It’s been a while

The last month has been a very interesting one from an opinion writer's point of view. Lots of interesting news for us to opine about - which makes our lives much easier when it comes to writing our weekly piece.

As you may have noticed I have missed a few Sundays, mainly due to the fact that I have been travelling - however one of the joys of the internet is that the news is only a click away. I have therefore followed various controversies with interest and sometimes with amusement and/or exasperation.

Let me start with the Dear Dom saga, which took an interesting twist when Yana (Joan?) Mintoff (Bland?) who recently threw her hat into the ring, stated that she was considering taking legal action against the makers of the documentary. Now I have not watched the movie and I am not that interested in it, but I find it ludicrous that a woman who left the country when she was still a child and who was not embarrassed to admit that she needed someone to brief her regarding the political upheaval in the country in the 70s and 80s, somehow felt entitled to conclude that the documentary was not accurate.

In fact I must say that I find the whole Yana Mintoff Bland scenario unbelievable. This woman left the country in the early 60s - she cannot speak Maltese, she has not lived in Malta for around 50 years - and yet here she is, expecting us to take her seriously as a candidate! Does the woman even have the right to vote in the country, for goodness sake?

I get it. Joseph Muscat is trying to appeal to the Mintoff-lovers. However, unfortunately, he risks alienating everyone else in the process.

Now onto something else that got my attention - the gang rape case which hit the news when the three accused men were cleared of all charges.  I am not going to comment about the case itself, since there is no way that I can possibly come to a fair conclusion without having heard all the testimony and facts about what happened. What I am going to comment about, however, are the comments made regarding the virginity, or lack thereof, of the woman who make the rape accusations.

I am not referring to the comments made by the Magistrate because it seems to me that they have been misinterpreted - the Magistrate did not say that the rape claims had no merit because the woman was sexually experienced, but that the virginity claims made by the girl were not valid. That is a sensible conclusion and I do not see why anyone should take exception to it - if the woman claimed to be a virgin (she said that her encounter with the three boys was her first sexual experience) and was then proven to have had several sexual encounters prior to the episode in question, then she is a liar, no two ways about it.

What bothered me were the comments made by people under the various online reports about the case. Several commentators seemed to imply that women are temptresses and that when men succumb, it is purely due to their nature as "lovers of female flesh". I kid you not, that is a quote I lifted from one of the online comment boards. Others saw fit to blame "feminists" for the injustice that the three young men suffered - apparently those of us who believe that men and women were born equal and should be treated equally are responsible for false rape accusations.

What I found ironical is that several men flocked to the boards to brand the girl a "slut", a "whore" or a "dangerous woman" - clearly for these people it is OK for three men to have group sex with a girl they hardly knew (and who possibly has mental health problems) but not OK for the girl to do the same.

Apparently sexual urges are acceptable (indeed admirable) in men, while women are not allowed to have a libido - in fact when they succumb to having sex they should only be doing so because it is their duty to keep their man "satisfied".

Now onto the third and last story that stuck in my craw. Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando saw fit to proclaim that Turkey should not join the EU because it is not "culturally European". It seems that he has a definition of what is European and what is not, and Turks do not fit the bill.

My feeling is that Pullicino Orlando does not know many Turks. When I was studying in the UK two of my closest friends were Turkish. One was a girl called Neslihan, who was a vivacious blond with sparkling blue eyes. The other was a young man called Yigit, who had olive skin and could have totally passed himself off as a Maltese bloke.

I had a lot more in common with these two than I did with any of the British students in the course, whose main hobby was getting pissed out of their minds and jumping from bed to bed like musical chairs.  It could be that I am not "culturally European" myself, but I found that they had the same values regarding family, morality and friendship that I had. Frankly, I would have no problem welcoming Neslihan and Yigit (and all their Turkish brothers and sisters) into the European Union.

Clearly Turkey has several issues to resolve before it can be seriously considered for membership. I totally agree that the country needs to meet all the criteria before it can join the club - however when it does, and I am sure that one day it will, then we should accept them. 

Otherwise the whole European "dream" is nothing but a xenophobic sham.