This applies only to people eating together by mutual consent.

It’s basic good manners.

Would you put on a porn film when you have guests at home and tell them ‘If you don’t like it don’t watch’ or accuse them of intolerance if they object?

Well, then.

One of the noblest men I have ever met is an observant Sunni Muslim. Observant to the point of growing a beard and all that.

He washes his hands before handling the Quran. One day we were out in the field and a page of his copy of the Quran got unglued and fluttered to the ground. Rather than pick it up out of the mud, he ran half a mile to the nearest water source so he could wash his hands. None of us touched it, because we knew it would offend him.

We’d be eating pork and whatnot and he wouldn’t say a word, because he knew it would offend our liberal sentiment. We just made sure we had halal rations for him.

One time when we forgot to get any halal food, he lived for three days on bread and a few vegetables, without a single word of complaint.

He isn’t even middle class or anything. He was born in a slum in Morocco.

The biggest c@nt I have ever met was born in Sliema to a pepé family, and is a practising Roman Catholic.

For example, you do not make a point of ordering a rare steak when you are having lunch with somebody who is fervently ideologically opposed to killing animals for consumption.

You do not order shellfish or pork when your companion is Muslim.

Many Muslims are quite happy to drink alcohol. If you know that your companion is one of them, there isn’t any problem. But if you are not sure, then ask. In the same way that you would ask somebody, “Do you mind if I smoke?”, you should ask, “Would it make you uncomfortable if I were to have a glass of wine?”

Ideally, though, perfect manners dictate that you shouldn’t ask the question at all, but wait for your companion to say that he/she doesn’t mind if you drink alcohol, and this because the question itself can put your companion in the uncomfortable position of not wishing, in turn, to cause offence.

Secondly, the Maltese are among the most intolerant people on earth. This subject is, in fact, a discussion about Maltese intolerance of anybody who is different, and particularly about Maltese intolerance of Muslims.

Religion and social culture are tightly intertwined. In most cases you will find that particular religions take root because the pre-existing social conditions favoured them.

Northern European social culture was not compatible with Roman Catholicism, and the inevitable happened. Southern European social culture, however, was compatible and the religion took root there.

I take you to be a person of impaired intellectual faculties whose problems with rational analysis were further compounded by a less than ideal education.

You miss the primary, essential and fundamental point that the last remaining Jews of Europe owe their survival solely to Britain’s persistence in the war until it was finally joined by the Americans in 1941.

And to Stalin’s army, yes, but it was not democracy or the Jews that the Russians were fighting for.

Ignorance is not bliss. It is a tragedy.

Thank God for the British, because if it were not for them, the whole of Europe would have been under the control of Hitler, Franco and Mussolini.

Incidentally, exactly who do you think Ed and David Miliband are?

The behaviour you describe is not the result of a religion or even a country, but of social class and education.

This is something you have identified yourself when you say that some Maltese people behave like this too and that is why you choose not to live in certain parts of Malta (where there are lots of them).

Unfortunately, the only ‘Muslims’ Maltese people tend to come into contact with are hamalli bla flus or worse, hamalli bil-flus.

Or rather, when they come into contact with ‘Muslims’ who are just like you and me, they are unaware of it for the obvious reason that they are just like you and me.

People like you and me hated the years when all Maltese were identified by the floods of criecer on the Sicilian markets, or the criminals in Soho, and we should be doubly aware of this.

Sickening.