Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/706995
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 24 JULY 2016 24 Opinion I t must be such a hard life being a Member of Parliament these days. As if it wasn't bad enough that they already enjoy full liberty to say whatever the hell they like in Parliament, about whomever they like, without facing any form of legal repercussion whatsoever… apparently, they are now so scared of ending up on 'hate blogs' that they can't even go to the beach. I kid you not. This is how Nationalist MP Claudette Buttigieg, the Shadow Minister for Health, put it this week: "We have reached the extreme when Members of Parliament can't even go swimming for fear that a photo might be taken. Thanks to a few individuals, we have become conditioned…" Can you imagine? Those poor sods can't even enjoy a swim on a relaxing, working weekday. And not for fear that some jellyfish might get entangled in their private parts, either (I mean, that's the sort of phobia we can all relate to)… but for fear that they may be exposed to ridicule or malice on certain blogs. Honestly: the gross injustice of it all. I mean, what's the point of even having a 'summer recess', if you can't spend the entire day sunning yourself at Ghadira Bay with all the other tourists? It's like schooldays without summer holidays. I can just imagine MPs like Claudette Buttigieg, on the edge of their Parliamentary seats with their eyes permanently fixed on the clock… only for the final bell to ring, whereupon everybody suddenly throws up laptops, Ipads and notebooks up in the air, and stampedes out of the building chanting: 'No more English! No more French! No more sitting at a Pea-Green Desk…!' And then, the harsh reality. No more swimming in the sea, either… because big bad Glenn Bedingfield might be there with a hidden camera, ready to have a field day with your bikini-line. It almost reminds me of the release of 'Jaws 2', the film that ruined our collective summer way back in the 1980s. Remember? 'Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water…'. No, no, this is too much. Personally, I think we should start a petition so that MPs are given their own private beach – walled off from the rest of the public, and manned 24-7 by security personnel paid for by the State – to ensure that the most privileged members of our society can enjoy their summer holidays like everybody else… Oops. Did I say everybody else? 'Everybody else' like… who, exactly? Ok, I suppose there are other categories that get their summers off. Teachers and academics automatically spring to mind… though their 'recess' also comes with a tonne of exams and assignments to grade, resit papers to draw up, and (unless things have changed drastically since my schooldays) private lessons to be given every day of the week. Other categories might enjoy other summertime perks such as half-days. But the rest of us? We don't experience much variation to our daily work schedules, just because the earth 's orbit has brought it marginally closer to the Sun. In fact, for the vast majority the summer months are actually a f laming nuisance. Ask the builders on any of the 16 building sites visible from my home (though you might have to take a crash course in Swahili or Bulgarian first). They have to get started before 7am, to get as much done before it gets too hot to work by around 10. Same goes for quarrymen, road repairs, plasterers and the Water Works maintenance unit. Unlike members of Parliament, these people can't just take a dip whenever they feel like. The most they can do is wrap their head in a handkerchief. Meanwhile it is not just blue- collar, manual labourers whose job necessitates constant exposure to the sun at the Raphael Vassallo I think we should start a petition so that MPs are given their own private beach – walled off from the rest of the public Gone to the blogs Will our children reap a whirlwind? I wonder what could possibly make Saviour Balzan think that his newspaper is out of synch with its readers when it comes to the matter of 'migrants' and 'refugees'? From his moral high ground he claims that the Maltese are detached from the history behind the 'despair' of migrants and refugees and precedes his list of what ails Arab and some African countries by stating that "Africa and the Middle East in particular have been the playing ground of the West" seemingly overlooking the tiny detail that practically the entire world, including our tiny island, has at some stage or another been 'the playing ground of the West', much the same way that other parts of the world were the playing grounds of whichever culture was in the ascendancy at a particular time. What Balzan in fact fails to point out is that while the rest of the world shook off direct Western domination and proceeded to get on with their lives and even improve their living standards, the Middle East and large swathes of Africa have not. Balzan's declaration was in fact very reminiscent of a recent tirade by a University of Malta International Relations senior lecturer who in a mid- March 2016 Work in Progress Seminar Series