Month: August 2016

Finland’s blind spot of racism and the incitement of violence against migrants and minorities

Posted on by Migrant Tales

July was a busy month for hate speech with the usual bunch of politicians from a particular party hurling insults at migrants and minorities.  If we look at the pyramid of hate below, we can see politicians like Perussuomalaiset (PS)* MP Teuvo Hakkarainen and PS youth leader Sebastian Tynkkynen venturing with their comments to the bias-motivated-violence phase, which openly incites violence against migrants and minorities. 

“We’ve got to stop pussyfooting,” Hakkarainen wrote on his Facebook wall in mid-July after the Nice killings. “Muslims out of this country! Not all Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims. We shouldn’t accept Muslims from the Middle East and Africa to our country.”

Even if fearmongering, demagoguery, xenophobia, pandering and raw hatred are the norm in today’s Finland against migrants, it is a a slippery slope were already on. The faster we slide down that slope the more hateful our attacks become.

Na?ytto?kuva 2016-8-8 kello 4.09.24

Source: Newspaper Rock

A recent example of an anti-immigration rally in East Helsinki during the weekend, a French-speaking person threatens on a YouTube video that Muslims “should be banned from any civilized society.”

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(Institute of Race Relations) Post-referendum racism and the importance of social activism

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Written by IRR News Team

postrefracism report full coverA new report by social media activists on the spike of hate crimes immediately after the referendum on EU membership should prove uncomfortable reading for the Home Office.

On 26 July, the Home Office unveiled its new Hate Crime Action Plan. Home Secretary Amber Rudd not only cited a surge in reported incidents following the referendum vote to leave the EU, but called on the nation to ‘come together and stand united against those who use hate to divide us’. But a new report compiled by activists from three social media platforms and published by #PostRefRacism will prove uncomfortable reading for the new Home Secretary. In its analysis of 645 racist and xenophobic incidents reported to them following the referendum vote, #PostRefRacism draws attention to the divisive policies of the previous Home Secretary. In 2012, Theresa May had promised to deliver policies based on creating a ‘hostile environment’ for irregular migrants, through, for instance, ‘Go Home or face arrest’ vans. Far from being a ‘unifying force’ the Home Office’s ‘insider-outsider’ messages have created the conditions whereby racism can be normalised.

Post-referendum racism and xenophobia: the role of social media activism in challenging the normalisation of xeno-racist narratives (download here, pdf file, 5.8mb) is a factual account of the lived experience of racism felt keenly, post-referendum, by BAME communities, whether born in the UK, long-settled or from newly-arrived communities, up and down the country. Several hundred people were so angered by incidents of hate that, at very short notice, they attended an emergency meeting in London called by The Monitoring Group. As this report shows, cases reported to social media platforms were largely verbal abuse, though incidents involving physical violence or threats of violence accounted for 14 per cent of cases, within this:

  • Abuse aimed at people with non-European BAME backgrounds made up the majority of reported incidents – nearly a third of the total – with ‘South Asians’ reporting the most incidents (16 per cent). Around a fifth of the abuse aimed at this group was also Islamophobic.

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(Racism Review) Our post-truth culture: institutional and individual consequences

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Maria Chavez

This presidential election has become the perfect storm of “post-truth” politics and racism. It is reflected by the fact that an unqualified “know-nothing” like Trump could be nominated as the Republican presidential candidate. Trump’s disregard for ethics, extreme egoism, and racist solutions to complex policy problems, which include banning all Muslims, building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and bombing our enemies into the stone age, will have institutional and individual consequences if he is elected as the next president.

Na?ytto?kuva 2016-8-3 kello 13.44.55

Read the full story here.

In an article entitled “Why We’re Post-Fact,” Pomerantsev states:

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Juha Sipilä and Petteri Orpo: The sad Finnish tale of spineless politicians

Posted on by Migrant Tales

In the United States, a lot of Republican politicians who should know better still haven’t withdrawn their support for Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump despite his ultranationalistic, racist and misogynistic comments. The latest row involves Trump insulting the parents of Captain Humayun Khan, a Muslim who was killed in Iraq.   

Writes The Guardian: “Donald Trump’s attacks on the family of the army captain Humayun Khan, who died in combat in Iraq in 2004, have inflamed the candidate’s already poor standing with the Muslim American community, with many saddened and frustrated by his recent remarks.”

While some leading Republicans have denounced Trump’s disgraceful comments of the Khans, they fall short of withdrawing their support for his candidacy. A good example of the latter is Senator John McCain of Arizona, a decorated Vietnam War hero, who criticized what Trump said to the Khans but fell short of taking away his support for him.  

Even if politicians like McCain are painted by the media as the voice of moderation, he’s anything but that.  Let’s not forget that when he ran against President Barak Obama in 2008, his running mate was Sarah Pailin.

Some may ask how is it possible that a person like Trump can get the nomination for the highest office in the United States and why, in Europe, far-right politicians like Marine Le Pen of France and parties like the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* of Finland grow thanks to their vengeful and racist narrative?

The only answer to the latter that I have is spineless politicians. Those that have helped extremist populist parties to power aren’t voters per se but politicians from mainstream parties that have permitted with their silence for such parties to grow.

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Migrants’ Rights Network: Byron Hamburgers: When employers fail to do right by migrant employees

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Don Flynn*

What else could Byron’s have done? The social media world was awash with attempted defences of the hamburger chain after it collaborated in the arrest of 35 of its migrant workers earlier in July. Our answer is they didn’t have to go along with the shabby act of entrapment of its staff, and they could have done so much more to push back against punitive, anti-worker rules.

The operation directed against migrant employees of the fast food chain, Byron Hamburgers by Home Office Border enforcement officials on the evening of 4th July has sparked a lively discussion about the extent to which employers should be held to any sort of standard why it comes to a duty of care towards its workers.

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