“Mhumiex nies li jaqlawa u jiekluha. Huma nies upper jew mittelkless f’pajjizhom” – Joseph Muscat

You need to watch this Labour Party TV broadcast from last Tuesday. It is beyond embarrassing. A bunch of Middle Eastern people accustomed to doing business in a baksheesh/undemocratic environment come to Malta and blind the backwoods prime minister with money.

Thaer Mukbel, the Palestinian immigration consultant (Super One doesn’t tell us he is an immigration consultant or that he is Palestinian), is interviewed as though he is the main man, while the prime minister stands to the side, simpering and blushing with pleasure as Mukbel praises him in the sort of tone and terms a grown-up might use to praise a small boy who’s just helped mummy in the kitchen for the first time.

“We were going to Spain but he convinced us in minutes that we should come to Malta,” Mukbel says of the prime minister. Oh right. Because that’s how it works in the real world. Meanwhile, Muscat simpers and simpers because he is being praised by an older (rich) man, which I have noticed is one of his emotional triggers.

“That’s my prime minister,” I thought, and cringed.

Then Muscat is interviewed and he says, with an air of self-importance completely different to his subservient stance in the face of the Palestinian immigration consultant, “Dawn mhumiex nies li jaqlawa u jiekluha. Dawn huma nies upper jew mittilkless f’pajjizhom.”

He is referring to the students which the so-called American University of Malta will be catering to. In other words, like all American university this and American college that, it is going to be a playground for the progeny of privileged Middle Eastern families, who don’t have the qualifications to get into a proper university or who can’t get a student visa for Britain or the United States or Canada.

And that’s where the Palestinian immigration consultant comes in.