lecture on campus followed the well- trodden path of blaming the West for all that is amiss in the Middle East. In 2002 the UN Development Programme and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development released the first Arab Human Development Report, a devastating account of the failures of the Arab world written by Arab intellectuals which highlighted the many deficiencies plaguing a region which although sharing a religion and a language nevertheless differed considerably from place to place. Since then much has changed but in the main it seems to have been for the worse rather than for the better. Foremost amongst the deficiencies identified is what the report calls the freedom deficit. As the report made clear the wave of democracy that transformed governance in most of Latin America and East Asia in the 1980s and Eastern Europe and much of Central Asia in the late 1980s and early 1990s had barely reached the Arab States and attempts to free up societies since have in the main failed miserably. The dismal position of women, another highlighted failing, is reflected in the fact that more than half of the region's women were illiterate while maternal mortality rates were double those of Latin America and the Caribbean and four times those of East Asia. It would also be an understatement to say that women in the Arab world suffer from unequal citizenship and legal entitlements. But the characteristic of the Arab world which has the most serious immediate consequences for its own development and what has very important consequences for us has to do with demography. An Arab Human Development Report Research Paper prepared by Barry Mirkin published in 2010 states that the population of the Arab countries had nearly tripled since 1970, climbing from 128 million to 359 million. To state that their prospects for jobs were at best dismal would be putting it very mildly so even if the crisis in Syria, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and ISIS/Daesh were to go away tomorrow the pull factor of Europe's wealthy cities and the push factor of population pressure at home augurs for an ever-increasing number of Arabs clamouring at the gates of Europe but the time has come for us to put in place gatekeepers who will determine who enters and who does not. Only a tiny minority of Muslims would seem to actively support or participate in terrorism but a large share of them harbour all sorts of chauvinistic attitudes towards other Muslim sects, religions, races, ethnicities and nationalities, women, sexual minorities and others with non-normative (from an Orthodox Muslim point of view) beliefs and practices. Are these really the sort of people we want in our midst? Muslims are evidently not alone in being chauvinistic, of course, and Christians, Jews, Hindus and others have their fair share while hundreds of millions have been killed in the name of some fatherland or ideology, indeed chauvinism seems to be part of the human condition, but I have not heard of any Christian using a truck to kill nearly a hundred people enjoying a holiday lately, or of a Jew blowing himself up in a park crowded with families celebrating Easter. Martyrdom to a Christian or a Jew is dying for their faith while martyrdom for a good number of Muslims seems to be dying for the faith while killing as many other people as possible who do not see eye-to-eye with them on some issue or other. Outgoing US President Barak Obama has made it a habit of quoting the Quran – specifically 5:32 "Whosoever slays a soul it shall be as if he had slain all mankind; and whosoever saves one life it shall be as if he has saved all mankind" – to demonstrate Islam's peaceful essence but as University of California professor and Al-Jazeera senior columnist Mark – no friend of the West – LeVine, has stated neither Obama nor most other leaders read the next verse in the Quran which declares the punishment for perceived enemies of Islam to be execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet. I have a feeling that bleeding- heart liberals across Europe have gravely overestimated both our societies' capacity to absorb people with such an alien mindset and the willingness of these newcomers and their children to buy into our values, a sine qua non for successful integration. Malta is an increasingly cosmopolitan society but is it heading in the right direction? According to MaltaToday's James Debono, in 2014 more children were born to foreign parents who were both born in Africa (151) than to foreign parents who were both from the EU (122). Is this really where we want to go or are we sowing the wind and setting the scene for a whirlwind to be reaped by our children? The message from across Europe is increasingly that we should look towards societies with populations whose cultural and other characteristics are more akin to ours to make up for our demographic deficit if we are not to bequeath a terrible legacy to future generations. Europe's pull factor and the push factor of population pressure at home augurs for an ever- increasing number of Arabs clamouring at the gates of Europe Carmel Vassallo