What value life?

A man lost his life last weekend. The details are still emerging, but what is certain is that he was alive prior to being taken into custody by the Armed Forces of Malta, but ended up dead within 24 hours of being apprehended.

It does not matter whether the man was Maltese or Malian. His name, or names, do not come into it either. He was a man, and he died an unpleasant and untimely death. That is the only thing that should concern us.

Unfortunately it does not quite work that way in Malta, does it? There are many amongst us who do not believe that all men were born equal in front of God. As far as they are concerned, some lives are worth protecting, while others can be stamped out of existence with impunity.

As I read the comments streaming in under the online reports of the incident, I felt chilled to the bone. A good number of people clearly felt that beating a man to death is justified because the Armed Forces are facing a difficult task with the immigrants. Believe it or not, these people feel that it is OK to murder a man, kicking him until his internal organs rupture and dies in misery as a result, if he is an "illegal" - after all, such people have it coming to them.

Many people said that the soldiers guarding the detention centres have a hard time doing so, and that it is inevitable that one or two of them would blow up occasionally. The argument continues... on seeing the men guarding the immigrants are sometimes pelted with food, or attacked with razors and other improvised weapons, they are entitled to lose it at times.

Others waxed lyrical about the fact that the men who beat the Malian to death are Maltese, and hence they deserve our support. The dead man, on the other hand, is an outsider, and an unwanted outsider at that.

When I read such statements I get a feeling of what it must have been like in Nazi Germany when the Jews were dehumanised prior to the Holocaust. The arguments put forward by those who wanted to justify murder on a massive scale were undoubtedly similar to the ones put forward by our own local racists - these people do not look like us, they do not think like us, they do not dress like us, they do not pray like us, they do not eat the same food as us.... hence they are not as good as us.

What is really shocking, however, are not the comments posted by racists and bigots, but the absence of a barrage of comments posted by people like you and me - people who are supposedly not blinded by hate and ignorance.

All we need to do is hark back to the massive outpouring of outrage that flooded all the comment boards and social networks when Star was found buried alive to get a feeling of how weak the response has been so far. When Star died the Maltese public made its voice heard and the authorities listened. Believe it or not, a short while later, a monument to Star was inaugurated at St Francis Animal Welfare Centre.

At the time of the Star incident it was impossible not to login to Facebook or go to the hairdresser's without having to listen to people rant and rave about the cruelty that that poor dog had to experience.

However, now a man gets beaten to death and these very same people are silent.

Apparently the life of a Malian man is less precious than the life of a dog.