Judge not, lest you seriously piss us off

There is something vaguely predictable about the way Malta copes with racism and racially motivated crime.

What generally happens - admittedly with some minor variations here and there - is that a minuscule fraction of the population will react by loudly voicing horror/concern/condemnation of whatever incident is under discussion... only to be promptly drowned out by a cacophony of much louder and more aggressive howls of protestation... out of which come tumbling all the usual mindless clichés: "judge not lest you be judged"; "innocent until proven guilty"; "before criticizing others, walk a mile in their shoes"; "don't judge a book by its cover", and all the rest of the similarly trite (though often misplaced) platitudes.

The exact same pattern unfolded this week in the case of that Malian migrant (whose precise name still remains a mystery more than a week after his death - so let's keep calling him Zoto) who was murdered last Saturday.

I have just spent the better part of an hour trawling comments on a newly set-up Facebook group called 'Justice for Sergeant Mark Dimech'... a rather depressing experience, when you consider that it was not Sergeant Mark Dimech whose lifeless, handcuffed corpse was retrieved from that van with army boot-marks in the region of the groin and lower back. That was actually Zoto's corpse... though I have yet to come across one single, solitary comment to so much as allude to his existence.

Sergeant Mark Dimech, on the other hand, is one of two AFM soldiers charged with Zoto's murder, while a third stands accused of trying to cover up the deed. So it seems that, in their unbridled zeal to preemptively influence the outcome of the imminent murder trial, the 5,000 members of that group - more on that number later - got their priorities sort of muddled up.

If any 'justice' at all is to be done in this case, it should be justice for Zoto: the victim of the crime. And yes, granted, if it turns out that the three AFM officers are innocent, all well and good. They would deserve to be acquitted, and (provided the evidence for their innocence was watertight) I can't imagine how anyone could possibly argue with that.

But the entire case we are talking about here - like all murder cases, for that matter - should surely revolve around the central plank of 'justice for the victim'... something that does not (by definition, it should not) have to come about at the expense of justice for the alleged perpetrators of the crime.

And this in turn explains why trawling through those comments was such a depressing experience. Leaving aside the fact that hardly any acknowledged the most single most basic fact of the entire case - i.e., that a 32-year-old man entered that army van alive, and came out DEAD... following which, the pathologist's report confirmed that his death could only have been caused through violence - the real problem is quite another.

The Facebook group prefaces its entire argument with the observation that the AFM soldiers are the real victims of the crime... because they were 'hanged and left out to dry by those who should know better than use this sad case for their own agendas'... whatever that is supposed to mean. And to be perfectly frank there is so much wrong with this approach that I hardly know where to begin.

Let me try by seizing on what is arguably the most annoying of the trite clichés that form the bedrock of all subsequent arguments in favour of the preemptive release of the three suspects.

'Judge not lest you be judged'. No prizes for guessing that that is a Biblical quotation (Matthew 7:1, if you really want to know); and - being Biblical - the 'judgment' in question actually refers to the Day of Reckoning: you know, when the Lord God is supposed to sit in judgment on the living on the dead, elevating the worthy to the Kingdom of Heaven, and casting the undeserving into the eternal pit of Hell.

Exactly what relevance this has to the current case is at best unclear. If the Christian version of eschatology is to be believed - and that's a rather big 'if' as far as I am concerned - then why on earth are we wasting our time in a court of law? Zoto will by now already have been judged by his Creator; likewise, the three accused of killing him will one day be judged in their own turn... not, of course, by any human institution, but by none other than God himself.

That is, in fact, the entire point behind the same much misunderstood quotation from the New Testament. And incidentally Jesus Christ repeated almost exactly the same argument during his own trial before Pontius Pilate. 'My kingdom is not of this world', he informed the Roman governor of Judaea; and if Pilate had any authority to judge anyone at all, that authority (or so Christ argued at the time) originated from the same 'Divine Power' that would eventually judge Pilate himself.

So much for the Kingdom of Heaven. Down here in this other kingdom, things tend to work out... rather differently. And a good thing that is too, if you ask me. Otherwise... well, seriously, folks. Can you even imagine the consequences of taking Christ's argument literally?

Apply the same 'divine justice' concept to all cases, and quite frankly you will instantly obliterate the foundations upon which the entire edifice of 'human justice' is built. If everyone simply desisted from judging others in anticipation of a "final judgment" by God then... why, what need would we still have for such things as law-courts, judges, murder trials, etc.? None whatsoever. We would all just leave things entirely in the hands of the Lord, and hope for the best... Amen.

But is this really the sort of society you'd like to live in? Personally I suspect that life under those circumstances would resemble the classic image of barbarity so aptly put by Thomas Hobbes 500 years ago. Nasty, brutish, and... what was the last word again? Ah yes:  short. 

