Jason Azzopardi should stand his ground and not let the bastards get him down

If the corrupt cabal in government are reduced to wheeling out Owen Tal-Ajkla to go after Jason Azzopardi with the help of the Super One cameras, they’re not getting anywhere fast, because the whole thing reeks of desperation.

They are, however, putting the usually calm and collected Azzopardi under massive amounts of psychological stress, to the point where it shows that he can’t focus in his usual manner. Ad that is exactly why the government/Labour Party are going after him. He now looks and feels hunted by malign people in power, which has been the intention all along.

That would be why he took the ill-conceived decision to ring the police when he found the Labour Party cameras and propagandists outside his office. It was a decision he wouldn’t have taken if he were thinking clearly. When the mental fog lifted, he apologised.

Azzopardi has open lines of communications with journalists in the independent press. He is one of the most accessible politicians in that respect. We all know that he takes calls, returns them, messages with an apology if he can’t answer the phone, gives answers and promises to get the answer if he can’t do it there and then, and does so.

It was so unjust, therefore, that the ridiculous Institute of Maltese Journalists issued a statement taking him to task for ringing the police when he found Labour Party employees with their cameras outside his office. Have they ever leaped to my defence in that way, no much how much harassment I have gone through at the hands of the police and politicians? No. And I actually am a journalist, rather than an employee of a political party. The Institute of Maltese Journalists is politically motived.

The employees of political parties are not journalists in the real sense of the word, and it is high time this important point is considered and the distinction made. The fundamental principles which underpin the protection and special status of journalists under the law are based on the fact that journalists act in the service of the public by holding politicians and others in high public office to account. It stands to reason that if somebody is paid to work for politicians, on the payroll of a political party, then he is in the service of the politicians he is meant to scrutinise, and not in the service of the public.

The people hounding Jason Azzopardi and hanging around his office door are NOT journalists but Labour Party employees, and the sooner we get this straight, the better. They don’t even make any attempt at pretending that what they are doing is journalism, and they are not after the truth or the facts but are there as agents of the governing party to harass politicians of the rival, Opposition party. That is not an exercise in democracy and freedom of expression, but the precise opposite.

Which brings me to another, related point: the Labour Party is in government. It is in power. It should understand that the tactics it used when in Opposition look really very ugly now. It is one thing sending your party employees and party cameras to harass government politicians when you are in Opposition. But the governing party sending its party employees and cameras to harass Opposition politicians and critics of the government? That’s absolutely terrible – and it is being read as terrible, if not in Malta then certainly outside Malta. Those are totalitarian tactics, and in the civilised world they are viewed with disgust and dismay.

Meanwhile, I have a message for all those intellectually challenged members of the Maltese chattering class – and God knows it’s pretty big – who are oohing and aahing because poor Mario Demarco has been “attacked” by a blog-post on this website. Are you all out of your tiny minds? Haven’t you bloody noticed that the Nationalist politician who really is under attack is Jason Azzopardi, by the governing party and its entire mammoth party media machine? How about focussing your idiotic minds for a change – as though the mess you made in 2013 wasn’t bad enough – and work out what is going on, who really needs your support, and who is really doing some actual attacking.

The government is going after its most vocal and hard-hitting critics, one by one. Jason Azzopardi is the current target.