Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/257374
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 9 FEBRUARY 2014 Opinion 24 I t's an old cliché, but there are moments in life when you really do feel like you're in a movie. Everything seems to play out according to a script – not necessarily a very well-written one, but nonetheless predictable and formulaic as any Hollywood screenplay, and with better acting to boot. And we all unwittingly fill out our little roles to keep the plot ticking along. This week I was reminded of countless movies based on the Jack the Ripper motif. And it was a piece of video footage – uncannily and eerily similar to a single scene from one of the Hannibal Lecter movies – that sparked it all off. By now you will probably have watched a private screening of the CCTV footage in question. Like myself you might have seen what looks like a bald man with a shining domed forehead, loitering in nail biting vigilance at a dimly-lit Mosta street corner, before reappearing seconds later in the upper corner of the screen to hang a crucified dog from a church parapet. But you might have interpreted the footage differently. Some saw a man in a white balaclava; some argued that it might have been a woman, others still that the person on the street corner was not the same as the one carrying the crucified dog seconds later, and so on. In all such interpretations we found ourselves performing our own little part in a broader screenplay, which seems to echo all the standard devices and plot twists of any classic cinematic psycho thriller. One of the baldest (ahem) interpretations to date concerned a blog post purporting to instantly solve a mystery that has proved beyond the police's capabilities for over three years. 'Muslims crucify a dog and a cat to a cross in Malta – in earmarked Islamic territory', ran the categorical and unequivocal headline. 'What does this crucifixion of animals mean?' the blogger wrote below. 'It means 'you' are next. 'We're coming to take you (Christians) down'.' Ah, yes. Because all those crucified cats and dogs were devout, practising Christians, obviously… as are all things which are cute, cuddly, friendly and innocent; while everything nasty, dangerous and violent is by definition Muslim. So there you have it. An unsolved mystery that has caused widespread revulsion and anger amongst the population at large? It was the Muslims wot dunnit, naturally. It goes without saying (and certainly without proving) that any action which causes moral outrage in a predominantly Christian community can only ever be the work of Muslims. And because no Maltese Christian has ever, ever, EVER perpetrated any form of cruelty of any kind on any living animal, we can safely exclude any Christian suspects in is case. But my, how very convenient. There's an entire population of Maltese Muslims – some 10,000 in all –just lying there waiting for the blame to be lain at their collective door… Oh, and any additional detail that might seemingly lend weight to this interpretation finds itself casually thrown into the mix, even if hopelessly inaccurate and woefully ignorant of the facts. The admin of the same blog also observes that the crimes began in 2011… 'in tandem with [Malta's] mass immigration problems from North Africa'. Yet the phenomenon of mass irregular immigration of boat people (many of whom are incidentally Christians) began much earlier than that, and can be traced back to the late 1990s: over 10 years before the first cat was crucified in Mosta. But who cares? And what need do we have for further investigations, anyway? Simply round up all Malta's Muslims, intern them in a makeshift prison camp – or even better, strip them of their Maltese nationality and deport them en masse – and hey presto! Mystery solved. And if any other cats or dogs are found crucified under identical circumstances in future… well, that only means a few more Muslims somehow managed to slip though the net. So let's just keep fanning those flames of ignorance, paranoia, hysteria and xenophobia, folks… all in the name of justice, animal welfare and human decency, naturally. Meanwhile it needn't surprise us that not a jot of evidence of any kind was supplied to even remotely sustain this theory. Nor that all the evidence to date actually points towards the handiwork of a local culprit, including a number of notes left at the scene of the crimes that even specified a motive: 'revenge' (or at least a psychotic version of the same impulse) for 'abuse' the perpetrator claims to have suffered as a child. These details are not important, because the motive behind the blogger's detective work has nothing to do with actually finding out who killed and/or mutilated those cats and dogs, still less with preventing future cases. The entire exercise was aimed only at capitalising on a widespread sensation of fear, paranoia and mass-hysteria, and directing it towards a single target... which just happens to be the object of the same blogger's own hatred. In this case it's Muslims, but in other scenarios it could just as easily be Roma people, Eastern Europeans, Africans, dodgy Chinese billionaires, or any other minority or denomination you care to name. When prejudice starts feeding off itself, there is simply no limit to the categories we will be told to hate. This will all be very familiar territory to people brought up on real and fictitious psycho thrillers, including the most famous and archetypal of the lot: the Jack the Ripper phenomenon of the 1880s. In that scenario, the Whitechapel police proved similarly incapable of ever solving the mystery – officially, at least – and seeing as the victims were neither cats nor dogs, but humans, the widespread sense of fear, paranoia and hysteria was understandably much more acute. Then as now, efforts were made to direct this dangerously volatile sentiment towards the most vulnerable and unpopular sector of society: which in late 19th century London happened to be the Jews. It would appear that Jack the Ripper himself intended this to happen all along (unsurprisingly, as such theories also provide an instant smokescreen which can only hinder any real effort to identify the real murderer). At the scene of the first of several gruesome murders – on Goulston Street, to be precise – the following graffito was chalked on the wall: 'The Juwes [sic] are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.' Pointing out that "a strong feeling existed against the Jews generally", Police Superintendent Thomas Arnold later reported: "as the Building upon which the writing was found was situated in the midst of a locality inhabited principally by that Sect, I was apprehensive that if the writing were left it would be the means of causing a riot and therefore considered it desirable that it should be removed…" In this respect Arnold was unsuccessful. There were in fact several anti-Semitic riots and demonstrations in the wake of the Jack the Ripper murders, all of which arguably played into the The never-ending story of Jack the Ripper When prejudice starts feeding off itself, there is simply no limit to the categories we will be told to hate Raphael Vassallo