Ultimate harassment

After months telling us to let the institutions work with serenity, the prime minister will today be asking parliament to vote in favour of asking a magistrate to hurry up and deliver the results of her inquiry, hence institutionalising the ultimate harassment.

Salvu Felice Pace – Għasri

Heartless

A group of migrants rescued by French NGOs SOS Mediterranée and Médecins sans frontières. Photo: Anne CHAON/AFP

How heartless can we get when, very recently (as has been happening time and time again), the government instructed the AFM not only to brutally ignore distress calls from a boat full of exhausted migrants in Maltese waters but unashamedly ordered a commercial ship close by to ignore them too and move on.

However, the captain, with a conscience in its right place, would have none of it and did the right thing, taking the migrants to safety.

And how cynical and callous can the prime minister and his government be when they have the gall to defend keeping or actually imprisoning over 400 migrants on leisure boats for days on end, like cattle, blaming COVID-related measures and Malta’s safety. This was no pleasure cruise. If health measures had to be taken, the migrants could have and should have been put in a decent place on dry ground and afforded human dignity. It was a terrible, dehumanising decision, which also smacks of arrogant racism, whichever way you look at it.

Had the migrants been our relatives, your relatives or wealthy people, friends and acquaintances, would the thought have ever crossed anyone’s mind to treat them so appallingly?

Carmel Zammit – Naxxar

The last idol

David Marinelli wrote: “All scriptures of all religions are clear on the point that we are the children of a good God” (June 16).

“Does history support a belief in God? If by God we mean not the creative vitality of nature but a supreme being intelligent and benevolent, the answer must be a reluctant negative. Add to the crimes, wars and cruelties of man the earthquakes, storms, tornadoes, pestilences, tidal waves  and other ‘acts of God’ that periodically desolate human and animal life and the total evidence suggests either a blind or an impartial fatality” (Will Durant, The lessons of history).

The search for “God” is “a long pursuit, carrying the junk and treasure of an ancient creed, to a love who keeps faith by seeming mute and deaf, and dead indeed” (Anne Ridler, Collected Poems).

In his biography of Thomas Carlyle, James Froude wrote that Carlyle believed that “the poor wretches called mankind treated God as if he were indeed, in Milton’s words ‘a buzzard idol’ [a bird of prey] which would exact an account of them for their misdoings to the smallest fibre”.

The French modernist Abbé Hébert described God as la dernière idole (the last idol).

John Guillaumier – St Julian’s