, debated etc.

What one should not do is say things like “since some Muslims blow things up, then all Muslims blow things up”. I trust you get that.

If you’re a woman, preferably single and preferably 18-35, then yes. Otherwise, there’s no point.

The women wore variations of the veil, and I won’t be smart here and mention all the various types just to prove that I am not some ignoramus.

[Daphne – You were talking about the men who went to the club while their women were at home, so veils don’t come into it. And a veil in a club at 2am, anyway? I don’t think so.]

The men, not all, wore attire you would normally see Wahhabis wearing.

[Daphne – At a club? Be serious, please.]

As for the young men in the photo, I think you are being a bit naive here for the sole purpose of making your point.

In this photo, using context — an argument you always use — I can deduce that these men are Maltese and if you would like to go one step further, a mixture of agnostic, atheist and nominal Catholics.

[Daphne – No, it is impossible to deduce they are Maltese without the context of the accompanying news story and without knowing that the language on the placard is Maltese. Those young men look 100% Middle Eastern. Anybody who is not Maltese would immediately draw that conclusion, as would many Maltese who couldn’t read the writing because they don’t have their spectacles on. My point to you here is that you cannot assume that somebody is a Muslim just because they look Middle Eastern or North African.]

Context is king. Would you also argue that if a group of men, all stereotypically Chinese in appearance, speaking Chinese, with behaviour and mannerisms your experience tells you are that of a Chinese person, were to turn up at a disco you would assume they were from just about anywhere on the planet?

Would you ask yourself: ‘ooh I say, could these lovely gentlemen be Nigerian Muslims’?

[Daphne – We are talking about religion, not ethnicity or citizenship here. It reveals a great deal about your mindset that you think of ‘Muslim’ as an ethnicity rather than a religion. My point to you is that you should not assume that anyone who looks Middle Eastern or North African is a Muslim or even Middle Eastern or North African. Equally, you should never assume that your Chinese people here are NOT Muslim, because China has one of the world’s oldest-established Muslim populations outside Saudi Arabia. But then a Chinese Muslim probably foxes your prejudices because they live like all other Chinese people and are indistinguishable from them except for the fact that the men go to the mosque and they don’t eat pork.]

The people I am talking about are from predominantly Muslim countries. By the way, having worked and lived with Christian Middle Easterners and North Africans, I know how to make the distinction between the behaviour of the two groups, with exceptions, given. But then, only people desperate to argue their point will use the exceptions as their focal point, wouldn’t they? Those who know their argument is sound use the norm as their guide.

[Daphne – You are making the usual, fatal error commonly made by Maltese people (who should know better): that there are no class divisions or socio-educational distinctions in North Africa and the Middle East. And so you conflate the behaviour and attitudes of North African and Middle Eastern ‘hamalli’ with those of Muslims in general. Behavioural differences are not attributable to religion. They are attributable, as everywhere else in the world, to social class, education and family background. Use the signifiers you would use for assessing somebody European – they are no different. But if you start off from the point that ‘this is an alien culture’, you will miss those signifiers. I don’t, just as I don’t miss them among Europeans. You say you felt alienated living in a Brussels neighbourhood where mainly ‘Muslims’ lived. It wasn’t the fact that they were Muslims that alienated you, but the fact that they were from a certain kind of background, and instead of reading the signifiers as differences of social class, you read them as cultural differences due to religion. North African and Middle Eastern people from educated backgrounds and the top rungs of the social ladder do not congregate in ‘Muslim’ neighbourhoods. That behaviour is typical of working-class immigrants, which is why the Maltese do it in Australia. You would feel equally alienated, I suspect, living on a housing estate in Bormla.]

I would be interested in reading comments from people who, like me, have worked with both Indians and Pakistanis. The Indians I have worked with were predominantly Sikh and Buddhist whilst the Pakistanis were all Muslim. The difference was truly astonishing.

I found the Indians respectful and cooperative and the Pakistanis arrogant, and uncooperative. The ideology a person grows up with intimately shapes their character, how they see the world and how they interact with it.

[Daphne – This is a very blinkered statement. I grew up Roman Catholic. It had absolutely no influence on my character. Other things did. I am grateful for the experience of growing up in a religious country, however, because it gave me a great deal of insight into how the religious mindset works to control and shape society, which is useful when understanding Islamic societies. Maltese people are arrogant and uncooperative, ill-mannered and extremely passive aggressive. I never attribute this to their having been raised Roman Catholic, but to cultural attitudes which have nothing to do with religion. The main problem is ignorance, lack of manners and a catastrophic absence of self-awareness. Given your attitude, I’m surprised you haven’t told us that ‘Indians rape girls and leave them for dead’ and that ‘they kill girls for refusing to marry old men’.]

Mr Baxxter,

My most sincere apologies, I did misread your contribution. I will not spar with you on whether it’s Abbot Gilibert or Gilibert Abate – surnames were not at all that common unless with a “de” at that time to denote father, place or extraction. I was going by Galea, Powicke, Fryde, Cheyney, Cappelli, and Poole – but I shall not argue as I do not know further and have never researched the chronicler. I shall rely on your better resources.

I used a word that is in common usage when I mentioned Frederick II’s “evangelisation efforts”. I might as well have said “proselytising” or “Christianisation efforts”. All efforts to import or impose religion are always political. From the British missionaries in India to the Islamists in Iraq and Syria. Frederick II’s purge was the same as Ferdinand and Isabel in Spain in 1492 – where states failed to do that they had to deal with the strife that tore France and Germany asunder.

