Author: Migrant Tales

A letter to Prime Minister Juha Sipilä

Posted on by Migrant Tales
Dear PM Sipilä,
 
I have resided in Finland since 2000 and feel this affords me the position to speak on this subject from personal experience.
 
My experience of immigration & ‘integration’ pre-dates the recent migrant crises and therefore my views are not greatly influenced or biased by such.
Prime Minister Juha Sipilä. Source: Parliament.

 

The recent results of a 2017 report by EU Agency for Fundamental Human Rights (FRA) has placed Finland as EU’s second most racially-discriminative EU nation. I have not contributed feedback to this survey, however, would welcome any opportunity to do so in future.
 
The FRA’s results have been publicly acknowledged by some of your peers; including public recognition from Kirsi Pimiä (non.discrimination ombudsman/yhdenvertaisuusvaltuutettu). 
 
I would also like to take the opportunity to quote FRA Director (Professor) M O’Flaherty;
 
“With every act of discrimination and hate, we erode social cohesion and create inequalities that blight generations fuelling the alienation that may ultimately have devastating consequences.”
 
I and my family – including bi-lingual children – have been victims of such hate and discrimination. Discrimination that has been repeatedly enabled and excused by local public sector workers and has led directly to negative outcomes described above. Local officials are enabled & given too much power without regulation which they can abuse to bully and intimidate and their ‘clients’ are unable to obtain legal redress. I have experienced a culture where very serious false allegations have been permitted and effectively encouraged by social workers that appear to enjoy the psychological bullying. The victims are unable to seek redress as police are not allowed to investigate such cases and so the cycle is allowed to continue. This cycle has continued for several years and the people behind it have been systematically attempting to drive-out and destroy. This bullying – of several years duration – has been excused and dismissed by local authority executives to us in person as “maassa maan tavalla” – I take this as both a highly offensive insult (as it was intended) and as a racial slur; yet another example of the empowered punishing the powerless. 
 
In my view, there is no longer any excuse or mitigation for Finnish Govt & leadership to either deny or downplay these issues any longer; such as was the 2015 Nordic Media press release.
 
I implore you Mr Sipilä and your professional colleagues/peers to take immediate actions that will lead to prevention of the potentially devastating consequences of racism, discrimination, injustice and social exclusion in Finland. 
 
In my opinion, you must now engage with your critics and accept that negative feedback IS of positive value.

Exposing white Finnish privilege #46: Teuvo Hakkarainen = white racism and sexism

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 Disgraced Perussuomalaiset (PS)* MP Teuvo Hakkarainen, an Islamophobic politician convicted of ethnic agitation, got off with a light slap on the hand from the PS for forcing a fellow MP to kiss him while drunk. But that’s not all. We now know that Hakkarainen grabbed another woman MP by the hair a year ago while drunk. 

The hair-pulling incident with Christian Democrat MP Päivi Räsänen was kept under wraps and apparently only known to a few like the speaker of parliament Maria Lohela and Sampo Terho, the former PS parliamentary group leader.

Another former Social Democrat MP, Mikael Junger, told the media this week that Hakkarainen had tried to kiss him without his consent at a party.

How is it possible that a white MP can get away with such aggressive behavior that includes drunkenness and sexual harassment in parliament?

Imagine in London if an MP would have acted like Hakkarainen at the House of Commons? Imagine if a Muslim had done what Hakkarainen did in public?Imagine what kind of a lynching we’d see on social media and in print media?

 

Read the full story here.

White Finnish privilege #46

What happened Thursday and the action that the PS took to reprimand Hakkarainen speak volumes about who has privilege in this country.

Continue reading “Exposing white Finnish privilege #46: Teuvo Hakkarainen = white racism and sexism”

Finland’s Perussuomalaiset party and its disdain for #metoo and our institutions

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Racism and Islamophobia are nothing more than pigheaded ignorance. 

What do you do if an Islamophobic MP called Teuvo Hakkarainen gets so drunk in parliament that he picks a fight with other MPs from the rival Blue Reform party by throwing bottles at their meeting? What about if that same MP, convicted for hate speech, grabs a fellow woman MP and forces her to kiss him? 

All of this happened on Thursday.

What about if an aid for the PS got so drunk the same day at a Christmas party in parliament that he was carried out and taken to a hospital in an ambulance?

 

Teuvo Hakkarainen on his first day in parliament in 2011.

What about if the leader of the PS, Jussi Halla-aho, believes that exposing this type of inappropriate behavior is synonymous with “undermining trust” between politicians and the media?