Even without this observation, snatches of Biblical wisdom - however questionable the 'wisdom' they contain - are simply no substitute for rational arguments. Here are two quick reasons why: one, to every Biblical quotation, there is always an equal and opposite Biblical quotation ('eye for an eye', anyone? Or how about a 'tooth for a tooth'?); two, not all of us are Christians... and at the risk of being blunt, not all of us really give a toss what the founder of one particular religion out of thousands had to say about any given topic some two millennia ago. (After all, do any of you out there give a toss about what Zarathustra might have had to say about anything? Any of you apart from Friedrich, that is? Don't all speak at once...)

Besides: the trouble with the 'judge not' maxim is that - and by the way it is positively mind-boggling that in this day and age I should even have to point this out - IT CUTS BOTH WAYS.

'Judging others' does not automatically mean 'condemning others', you know. It can just as easily mean 'acquitting others of all charges'... before their trial even begins.

This is in fact the express purpose of the same Facebook group that decries such prejudice in others. The irony of the situation is as disturbing as it is inescapable. Whichever way you look at it, the same people urging us all 'not to judge' Mark Dimech and his colleagues, happen to also be the first to don the judge's mantle themselves. They have in fact preemptively tried the entire cause, and concluded that the three defendants are not guilty on all charges... before even hearing any of the evidence.

And in case the FB group alone was not enough to hammer home this point (with a gavel, as it were), there was even an online petition that spelt it out for us in no uncertain terms. This petition called for the dismissal of the entire case out of hand... yes, that's right: drop all charges, and release the suspects without trial, for all the world as if the Republic of Malta does not have a duty and a responsibility to investigate all cases of murder, whether or not it is the interests of certain people to do so.

Excuse me for repeating an earlier question, but... what sort of society do these people want us all to live in, anyway? A society in which dead bodies happen to simply fall out of vans with external symptoms of extreme violence perpetrated upon them... and that's it? Everybody just carries on regardless, whistling merrily away as if nothing happened at all...?

And while I'm on the subject:  is it just this particular murder case that should remain uninvestigated? What about all the other cases currently before the courts? Take the so-called 'serial killer', for instance. Who cares if a man is suspected of having killed no fewer than four people? After all, will he not one day also be judged by his creator? Is there not the possibility - as there always is, in Dimech's case as much as everyone else's - that there might have all along been a horrible misunderstanding? And on the basis of that possibility alone... should we not give ALL suspected murderers the benefit of the doubt, and simply release them all without charge?

Apply this line of reasoning across the board, and all that remains would be to abolish the entire concept of murder, lock stock and two smokin' barrels. Oh, and while we're at it, all other types of crime too. Theft, rape, larceny, paedophilia... you name it. After all, every person who has ever been accused of any of those things will have been supported by friends and family members who firmly believe they were innocent. And if this consideration alone is now enough to absolve Sergeant Mark Dimech of even the suspicion of Zoto's murder... why, then I fail to see why others who face criminal charges should be treated any differently.

***

But the single most irksome of the 'arguments' brought forward by the Facebook group demanding the temporary suspension of justice in this case  - also by far the most contradictory - remains the 'strength in numbers' game.

It is little short of nauseating that individual members would crow about how no fewer than 5,000 joined their group within a few hours... as if one's 'innocence' or 'guilt' in any given case now depends on how many people 'join your cause' or 'like your page' on frigging Facebook.

I mean, honestly. By the same reasoning (if 'reasoning' it can be called) the more people who rally to your cause, the likelier you are to get off scot-free, regardless of whether you are guilty or not. I can imagine this view of 'justice' would go down particularly well among international celebrities enjoying worldwide fame and adulation (You know, people like Justin Bieber...Courtney Cox... Peppi Azzopardi, etc...). All they'd have to do when charged with murder is sent out a simple 'tweet'... then sit back and wait for millions of people around the world to pressure the courts into releasing them.

Hence the mind-numbing contradiction in this case. Ironic, isn't it, how the same people who so loudly decry the 'politicisation' of the case against Dimech, are themselves the first who instantly resort to purely political tactics to get it thrown out of court? And paradoxical, is it not, that a Facebook group warning against 'pressure' on the law-courts, is in the same breath leaving no stone unturned to exert as much pressure of its own as possible?

And they're not even disguising their intentions, either. They are actively trying to translate mob support (even threatening to descend onto the streets and squares in protest, like any political party or trade union would in political circumstances) into popular pressure with precisely a view to influencing the outcome of a trial by jury.

In any ordinary country, this fact alone would result in calls for a mistrial. But of course Malta is not an ordinary country. Malta is a country where a sizeable chunk of the population - probably an outright majority, though I can't prove it - would actually prefer it if murders were not investigated at all.

And then they tell us to 'judge not, lest we be judged'. By which, of course, what they really mean is: 'judge not, lest you piss you us off'...