Malta Council for Science and Technology chairman hates Turks, but his friend Joseph is selling them Maltese passports

Will somebody ring the chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology to find out what he thinks about TVM’s big story that a Turkish businessman called Murat Karaduman and his entire family are buying Maltese passports for cash from the government he supports and his friend Joseph?

Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando hates Turks (it fits with his Far Right consciousness). He becomes hysterical at the merest suggestion that Turkey might join the European Union.

He almost had a stroke when the (Nationalist) government supported Turkey’s bid for EU membership and he threw a hissy fit in parliament.

He made public statements about Turkey not being European that were soaked in irrational prejudice and rage – has the man actually ever been there and does he know anything about Turkish history? – that led to his views being dismissed, publicly, by Turkey’s chief negotiator as “childish and foolish”.

When Prime Minister Gonzi and his foreign affairs minister, Tonio Borg, met Turkey’s chief negotiator and pledged Malta’s support for Turkey’s EU accession bid, Pullicino Orlando – then a Nationalist member of parliament – hit Facebook and began to rant against Turkey, Turkish people and his prime minister, saying that the government did not have a mandate to do that.

Well, this government doesn’t have a mandate to sell Maltese passports, to Turkish people or anyone else, and yet Pullicino Orlando is silent. What a corrupt weakling he is, and a coward.

Bigger hissy fits followed when he took offence at being called ‘childish and foolish’ by somebody who was so obviously his inferior because he is Turkish.

But Pullicino Orlando chose to ignore the fact that even the (then) Opposition supported Turkey’s EU membership bid. Parliament’s foreign affairs committee took the same approach. And when quizzed by the press, George Vella, then shadow minister for foreign affairs and now minister, said: “Turkey was accepted as an EU candidate country in 2004, something you cannot simply withdraw. If it undergoes EU scrutiny and satisfies EU accession criteria, there are no grounds for denying it membership.”

But Pullicino Orlando’s objection to Turks and Turkey is not rational. It is cultural, and the fruit of prejudice and ignorance. Pullicino Orlando’s temperament and outlook are Far Right, though he wears the false cloak of a liberal, as though it is somehow possible for somebody with a totalitarian temperament to be liberal in outlook when the two are in direct conflict.

The fact is that the chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology is an old-fashioned bigot with a small and narrow mind and a villager’s world view that is rife with ignorant prejudice.

He must be very annoyed indeed that while he would do anything to stop his hated Turks getting into the European Union, his friend Joseph is shepherding them in through the backdoor by – horrors! – making them Maltese citizens.

And like all ignorant and irrational bigots, Pullicino Orlando is not consistent. He opposes Turkey’s EU membership on the grounds of religion and its human rights record, but then says that Israelis are ‘culturally European and fit for membership’. So Jewish people can join his Christian club but Muslims can’t, and he thinks that Israel has a fantastic human rights record. What a stupid man.