1960-1970 was a tragedy for the Roman church – but enough said.

Stupor Mundi had a munificence and brilliance in his age that attracted scholars from the whole of Europe. His court was akin to the renascimental patronage of the Medicis in the humanist renaissance. Scholars would have communicated in Latin – they were nearly always clerics anyway and always studied in Latin, coming out of Paris, Rome and so forth. So the court language was undoubtedly now Latin (as opposed to old Picardian French in the previous Norman period). The great unwashed will have migrated from the King’s displeasure of Siculo-Arabic to a more acceptable siculo-Italian. From Dante, later, we know that the mainland Italian was already flourishing and structured.

Mr Baxxter, I am a committed monarchist, anglophile, and revere the same institutions as you do – but never forget, in the “Pari Passu” question, it was the pro-British parties who advocated the use of English and Maltese in tandem – the pro-Italian Mizzians were completely against the introduction of Maltese in schools and regarded it as a retrograde step. Then along came Aquilina who made sure that even non-Semitic latinised words were replaced by Arab words in the curriculum, and our children in schools were taught that in “proper Maltese”, “pilota” was “bdot”, an “ajruport” was a “mitjar”, a “siggu” was a “maghqad”, a “pjazza” was a “misrah” and all that blistering nonsense.

If we are honest to ourselves, we will accept that 1974 was a national tragedy, the great point in history when a country moves sideways rather than remaining staid and solid: we became a republic, when all it meant was a transition to oblivion. We already had the Malta Pound in 1972, and already had all the independence we needed to be “rajna f’idejna” (and do I hate that phrase – how the hell can you hold your arms in your hands?!). From a proud, smart country, we became a shabby, socialist backwater, depending on alms for the poor. It is the tragedy of essentially no education in a little island in the middle of nowhere.

My dear Sir, we have a great deal in common and I could kill three bottle of Laphroaig with you, after lunch or dinner at the Club. If you will grant me the distinct honour, I would be delighted if you were to ask Mrs Caruana Galizia for my details or I ask for yours. Your secret dies with me (the true identity of the Scarlet Pimpernel, one means).

Thank you for taking the time to answer.

I understand what you are saying with regard to Malta and I too have seen that sullen look on many people’s faces. Having said that, I have seen that look on many a face in the UK, a country I feel is inhabited by severely depressing people. However, the look I am referring to is different. I do not know how to explain it to you.

I do not want to be too specific but to give you some context I am referring specifically to Switzerland and Belgium.

The ethnicity of the people did not bother me and foreign languages fascinate rather than scare me. I am quite a reflective person so I have tried to analyse my feelings on this. I, and others like me who lived in the same areas, felt looked down on, stared at, and in the case of the women, disrespected and unsafe.

Anyone who has lived in a place they are not welcome will know that look, the ‘get out of my neighbourhood look’. I am not saying this tendency is confined to Muslims; it can be based on anything tribal, race included.

I also found it rather unfair that at discos (I promise I am not that old but I still insist on calling them that) you would see no Muslims until 3am when they knew the girls would be as loose as a goose and then they would just start making a nuisance of themselves and generally harassing the ladies. No doubt their women are locked up at home being ‘good girls’ whilst the boys play with the infidel slappers.

[Daphne – How did you know they are Muslim? Did they wear the equivalent of a yellow star? What does this look like to you if you couldn’t read that sign – some kind of demo by young Muslim men somewhere in the Middle East, right? Because that’s what I thought it was before I looked closely enough: http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20150113/opinion/Joseph-Muscat-s-albatross.551670 ]

For an official version of Catholicism’s attitude to wives I would like to recommend reading St Paul’s letter to the Colossians Chapter 3 Verse19.

Conservative, Frederick II never evangelised anyone. It’s just that he had a rebellion to deal with (the Ibn-Hammuds ruled the Sicilian interior like an independent emirate – they even minted their own coins) which had been going on since Norman times. And he had to deal with a hostile Papacy and a host of rebellious barons.

So it wasn’t about religion at all (just like the Crusades, but I’m flogging a dead horse here) but political power. That is to say, religious identity was nothing more than political affiliation. This whole “faith” mumbojumbo came in very late. Round about the 1960s. Don’t get me started.

I would also be careful about using the word “imposed”. The transition from a trilingual curia (Arabic-Greek-Latin) to just a Latin one seems to have been a natural one (demographics, immigration from the north of Italy and southern France.

Let’s just say that Sicily in 1200 in roughly the same state, linguistically, as Malta in the 1900s: a literate minority speaking and writing the language of international communication (English) and the great unwashed speaking a degenerate, pidgin, limited and inbred language (Maltese).

If Maltese hadn’t been declared, at the stroke of a pen, a national and official language, it would have died out just like Siculo-Arabic.

Alas, and so the darkness spread. Fast forward to 2015 and we have Xarabank.

Our children will curse us, said the Poet. They would, if they had any brains.

Ian, most of Europe is Islamophobic.

64% of Germans think Islam isn’t compatible with their nation, Merkel just issued a fatwa, decreeing islam integral to Germany.

[Daphne – Jozef, it is a serious mistake to quote Germans on the subject of whether another religion or ethnicity is compatible with their NATION. Even the Germans themselves understand that.]

Shall we say Islam is integral to Germany’s industries?

And then we’re all surprised at the rise of the far right.

Dresden’s marches have become a weekly affair, thousands suddenly find themselves described as neo Nazis.