Continue reading “Finland’s Perussuomalaiset party and its disdain for #metoo and our institutions”

Mike Hofman: Media censorship in Finland during the Cold War

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The thesis below published in 2014 by Mike Hofman. It is a comprehensive report on how censorship and self-censorship happened in Finland during the Cold War. It is surprising how Finland has sidestepped this issue and thrown it in the dustbin of history. 

As the old saying states, if we don’t know or deny our history are condemned to repeat it.

Even during the height of the Cold War, when media censorship and self-censorship were endemic in Finland, I never heard of the police searching a home of a reporter without a court order as happened Sunday,  according to  YLE News.

Read below Hofman’s thesis (in Dutch) and my interview in English.

Read full thesis (in Dutch) and a synopsis in English here.

Below is the interview in English that Mike Hofman had with me. There is only one correction in the interview. I worked for Bridge News, not British News.

 

Continue reading “Mike Hofman: Media censorship in Finland during the Cold War”

Finland’s standing in global press freedom ranking likely to suffer another downgrade

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Finland’s standing in global press freedom rankings will take another blow this year after the police carried out without a court order a Helsingin Sanomat reporter Laura Halminen’s personal and company phones, computer and iPad, and a large number of USB flash drives, reports YLE News. The search was carried out after Finland’s biggest daily published leaked classified documents from the secretive Defense Forces’ Intelligence Research Center. 

Writes YLE News: “During the search, which was carried out without a court order, police seized Halminen’s personal phone, her company phone, her personal computer, and iPad, as well as a large number of USB flash drives. Police also reportedly searched through her bookshelves and kitchen ventilation, but did not search her children’s room.”

 Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom ranking list.

 

Halminen was obliged to destroy the hard drive of her computer to protect her source(s).

“By destroying the device,” she was quoted as saying in YLE News,  “I wanted to ensure the confidentiality of my sources as well as possible.”

Continue reading “Finland’s standing in global press freedom ranking likely to suffer another downgrade”

Finland’s lost decade flirting with racism, fascism and the Perussuomalaiset party

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Sampo Terho, minister culture, sport and European affairs, was elected on Saturday to chair Blue Reform, a Lilliputian party that split from the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* after their plush ministerial jobs were on the line after Jussi Halla-aho was elected PS chairperson in June. 

Even if the PS imploded into two factions, the Blue Reform party continues in government despite its roughly 1% backing in the latest polls.

Terho admitted Saturday that the new party’s aim is a long and challenging one. He said that the final goal is to become the biggest party in Finland.

The new chairman of Blue Reform can fantasize about the future. The PS’ opportunity came in the 2011 and 2015 parliamentary elections but was dashed by power struggles and infighting.

Finland has paid a high price to learn today that parties like the PS and Blue Reform are a deception because the only thing they like to do is offer simplistic solutions to complex issues, scapegoat and never offer effective solutions.

The lies and the fantasies coming out of Blue Reform appear never-ending. Terho said that his party helped salvage Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s government and thereby ensured that the country’s anti-EU stance and anti-immigration policy would continue.

“Finland has a more sensible immigration policy [now] where the economic burden of granting residence permits on humanitarian grounds, uncontrolled immigration and security risks are checked,” he said, adding that one of the government’s accomplishments, thanks to Blue Reform, is putting an end to “asylum tourism.”

Fact check: It is questionable whether there was any economic burden of Finland for granting residence permits on humanitarian grounds. The Finnish Immigration Service’s numbers speak for themselves: 2016 (50 cases); 2015 (6); 2014 (4); 2013 (11); 2012 (112); 2011 (143); and 2010 (654). 

Exaggerating and feeding fake news to the public is nothing new by politicians like Terho, who loathes cultural diversity. He also wants through the Association of Finnish Culture and Identity (Suomalaisuuden liitto) for Finland to remain white and ensure our history is thoroughly whitewashed.

Continue reading “Finland’s lost decade flirting with racism, fascism and the Perussuomalaiset party”

Exposing white Finnish privilege #45: Do blondes have more fun?

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In the 1960s, there was a brand that dyed your hair blonde and asked if blondes have more fun? 

Considering all the sexual harassment charges going on these days that have exposed a pressing social issue, being blonde could be hell for a woman.

Sexist Lady Clairol alleges that blondes have more fun.

In Finland in 2017, blonde, blue-eyed women are used in ads to personify racial purity. One Islamophobe, who indulges in racism and bigotry, Laura Huhtasaari, embodies white Finland to the point of ad nauseam.

Why is she obnoxious?

Apart from her racism, whiteness for Huhtasaari is all about power and privilege. Her image and persona constantly remind us which ethnic group calls the shots in this country.

The ideal blonde in Finland appears in a Finnair ad.

Continue reading “Exposing white Finnish privilege #45: Do blondes have more fun?”

