The Times should stop bullying Gordon Manche: it has become the mouthpiece for incompetent ministers

Instead of defending Gordon Manche after the latter was attacked by one of the government’s ministers, The Times took the side of the minister and his government. The Interior Minister, Byron Camilleri, wrote a Facebook post describing Gordon Manche as an extremist.

It is unheard of for a minister in a European country to post a comment to attack a citizen and call him an extremist. The last time it happened was when Lorry Sant was a minister. He used parliament, and The Times went up in arms about it. I understand that a minister passes such a statement to another politician. That is licit, but passing such a statement to a citizen is unacceptable.

This is not a question of whether one likes Gondon Manche or not or whether Manche is today, to quote the Times, the butt of jokes. This is a question of principle. The Times can never condone such behaviour by the government. Here, the behaviour of ministers is being discussed and not the contents of Gordon Manche’s actions.

I disagree with Manche about taking artists to court. Nevertheless, that is beyond the issue here. The Times wants to appear as the defender of the rule of law, and as such, the editor of The Times knows that the law is equal for everyone. Therefore, with this editorial, The Times again falls on its face.

If this government passed the infamous hate speech law because the Woke are using Malta as a testing ground, Manche is right to put these laws to the test. According to the law passed by this government with the approval of parliament, everyone has a right to institute legal proceedings against anybody who butts jokes about him or her. Manche considers this to be tantamount to hate speech. I would like to repeat that The Times of Malta supported the government because the editors foresaw an instrument in such a law to restrain Catholics. The Times editors hate the Catholics to the bone because the gospel attacks sodomy. The local Maltese Archbishop Scicluna remains utterly silent. After all, he remains in cahoots with them. One wonders why.

This editorial confirms that The Times is today the mouthpiece for incompetent ministers.
Instead of criticizing the government, The Times asks whether the police should indulge Gordon Manche’s request. According to The Times, the police should only accede to requests of individuals like Silvan Agius and his woke friends.

If the journalists of The Times have information that Manche is committing some form of abuse, they should start writing about it. Otherwise, they envy his success while their whole enterprise is financially bankrupt. With this editorial, The Times wants to send Malta back to the period of the Inquisition, when citizens were instigated to spy in neighbours’ lives and report what they considered not in line with the dogma of the Wokes of the day, to the Inquisition.

Today, The Times fails to realize that it has long become the butt of jokes.