The fact that they prefer to live near each other – as do the Maltese in Australia, Canada and once upon a time, Detroit, does not make that neighbourhood ‘reserved’ for them. Other people are free to live there. If they don’t, it’s through choice. There are neighbourhoods in Malta where I would never live – practically the whole of the island, nowadays, and it’s not because of Arabs, Indians or Chinese.

I wouldn’t even trust him to run a bath, let alone the country.

I rarely leave the house except to go to other people’s houses because I hate the fact that whenever I do, I find that the swarms of Maltese hamalli have grown larger, worse and more pervasive than they used to be 10, 15, 20 years ago. Nowhere is safe beyond one or two places.

Do I demand that they be kept away from places I used to like going to? No, I just stop going there myself, go nowhere or find somewhere else to go.

You complain about the “Arabs” in Sliema, but my problem with Sliema is that on the rare occasions that I go down to the shops there, I don’t see a single face I know and am not even remotely tempted to sit down for a cup of coffee because the coffee-shops, which used to be full of my friends, former neighbours and acquaintances, are now full of odd-looking Johnnies and Taghna Lkoll-looking women. I feel that I might as well be in Fgura or Haz-Zabbar.

Dazgur li binja bhal dik hi attrajenti, izda l-implikazzjonijiet taghha jgorru piz ukoll.

Issa jekk tkun mibnija jew topera f’art Musulmana, kollox normali, pero jekk ter tkun f’post bhal Malta, hi rejalta’ differenti.

Din mhix primarjament kustjoni ta’ idejologiji religjuzi, daqskemm socjali u kulturali. Forsi ftit jifhmu li ghal Musulman, il-moskeja mhix biss ‘knisja’, post ghal kult, imma tfisser ferm aktar minhekk.

Ghalihom din il-binja hi bhal ‘laboratorju’.

Jekk inhu hekk, dan skandlu tal-iskandli u gennata akbar min ta’ Fantozzi.

Equally, I would have hated growing up in the oppressive Roman Catholic Malta of the 1950s. I absolutely detested being at a convent school, much as I liked individual nuns who were nice and did their best in what was already an anachronistic set-up.

You haven’t thought enough about your own country if you fail to realise that it was in the repressive grip of religion until well into my lifetime at least.

It is not religions which are bad, but their grip on the state.

Islam – or any other religion, for that matter – can’t have a grip on the state in Malta or anywhere else in the European Union.

Individual Muslims or groups of Muslims may be a problem in Malta, but then so are individual Roman Catholics or groups of them. For a time around 15 years ago I could not go anywhere socially – even parties that were supposed to be fun – without being cornered by yet another convert to the Charismatic Renewal Movement trying to press-gang me into joining the cause. It was appalling.

Have you ever seen video footage of one of John Bonnici Mallia’s public gatherings, for instance? I find it frighteningly disturbing.

Incidentally, xenophobia is not fear of difference but fear and suspicion of strangers from other lands, of foreigners.