Last week a Hungarian friend warned me not to mention a piece of gossip he had previously let me in on since our common friend would probably "go all medieval on his ass" if he got to know that the trivial piece of information had been divulged. Later I learnt that Pulp Fiction had immortalised the expression.

Zemploid has commented on the bloggers' failure to condemn the latest arson attack.

The burning cars are a new phenomenon in Malta so people are understandably shocked by the whole affair and are desperately trying to find a reason for it. But you can already sense that we're turning this into a 'Maltese case'. You read that 'this is what you get in 'Catholic Malta'. Alternatively you get the hackneyed 'where have our values gone?' line. Marie-Louise Coleiro can't believe it: "What is happening to us? What is happening to our society? Hell seems to have broken loose all of a sudden. Where have our values of a closely knit, caring and loving society gone?" Maybe the answer lies in the 'closely knit' nature of Maltese society which appears to be going haywire when faced with its first real external challenge since independence. This, I think, is the only factor which makes the Maltese case different: a sheltered nation which has woken up to find that it's actually part of a bigger world.

While some exponents of the 'new right' are clearly what the French would call "cathos-fachos", I suspect that this labelling trivialises the affair hugely. Racism and intolerance are as old as the hills and, no, we didn't invent them. There's no doubt that the guys burning the cars are medieval in thought and action. However, what's far more shocking, but perhaps predictable, is the laborious debate which surrounds the whole sorry business. It's painful to watch. You get the impression that the columnists who've taken the subject up are actually trying hard to educate their (adult) readers about what constitutes 'acceptable opinions' and what doesn't. Although the political parties' official position has been made clear, other columnists have commented that several people 'in power and in high places' actually harbour xenophobic views. We've all witnessed 'leftist papers' giving mixed messages at best. There's an unmistakably surreal smell in the air. It seems that we've been entirely unprepared mentally for anything of this sort - our artificial squabbles having taken up much of our public space. You get the impression that we have to start entirely from scratch as if we haven't been following events unfold elsewhere over the past 100 years.

The arsonists and racists have 'medieval' written all over them alright. But what makes it scarier is that they appear to be operating in an intellectual vacuum straight out of the Dark Ages.


Tourism update: Daphne has said that Malta is a crap tourist destination (see her article last Thursday). Check out what 'rival island' Lanzarote has to offer. In Maltese! By clicking here.