[WATCH] Xarabank presenter Peppi Azzopardi confronts Lowell’s priest over far-right endorsement

Xarabank presenter Peppi Azzopardi took Catholic priest David Muscat's apparent endorsement of far-right figurehead Norman Lowell head-on, confronting the cleric and condemning his behaviour as 'unbelievable.'

In the last edition of Xarabank, the two locked horns as Azzopardi produced a picture of hate-crime victim Lassana Cisse Souleymane who was killed cold-bloodedly in a drive-by shooting in Hal Far last April. Two soldiers are charged with the crime.

"I can't believe it, that the Father didn't go to Norman Lowell to convert him and his followers. He went there to deliver a speech in which he said that Lowell is planting a seed that will bear fruit in the future. Lowell is sowing hate, Father, and the fruit of that hate is Lassana Cisse Souleymane. This man was killed because he was black," Azzopardi said, revealing a printed picture of the victim. 

The raucous audience objected to this and Azzopardi chided them and insisted that hate speech, invoked by Lowell himself, would continue to be a fuel to such crimes. Muscat seemed unperturbed by this as he smiled and revealed his own printed photograph of himself with another black man.

"I too brought a picture," he said.

While Muscat didn't condemn Lowell, he said that the latter politician was ostensibly harmless, a laughable and multilingual figure that would put off any listener from racism altogether. He added that Lowell would not be contesting the next general election.

For this reason, it's unclear why the off-key cleric seemed to endorse Lowell's far-right movement in the first place but he did take a stab at other politicians who he said were no different from Lowell.

"You bring other politicians here. The difference between [Lowell] and other politicians is that the latter say the same things as Lowell but they sugarcoat the pill. Lowell is not a politician but a political philosopher," he said, evading the question of why he supported him.

Azzopardi prodded him again and asked him why he could endorse a Nazi sympathiser and mentioned how Adolf Hitler had killed more than six million Jews. Holocaust deniers in the audience booed and said that this was not true.

"Listen to them. This is the problem. Lowell's people don't believe that what Hitler did is real," he said. 

Muscat went into a convoluted spiel on how history was written by the winners and that what Americans had done was just as terrible.

"Wars are always historicised by the winners. Americans aren't the saints we think they are... they killed millions in the blink of an eye in Hiroshima and Nagasaki," he said, referring to the atom bombs dropped in Japan in 1945.

He then referred to a Harrison Ford film about the possible false-flag operation that allowed the Americans to go to war with Iraq in the guise of putting a stop to their nuclear programme.

"Are you justifying Hitler's actions?" Azzopardi asked.

"No, I'm saying they're both wrong," Muscat replied and the segment ended as if the two were in agreement all along.

But Muscat shocked audiences with his condenscending behaviour towards Celine, a transexual guest on the panel. His attitude bordered on the flirtatious as he repeatedly asked Celine to look him in the eyes as he moved his chair closer to hers.

And when this 'intimate' situation was disturbed by the discussion host with a question, Muscat rudely shut him down.

The priest, who has publicly ridiculed the acronym LGBTIQ+, looked evidently lost when confronted by Celine over her sexuality. Trying to charm her with smiles and a calm demeanour, Muscat insisted he could not speak about an individual without knowing the person's full story, only to go red in the face when confronted again by Azzopardi over his attitude towards gay people.