Was it deliberate or a mistake?

I cannot believe Mr Justice Giovanni Grixti, the judge who made a fool of himself and sentenced Ignatius Farrugia to four days’ incarceration (Farrugia was appealing to have his sentence reduced) is so friggin ignorant in his department. If he does not know the law, if he can make such a mistake, he should be impeached or removed.

I will not go into the original police report filed by the bile blogger against Labour party Zurrieq mayor Farrugia. The bile queen basically did to Farrugia what Pietru Pawl Zammit did to Jason Azzopardi. I do not know Farrugia and I have no time for the queen of bile but this is yet another case of two weights and two measures, as I will soon show.

For the truth is that when Magistrate Consuelo Scerri Herrera was paraded on the social media by the same soulless gossip columnist, the magistrate was catapulted into the presence of the commission for the administration of justice, for having committed the crime of attracting the attention of the hatemonger.

But back to Grixti.

There is a general feeling at the law courts that the queen of bile, a tax dodger and under judicial scrutiny for her failure to pay VAT, will have a go at anyone she takes a dislike to in the courts. She will, if she chooses, tear apart the personal lives of the judiciary and shred them to pieces. Her consistency is marked by her constancy in choosing only those who serve her purpose.

She did this with Consuelo Scerri Herrera, who was separated and living with a partner. The bile blogger did it at the time when her own state of matrimony was in a bumpy patch and going through some farcical events, dominated by plate throwing at home – with what accuracy is not known – and her husband filing a police report about plates cutting the air in the direction of his cranium.

Perhaps the point is somewhat obscure to some, but the point is that Giovanni Grixti is also in a vulnerable personal situation, which I will not dwell on here. But it is a situation that traditionally is picked on by the insensitive and reckless blogger who is applauded as some kind of prima donna by the self-conceited.

Grixti would have known that his decision would have raised or could raise the ire of the blogger, if the blogger did not like the way the guillotine fell. She has acted in her vengeful, unforgiving way whenever she was treated like any other member of the plebeian class at the law courts.

When Consuelo Scerri Herrera dropped her case against the blogger it was only because she could not take the relentless pounding and abuse about her personal life.

The magistrate presiding the case, Tonio Micallef Trigona was also reminded at one time that he too could have his personal life torn to shreds.

You see everyone has a skeleton or more in the cupboard, but not everyone is as ruthless as those who have the pretence of calling themselves journalists when in fact they are online intellectual terrorists.

But if the judiciary are unwilling to stand up and face the vindictive online odium, surely the Ignatius Farrugia case shows to what extent we are still living in an apartheid situation.

Now, if Ignatius Farrugia were a Nationalist, a PN mayor and facing a police report filed by a Labour-inclined blogger, there is no doubt that the law courts would have been delighted to see yet another protest being mounted.

There would have been declarations that democracy was threatened and accusations that those journalists who do not take a stand are accomplices in the cancerous degradation of democracy.

And one better, if this same Ignatius Farrugia (of the PN) were to be sentenced wrongly and unashamedly handed a four-day prison sojourn, I have no doubt that Simon Busuttil would have torn apart his Tommy Hilfiger shirt and self-flagellated himself to describe the Putinesque state in which our democracy was floundering.

And of course journalists who disagreed with him would have been labelled lapdogs and poodles of the State.

The only and vital difference is that Ignatius Farrugia is a big hamallu from the South, and the worst crime of all is that he is not a Nationalist, not a Communist, not a member of Opus Dei, or a member of the Horticultural Society.  He is… my God, I dare say it…  Jaqq, a Labourite!!

Whistleblowing, according to which way the wind blows

I could not help noticing that Nationalist MPs were eager to tag none other than that most persecuted of whistleblowers, Edward Snowden, in their tweets soon after the protest held in Valletta. 

To be fair, it was Snowden himself who first re-tweeted a tweet by Nationalist MEP Roberta Metsola of photos of the Valletta protest – and hey presto, there’s a new favourite ‘international’ ally in town.

Cue the likes of Jason Azzopardi – always eager to jump on any bandwagon that will carry that bespectacled oblong mug of his – tagging Snowden and Wikileaks in his own tweet on Panamaleaks and the recent emails disclosed by the Australian Financial Review.

Perhaps few among you may know that it was the Nationalist MEPs themselves, who joined their European People’s Party colleagues to vote (check it out on votewatch.eu) against a resolution calling on EU member states not to criminalise Snowden, who blew the whistle on the United States’s NSA ‘big brother’ programme.

By 285 votes to 281, MEPs decided to call on EU member states to “drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden, grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as whistleblower and international human rights defender”.

Among those who voted against this resolution were David Casa and Roberta Metsola. Therese Comodini Cachia was absent for the vote.

I’m not saying Casa and Metsola did not have their reasons. They might feel justified about seeing some EU laws extending the surveillance capabilities of intelligence bodies; they might feel that Snowden did more harm than good by showing the scale of mass surveillance of telecommunications and internet traffic inside the EU by the US National Security Agency.

Of course, Manfred Weber himself – the EPP chief – voted against the resolution, when it was especially revealed that the NSA was spying on the EU with the help of the German foreign intelligence agency BND!

Quite amazing if you ask me, especially since Herr Weber felt it fit subsequently to lecture us Maltese on the state of our democracy when Dr Azzopardi had to face the due process of justice on a criminal defamation complaint.

Hold on. Maybe the good people at the European People’s Party could tell Manfred Weber to issue another statement on the crumbling state of democracy in Germany itself: Angela Merkel has agreed to allow prosecutors to pursue a case against comedian Jan Boehmermann for mocking Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the public broadcaster ZDF, suggesting that he hits girls, watches child pornography and engages in bestiality. Indeed, that was quite harsh satire, but banned apparently, since the German criminal code prohibits insults against foreign leaders, and even leaves it to the government to decide whether to authorise prosecutors to pursue such cases. Now where’s a foreign interference act when you need one!

But I digress once again. Obviously someone should tell Snowden not to re-tweet just about anything that comes his way. They might be the same people who want him locked in jail.