The Malta Independent columnist Daphne Caruana Galizia has taken issue with the comments of a blogger, whom she reported to the police according to comments she herself posted on an internet blog debating the general elections.
Caruana Galizia told blogger Sandro Vella – previously associated with satirical website Maltafly.com – that his name had been put on record with the police “in case there are further developments” after Vella posted a ‘joke’ which portrayed Daphne in the afterlife, after having been supposedly killed in a bomb attack.
“A quick search,” Caruana Galizia told Vella in her comments on the blog, “has revealed that you have already faced one police investigation and ensuing court case for malicious and vindictive harassment of two individuals. Because this kind of leopard rarely changes its spots, and in view of the violent and abusive language you are using towards me here, I thought it best to make things clear. You are not just another blogger, but somebody with a problem.”
While the joke itself was nothing to write home about, it was the comments penned by Daphne herself that have become the centre of attention on the blog, pitting the columnist against those bloggers whom she accuses of being AD and Labour voters.
Caruana Galizia intervened at the point when one commentator expressed scepticism regarding the alleged bomb threat to the journalist, who already suffered arson attack on her house in 2005. Police officers have also been deployed to guard her residence.
In her blog entries, Caruana Galizia described Labour leader Alfred Sant as a “bewigged marionette”, to the other bloggers’ annoyance. “‘Bewigged marionette’ is not name-calling,” she replied, “but a factual description.”
She also defended her son over the One News footage at the University debate between the four political leaders, who warded off a One News cameraman while filming Caruana Galizia. In the blog, Daphne said the footage had been used by a party trying to form a government “to intimidate, through its broadcast, Internet and print media, a newspaper columnist who that political party regards in the Stalinist manner as Public Enemy No. 1 - by harassing her son.”
But her most controversial comment was arguably the one reserved for those who expressed their intentions to vote for AD: “I’m sorry, but in your desperate attempts at convincing yourselves and anyone else who is listening that if Sant becomes prime minister you have nothing to do with it, you are on your own,” she warned in a comment on Jacques Rene Zammit’s blog. “If you had the slightest bit of political savvy or psychological nous, you would know that you are setting yourselves up as hate objects…”
The controversy continues…