Category: Enrique Tessieri

Finnish white privilege #59: In this country, you are guilty until proven innocent

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Interior Minister Kai Mykkänen and the government are using the same tactics as the Nazis in World War 2 but in a different context. The government is not rounding up people and killing them in cold blood but punishing them severely for the crimes others did. 

Imagine the migrant community of Finland, especially Muslims and non-EU citizens, sentenced by social media kangaroo courts encouraging social media lynchings while politicians reinforce such anti-social behavior  with their hostile statements and silence.

Social media lynchings are common in Finland these days. Source: Westword.

Such irresponsible behavior will cost society dearly in the way of social exclusion and increased racism.

Due to what a handful of sexual assault suspects did in Oulu, the government now vows to get tough and deport up to 8,000 asylum seekers. The government is also studying how it can revoke Finnish citizenship from dual citizens as well as terminate permanent residence permits if a person is convicted of a serious crime.

The lowliest of their plans is to find loopholes to circumvent human rights and refugee agreements at the cost of the rights of embattled asylum seekers.

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The media of Finland is part of the country’s Islamophobia and racism problem

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When it comes to challenging Islamophobia and racism, the Finnish media is part of the problem.

Remember the power that words have when writing a sory. You don’t need to kill an ant with a bazooka. 

Journalists and newspapers in Finland, especially tabloids like Iltalehti, Ilta-Sanomat and state broadcaster Yle, are prime examples of not only white Finnish privilege but of white Finnish overkill and rage. 

Anu Koivunen, a professor at Tampere University that researches the media and gender topics, appears a lot in the media. In an op-ed piece in Suomen Kuvalehti,  she details the reporting of three publications that covered the sexual assault cases of Oulu.

Read the full op-ed piece (in Finnish)  here.

Here is Koivunen’s tally of the reporting:

  • Both Ilta-Sanomat and Iltalehti gave in their print editions 20 pages of space for the Oulu sexual assault cases;
  • During a week, Ilta-Sanomat published for five days straight front-page headline stories about Oulu;
  • Iltalehti published a special edition on the sexual assault cases;
  • Ilta-Sanomat published three editorials on the topic and Iltalehti two;

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Police officer fined and charged to pay 5,140 euros for making racist statements and slapping a women twice on the face

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A Finnish police officer in Turku was fined by a court to pay 5,140 euros in charges and lawyer’s fees, according to tabloid Ilta-Sanomat. The police officer, who admitted being too drunk to remember what he said and denied being aggressive at a taxi line, called a woman who attempted to him a “refugee-loving whore” and slapped her twice on the face. 

The police officer reacted in an aggressive manner after seven non-white Finns entered a minibus taxi without waiting in line for a normal taxi.

“Thanks to women like you,” he said admitting later that he was a police officer, “blood flows on Turku’s streets and [didn’t you know] that migrants commit 95% of all crimes?”

 

Read the full story (in Finnish) here.

The police officer slapped the woman on the face a second time when she said she would file charges against him.

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What political capital will the Finnish far-right Perussuomalaiset party gain from Oulu?

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The Perussuomalaiset (PS)* is the first modern Finnish party to capitalize politically on Finland’s Islamophobic and anti-immigration sentiment. With parliamentary elections around the corner on April 14, the question is if the PS will get a boost from the sexual assault cases of Oulu?

Another question is the Blue Reform Party, which split from the PS in June 2017. Will Oulu give it political capital as the PS is hoping?

Considering that the Blue Reform Party have about 2% support in diffrent opinion polls, it is unlikely that will pose a threat in the upcoming parliamentary elections.

The PS’ toxic Islamophobic rhetoric and fear-mongering were important factors that helped it to secure its historic parliamentary election victory of 2011, when it won 39 seats from 5 seats in 2007.

Four years later, in 2015, the PS got a boost from a widely covered sexual assault case about a month before the parliamentary elections. The case, which happened in the Helsinki neighborhood of Tapanila, sparked lynch-mob hysteria and fingerpointing on social media and in print media.

The PS became in 2015 with 39 seats the second-biggest party in parliament.

Like before and today, the reporting by the media of sexual assault cases by foreigners is the same: It paints all migrants with a single brush and spreads stereotypes made by Islamophobes and racists. One of these is that sexual assault crimes soared after 2015 when over 30,000 asylum seekers came to the country.

But charts like the one below tell a totally different story than what groups like the PS and politicians of mainstream parties are telling their voters.

The chart above shows that suspected sexual assault cases of minors by Finns totalled 82% in 2017 versus 18% by foreigners. As we can see, the number of overall suspected sexual assault cases in the chart has retreated while rising slightly among foreigners. Source: Statistics Finland.

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Happy MLK Day: The silence of our leaders and friends is more harmful than the words of our enemies

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In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.

