Patriot games and porkies

One sure way to invite mockery of your cause is to create an event which you then sabotage yourself with a ridiculous stunt.

That is exactly what happened on Sunday morning as the self-styled “patriots”, Ghaqda Patrijotti Maltin staged a protest in Msida precisely where the Muslims have been gathering in prayer on Friday. Someone had the bright idea of distributing free pork sandwiches. Why, you may ask? Well, apparently, there was a report from St Paul’s Bay primary school that “some Muslim parents were unhappy that children were taking ham sandwiches to school”.

Obviously, the first thing that came to mind is to check whether this highly unlikely report of parents who would presume to interfere in what other children eat, was even based on fact, or whether it was just a wild rumour. It didn’t take long, because the Minister of Education immediately issued a statement denying that any ban or imposition of this sort is taking place at this school. In fact, he went on to state that this school is a prime example of how children from many different cultures, religions and ethnicities are co-existing happily in an inclusive atmosphere.

It is easy to see how this rumour started. According to The Times, St Paul’s Bay parish priest Fr Michael Attard confirmed that he had raised the issue during a sermon last week but insisted the 'patriots' had blown the matter out of proportion.

“I heard from some social workers that the incident had happened and mentioned it in passing,” he said. “I don’t know when it happened or whether it was one student or 10. They’re making a big deal out of nothing,” he said.

Well Fr Attard, I suggest that perhaps next time perhaps you should not have relied on hearsay to tell this kind of story and use it in your sermon where you know you will influence hundreds of parishioners. What was the point of even bringing this up especially in the current atmosphere where people are ready to pounce on even the slightest incident as proof to back up their prejudice? And anyway, shouldn’t priests be doing their best to instill tolerance rather than stirring up even more hostility?

(Just as a side note, in the past there have been times when I have been looked at very disapprovingly and even told off to my face, because I used to eat sweets during Lent or ate meat on Good Friday, by people who felt they had the right to tell me what to do. But some very, very fervent Catholics never see the contradiction of how THEY try to impose their own beliefs on others, I guess).

But, back to the pork debacle. This is the problem with groups such as Ghaqda Patrijotti Maltin – they are so blindly intent on spreading misinformation and hatred about those who are different, that rather than first ensuring that something that someone said or wrote online is, in fact, true, they take it as fact and rush headlong into the kind of farcical situation which unfolded yesterday. It was a stunt which was ripe for satire, and FB was soon flooded with pork and pig-related jokes. We could not help it, it was just too good of an opportunity to pass up.

Apart from the fact that it was a fabrication, it was also completely irrelevant to what they were protesting about. The protest was presumably against the public prayers being held by Muslims in Msida, and if they had stuck to that issue they just might have had some more backing from the public because there are many who agree that by holding these public prayers, the Muslim community has gone a bit too far. A photo circulating on FB this week showed that the backyard of the Paola mosque is quite large, and so, many have pointed out, why not hold the prayers there?

Another very reasonable question which has been raised is whether the Muslim community is expecting a state handout of public land? In a way, they can perhaps be forgiven for thinking that this is quite possible – after all, hasn’t the Muscat government been handing out public land to whoever it deems fit, especially if that “whoever” just happened to have financed its election campaign? From the looks of it, therefore, it seems that the Muslim community has integrated into the Maltese way of life quite well after all, as it has cottoned on to the way things are seemingly done around here. So, if the ‘patriots’ had restricted their protest to this point alone – namely, that they do not agree with the Muslim community putting this kind of pressure on the Government for another mosque to be built - then they might have made more headway in the eyes of the public.

As it is, they have completely shot themselves in the foot and set themselves up for ridicule (although those passing through Msida might have enjoyed getting a free sandwich).

I am assuming that they expect more people to join their “cause”, but how they expect this to happen when they come across the way they do is beyond me. It didn’t help matters when they also turned aggressive against journalists who were there to report the event. Public Relations Rule No. One: you do not turn the media against you by getting physical with members of the press.

It is also pretty ironic to call yourself a patriot when you immediately lash out against your fellow countrymen just because they don’t agree with you. It is straight out of the Donald Trump school of patriotism, and I don’t mean that as any kind of compliment. When the word ‘patriot’ is bandied around like this, it calls to mind a kind of fanaticism which would do anything in the name of “nationhood”, to the point that anything is justified, and I would think that the world has seen enough of that kind of ‘patriotism’ already.

Reading the statement by the Ghaqda Patrijotti Maltin also left me baffled. They said the protest was held so that “no one would impose on the Maltese how they should behave in their own country. No one who comes to Malta has the right to impose their culture on us”. The thing is, I have yet to see concrete examples of this kind of imposition. Most of it is wild conjecture which finds fertile ground as a result of the kind of rumours which are started by ignorance, and which lead us to such banal situations as doling out free pork sandwiches in a puerile attempt to spite someone else’s religious beliefs.