GUEST POST/Apologise for yourself, Mrs Dalli

By H. P.Baxxter:

Helena Dalli is the typical successful Maltese politician. Not over-endowed in the brains department, she makes up for it with charm and congeniality. She is minn taghna, in the vernacular. She pleases everyone and offends no one, and so she skillfully sashays from Mintoffian poster girl to Progressive Liberal, until she reaches the pinnacle of her political career as Minister for Civil Liberties.

Of all things, I hear you say. Indeed, but then the Maltese nation was never strong in the brains department either. And the Maltese don’t do irony.

Last week she added the crowning touch to a glittering career by tackling head-on the Daboma Jack media fallout. And she did it in typical Maltese fashion. She apologised on behalf of the Maltese. Why? Is it national policy to be racist? Do all the Maltese do it? Do all the Maltese wish they could spit on black people and slap them?

Let me deconstruct the incident. A Maltese gaggle (a ‘cloud’, in technical jargon) finds itself abandoned by The System under the merciless July sun (‘sunny Malta’, in marketing jargon), after another one of Joe Mizzi’s cock-ups. The stifling heat adds to the irritation of waiting, and the gaggle turns into a lynch mob. Tempers are frayed, expletives become more frequent, and the waiting passengers start blaming everything and everyone (except the Labour government). Foxx Austin Gatt, hell yeah.

Then a Hungarian man, who happens to be black, tries to restore a semblance of civility (one might say civilisation) by organising the gaggle into a queue.

A foreigner telling us how to run our country! A BLACK foreigner!

To arms, Maltese patriots!

And that’s when Daboma Jack was assaulted and spat on by one Maltese woman, while many of the Maltese cheered, and the foreigners looked on, horrified but terrified.

In come Manuel’s Arditi, now renamed Carmelo’s Stormtroopers, who promptly pounce on the victim, wrestle him to ground and arrest him.

The video goes viral and jaws drop throughout the civilised world at the sheer savagery of Malta, eleven years after EU membership and fifty years after independence.

Oh shit. This wasn’t in the Progressive Liberal script.

What does Helena Dalli do? She apologises on behalf of the Maltese.

There’s a name for this. It’s called psychological projection. It’s when people defend themselves against unpleasant things by attributing them to others.

Apologise for yourself, Mrs Dalli.

You might apologise for your own Labour Party, which rode to power on the strength of the Imperium Europa crowd. In 2013, Norman Lowell was crowing about the young cub Joseph Muscat, now grown into a lion. He’s rather less laudative now that the promised pushbacks haven’t happened.

But the fact remains that Labour courted the Far Right, for whom Emmanuele Mallia was something of a seven-decade-old dream come true. It courted them when it should have condemned them. Hence the slapping and spitting.

You might apologise for your own government, which grants blanket immunity to the police for almost anything. In two years, we’ve seen it all: harassment of journalists (and you weren’t even in government on that night), carrying unauthorised weapons and shooting with same, bribery, corruption, nepotism, involvement in shady companies and worse.

What’s a knee to the victim’s kidney and handcuffing the wrong man compared to this? Move along, nothing to see here.

You might apologise for the encouragement of hamallagni as a national virtue. We are governed by hamalli who hang out with hamalli and cut deals with hamalli both home-grown and foreign. They talk hamallu, act hamallu, and use public funds to pay for hamallu events at illegal venues owned by hamalli.

Is it any wonder that the average Maltese, who make up the typical crowd at Valletta bus terminus, are now likely to be the most frightful hamalli?

It takes a racist to hate black people. But it takes a hamallu to put that hatred into action and slap and spit.

It takes a violent, hamallu police force to arrest the victim instead of the perpetrator.

And it takes a manipulating, cynical government to brush it off by blaming all the Maltese instead of the racist and uncivilised Maltese.

Apologise for yourself, Madam, but not for me.