Rewriting history again, are we?

I have reservations (and great big whopping ones at that) about Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando's tirade against Turkey's EU membership bid last week. But I do agree with him one at least point.

Responding to the Turkish Minister's retaliatory comments, JPO remarked: "If I'm childish and foolish, I'm not alone."  Well, who can possibly argue with that? This country is literally overflowing with childish and foolish people to keep him company.  Indeed the words had barely left the Zebbug MP's mouth, when the Prime Minister addressed a small crowd of 'Nazzjonalista tal-qalba' in Qawra. This is how it was reported:

"Stopping short of mentioning the media reports over PL leader Joseph Muscat's meeting with ambassador Han Tae Song, the Prime Minister said the Nationalist Party never held meetings behind closed doors. 'Our meetings have always been public and we have always made our position clear, whatever the issue was,' Gonzi said..."

Which I suppose is technically correct. The Nationalist Party did not have any secret meetings with North Korea - not that we know about, anyway - for the simple reason that it didn't have any meetings at all. It was the National GOVERNMENT, not party, that met with representatives of Pyongyang. (Do you know the difference, by the way? Because if so, that's more than 90% of government MPs can claim...)

And guess what? That meeting was indeed secret. It took place behind closed doors, and what was said was not reported afterwards. Most revealing of all, there was no DOI statement to announce it, as there usually is whenever government officials meet their foreign counterparts to discuss matters of 'mutual interest'.

See? It is perfectly clear from Dr Gonzi's own comment that he himself believed he was addressing an audience of puerile imbeciles. (Note: That the same audience applauded him so loudly for believing this - and even broke into an impromptu chant of 'Ghax Ghannda Gonzi Maghna' - suggests he may well have had a point.)

Nor did the Prime Minister stop there. I quote from the same report: "Gonzi went on to refer to the Libyan uprising and said that government had been the first from the international community to condemn the attacks on the civilians... The Prime Minister added that Muscat - who is currently heading a delegation in Libya - had failed to condemn the attacks and had waited for a more opportune time. 'Now Dr Muscat, don't you dare ruin the good reputation which we have built,' Gonzi said."

Strange, how memory plays tricks on us sometimes. I, for one remember the same sequence of events slightly differently. As I recall, Dr Gonzi's government did not exactly drop everything in its mad scramble to condemn Muammar's atrocities. How could it, when Dr Gonzi himself had so recently become the last Western leader to visit the leader of the Revolution in his Tripoli tent, begging-bowl in hand?  

And that was not exactly the first time Gonzi had embraced (both literally and figuratively) the Libyan leader. In those far-off days - i.e., little more than a year ago - Gonzi's government used to publicly boast about its excellent relations with Gaddafi's Libya all the time, and even snap at the occasional lone voice which dared criticise those same relations.

Examples: when MaltaToday criticised Sarkozy's nuclear deal with Gaddafi in 2007, then Justice and Home Affairs Minister Carm Mifsud Bonnici had lashed out with what became a front-page headline the following Wednesday: DON'T CRITICISE LIBYA.

Elsewhere, Foreign Minister Tonio Borg took it upon himself to internationally champion Gaddafi's outrageous demands for €5 billion from the EU, in return for halting the flow of irregular migration from Libya. This was at best a weird thing to demand, when you consider that Gaddafi (just like everyone else) was obliged by international law to do precisely what he claimed he could only do with a €5 billion bribe. But how much weirder is it for the Foreign Minister of an EU member state, to openly defend someone who was unabashedly holding the same EU to ransom?

Wait, there's more. Various exponents of Gonzi's government likewise defended the Italy-Libya pushback deal of 2010, which has since been condemned as illegal by the European Court of Human Rights. Not, mind you, that we needed any ECHR ruling. I would have thought it was spectacularly obvious that sending asylum seekers back to a country like Libya - without even processing their asylum applications - was tantamount to a gross human rights violation.

Well, history will no doubt be the judge of that. After all, it quickly became fashionable to condemn the Gaddafi regime once the uprising got going...  and even then, only when NATO decided to get involved, and it suddenly became a politically 'safe' thing to do. And this brings me to the most incredible of Gonzi's claims last Saturday. Once again, he repeated the same old ludicrous catch-phrase of 'always being on the right side of history'.

Excuse me, but... are we talking about the same history that will judge Gaddafi as a murderous tyrant? And if so: how will it judge those people and governments who had so loudly and consistently supported the same Gaddafi when the going was good?

So Dr Gonzi, please. You can carry on treating your audiences like children and fools as much as you like. But you can't so easily rewrite history, and expect to fool us all.