Why foreign criminals must be deported

Some weeks ago, while preparing my ‘Storm in a teacup’ opinion piece for MaltaToday, it occurred to me to do an impromptu ‘study’ of the characteristics of individuals being brought up before our courts. In order to do this I limited myself to a quick review of Matthew Agius’s MaltaToday court reports for the four preceding weeks. In overall terms my impression was that a good number of the reports involved individuals bearing names commonly associated with a Muslim cultural/religious background. But it was just a superficial impression and I resolved to delve further once I had the time.  

According to The Institute for Criminal Policy Research’s World Prison Brief, Malta’s prison population at the end of 2015 stood at 569 (http://www.prisonstudies.org/country/malta accessed on 13/02/2016). The same report indicates that in August 2015 the proportion of foreigners in the prison population was 40.2%, double what it had been ten years earlier in 2006, according to the Formosa report, to which I shall refer to later on.

I was unable to obtain information from official sources about how foreigners in the prison population are broken down as regards nationality but a special issue of The International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. 2 No. 24 for December 2012 carries a very interesting and detailed report authored by Dr Saviour Formosa et al of the University of Malta’s Department of Criminology, entitled ‘Foreigners in Maltese Prisons: Spanning the 150-year Divide.’ It covers a period of 150 years but for the purposes of this article I shall limit myself to the period closest to our own time.

The report declares that “…North African foreigners, mainly Libyans… have dominated the scene since the 1970s, when the Maltese government sought closer ties towards (sic) the North African countries, particularly Libya. This component reached 25% during the 1990s (Table 6). In fact, at a time when foreigners constituted 30.2% of the total prison population, North African offenders constituted 59% of all 1990s foreign prisoners, with 38% coming from the closest lands of Libya and Tunisia,…”(p107).

Closer to our times, in the first decade of the 21st Century, prisoners from Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco, in order of importance, made up 44% of the foreign inmate population, which by 2015 had climbed to over 40% of the total. 

A MaltaToday reporter recently asked for proof that the crime rate among Muslims is higher than among the atheists, Catholics, Jews or Buddhists living in Malta and the above data would seem to indicate very clearly that the crime rate for Muslims is much, much higher than it is for the general population if we take prison inmates as a proxy indicator. Indeed, this would seem to indicate that at one in five the proportion of Muslim country prison inmates in Malta is even higher than the UK where one in seven prison inmates is Muslim in contrast to the one in 20 Britons in the general population who is Muslim (Daily Mail 15/02/2016).   

To reiterate my ‘bold statement’ of some weeks ago, “It is not Muslims in Europe who need more tolerance, indeed I would go as far as to suggest that SOME of these have ‘too much’ of that already and systematically abuse the freedoms which they enjoy in our societies ...”

The MaltaToday reporter in question chose to conveniently ignore the all-important word ‘some’ in referring to what I had written and proceeded to build a whole edifice of his own making, all along speculating as to what I might have in mind for those who are not content with living their religion in their home and place of worship and respecting the norms and cultural values of our society and are instead intent on violating our laws and imposing their warped agendas. I shall tell this reporter exactly what concrete action I propose to save him having to speculate as to what my remedies would be:

1) Deport all those who are here illegally and severely sanction all those who have facilitated their entrance here in the first place.

2) Deport all those who although here legally have committed a crime and have been sentenced to prison for it and if found to be Maltese citizens withdraw their citizenship if their crime involves violence or is particularly serious. If legislation for the latter does not exist enact it.

These actions will render our nation safer for all law-abiding citizens, be they of the Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu or other faith or of no faith at all. By the by, we would also rid the Muslim minority, which I have no doubt is overwhelmingly law-abiding, hard-working and intent mostly on giving their children a safe environment to grow, of these trouble-makers who only serve to draw upon their community unwarranted public opprobrium.   

I agree with the MaltaToday reporter when he declares that he “…does not want to live in a society where people are considered as second-class citizens simply because of their race or belief…” although I myself would have preferred the word ‘treated’ rather than ‘considered’ and I would have added other characteristics such as gender, sexual orientation and such like. As a matter of fact, it is one of the reasons why I choose to live in Malta and not in any one of the dozens of Muslim-majority dystopias to be found scattered all over the globe where conversion by a Muslim into another faith is still punishable by death.

A 1990 meeting of Muslim-majority nations issued the so-called Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. Notable absences in the document were protection of religious freedom, freedom of association and freedom of the press, as well as equality in rights and equal protection under the law. The European Court of Human Rights has declared that Sharia is incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy.    

We are now well into the second decade of the 21st century and over the last few years the absolute number of individuals with a Muslim cultural/religious background would seem to have grown considerably as has their number as a proportion of the island’s population.

In my 12 April, 2015 contribution to MaltaToday on ‘The changing map of world religions’ I made reference to a report which indicated the presence in Malta of 6,000 Muslim residents, double the figure of 3,000 seven years earlier, but these figures reflect the situation prior to the surge which has led to a substantial increase in Libyan nationals amongst us.

More recently Walid Nabhan, a Maltese national of Palestinian origin and prize-winning writer, who incidentally has the courage to speak his mind despite attempts at intimidation, recently gave a figure of 30,000 or ‘more’ Muslims currently living in Malta (Inews report 04/02/2016). What consequences does this have for Malta?  

In contrast to the go with the flow attitude propagated by the MaltaToday reporter I will not simply roll over and die; and I will do all I can to prevent those who want to impose upon us a retrograde model of society incompatible, if not diametrically opposed, to our values from reaching their goal.