EU-MIDIS II: White Europe’s tacit approval and silence of ethnic discrimination

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Should we be surprised by a new EU-MIDIS II report that concludes that discrimination of people of Sub-Sharan African origin suffered the most discrimination in Luxembourg and Finland (50% and 45%, respectively)?  Matters aren’t that rosy elsewhere either. People with North African backgrounds endured the most discrimination in the Netherlands (49%), and the Roma reported the most discrimination in countries like Greece and Portugal (48% and 47%, respectively).

Contrarily, the report revealed that the lowest rates of discrimination by respondents were people of Russian origin living in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (7%, 6%, and 4%, respectively).

Finland has published in the past quite a few comprehensive studies about different ethnic and national groups like the Somalis. The EU-MIDIS II findings, however, are by no means a surprise.

Read the full report here.

Touko Aalto, the chairperson of the Greens, is the only politician in Finland who commented on the EU-MIDIS II report.

“Today there’s been news about the latest EU report, which claims that is is one of the most prejudiced countries in Europe,” Aalto wrote on his Facebook wall. “The non-discrimination ombudsman [Kirsi Pimiä] commented that the [EU-MIDIS II] report is a clear indication that there is a lot of racism in Finland.”

Even if we know that racism is a social ill that affects a lot of migrants and minorities, especially from Sub-Saharan Africa, the big question is what is the government going to do, if anything? At this moment, Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s government has had a dismal record on racism.

Continue reading “EU-MIDIS II: White Europe’s tacit approval and silence of ethnic discrimination”

Zalina Ametova:* How discrimination destroys academic careers

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Discrimination is a disease that plagues many organizations and often causes more damage to the organization such as profit loss, economical issues, and natural disasters. This is because discrimination destroys the people who make up the organization and causes damages irreparable by money or promotion. Career paths and patterns are things most affected by such a plague because they damage people mentally, emotionally, and socially. If a person is mentally and emotionally damaged by discrimination, this person becomes paralyzed and unable to function properly within the organization. Also, socially, victims experience role malfunction and resort to isolation for comfort rather than ask for help from colleagues.

The following tells a short story that reflects how discrimination in the academe and the workplace can negatively affect a person and cause problematic career patterns:

On an interview for a Ph.D. position at a university in Netherland, John, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was met by a professor who utterly undermined his professional capabilities just by being mean and dismissive. During the interview, the professor commented on his subject grades and thesis grade to be quite higher than usual compared to Netherland standards. He sounded surprised, but not impressed. 

While scrutinizing his CV after a few discussions, the professor was shocked to discover that John is currently taking up a second degree in economics at the time. John expressed his reasons freely with confidence, explaining the benefits of having a second degree in economics. However, the professor took it differently and concluded that the second degree puts John at a great disadvantage because he might forget all about physics—the major he’s applying for. 

Though the physics major remained John’s focus for 11 years, the professor thinks that the economics degree can easily overwhelm him and redirect his focus away from physics. Sharing his point of view was understandable for John; however, the professor commented about something that is quite irrelevant to the interview’s topic—his age. At 27, he’s pretty young and obviously puts him at an advantage over other older applicants, but the professor thought otherwise. He said that John is too old for a Ph.D. because by age 30 when he finishes his Ph.D., he thinks John will have less time to contribute to the science. This came to a shock to John because he met many other Ph.D. candidates and students who are way older than him and yet he is considered too old? It made no sense to him but he just calmly put up with the professor’s irrelevant and somehow mocking comment (based on the tone of the professor’s voice). Things got worse when John later received an email from that same professor. The email stated that John was “a bit lost in life” and unfit for the position. This bothered him greatly and left him wondering how on earth did he end up being judged like that? He was not even tested for his knowledge and skills yet, but he’s already been dismissed as unfit or incapable for the position. The experience caused him feelings of depression and resentment. After all his hard work and aspirations in the field, he was suddenly and rudely judged by someone who didn’t even try to understand him. 

Continue reading “Zalina Ametova:* How discrimination destroys academic careers”

QUOTE OF THE DAY: A good one about cultural appropriation

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“That blackness on your face it will come off, won’t it? You wipe that blackness off, and they’ll treat you like a man. We black, in a white man’s country, it ain’t nothing we can do about it. If you don’t understand that you don’t understand nothing.”

John Marriott in Black like me (1964)*

 

* This movie, Black like me, was based on a true story about a white man who changed the color of his skin with drugs to write about how difficult the lives of blacks were in the Southern United States. While the leading actor, James Whitmore, plays the “black” reporter, the makeup isn’t too convincing. Is the movie guilty of cultural appropriation?