Martin Luther King Jr.  (1929-68)

Happy MLK Day!

I have no respect for those who preach “social equality” in Finland but who would not raise a finger to challenge social inequality. They are the ones who support and reinforce institutional racism in Finland. 

The fake promises coupled with their silence reminds me, today commemorating Martin Luther King, of a famous quote by him: “…remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.”

We should ask politicians and others after they talk about “social equality” (yhdenvertaisuus) and “gender equality” (tasa-arvo) what they have done to further these important values.

You would be surprised by their answers that are nothing more than shrouded in silence.

The wise tales of Uncle Toms and the unbalanced reporting by the Finnish media

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Tabloid Ilta-Sanomat, which was complicit in the early 1990s of spreading racism wholesale in Finland, hasn’t yet apologized for its reporting about groups like the Somalis. In an interview with a Kurdish Islamophobe, Sheida Sohrabi, Ilta-Sanomat signals that it will never apologize for its shoddy and one-sided reporting. 

Sohrabi, who would be called in the United States an Uncle Tom, or Tuomo setä/Mamu setä in Finnish, is a good example of that label. While there are many definitions and explanation of what is an Uncle Tom, I consider it a close synonym of Stockholm Syndrome.

Articles like the one below are a good example of how tabloids like Ilta-Sanomat use so-called migrants to get across their prejudiced message of other migrant groups like Muslims. It is questionable if Shorabi, who came to Finland when she was five and who is a Kurd, even remembers where she was born.

Moreover, the Kurds are fighting to gain their independence and create their own country from Iraq, Turkey and Iran.

Sohrabi speaks of “cultural differences” in the story even if she came to Finland when she was five years old. Sohrabi is an aspiring National Coalition Party politician who wants to make her mark with Islamophobia. Read the original interview here.

An example of the “quality” of Finnish tabloid journalism of the early 1990s. The Ilta-Sanomat billboard affirms that Somali asylum seekers swindled the authorities in granting them refugee status.

Junes Lokka, Marco de Wit, Gleb Simanov, Miki Sileoni and too many others are examples of people who hate migrants, especially Muslims, even if they are people of foreign origin.

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Dr Abdul Mannan: Muslims want to live in harmony with the rest of Finnish society

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Dr. Abdul Mannan, the imam and the president of the Oulu-based Islamic Society of Northern Finland, is adamant about one matter: Those who are guilty of sexual assault should pay for their crimes. He said that the suspects, which number 16 men, have also brought shame to their community.

“These types of crimes [committed by the suspects] are unacceptable in all religions,” he said. “We strongly condemn what they did because of their gravity and the friction they cause with the rest of society. The whole community is suffering because of their crime.”

Dr. Abdul Mannan.

Dr. Mannan, who has lived 26 years in Finland, said he knows well the country’s Islamic community, which is the second biggest religion in the country with more than 100,000 members after the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church. Muslims account for 2.8% of the total population.

Being a Muslim in today’s Finland and Europe is sometimes challenging. Since September 2017, the mosque in Oulu was vandalized eight times.

The sexual assault cases in Oulu are a good example of how whole groups are easily labelled.

“The media and journalists carry a lot of responsibility on how others see us [in a negative or positive light],” he said. “Journalists must understand that they play an important role in society. What they say has a big impact.”

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Oulu has turned Finland into a more hostile place for migrants, especially Muslims 

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A journalist asked me what I thought about the reaction of the politicians to the sexual assault cases in Oulu. Certainly, any sensible person would condemn such acts. But what could we say about the politicians and the media?

My answer: The reaction of the politicians and the media is a clear sign of Finland’s ever-worsening hostile environment for migrants, especially Muslims.

A number of studies published last year, like the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, revealed that out of 12 EU countries studied, Finland was the most hostile to blacks. Racism is an issue in Finland as it is in other parts of Europe.

One may ask why is there a growing hostile environment in this country against migrants and minorities?

The answer is right under our noses: Not challenging our prejudices effectively enough and the rise of the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party in 2011. Even if the PS imploded in June, Blue Reform continues to beat the same hostile drum against Muslims.

The PS are the first modern party that vowed to “solve the Somali problem” in Finland.

Is this the bottom line for understanding what happened in Oulu?

In light of the sexual assault cases in Oulu and Helsinki, Blue Reform, which has five ministers in Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s government, is ratcheting up and returning to its old populist ways by suggesting changes in Section 9 of the Constitution. The Section states: “A foreigner shall not be deported, extradited or returned to another country, if in consequence he or she is in danger of a death sentence, torture or other treatment violating human dignity.”

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An Iraqi family in Finland and their brave 13-year-old daughter

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Asylum seekers and migrants commonly get in touch with Migrant Tales like a Turkmen Iraqi family below who feared being deported back to their former home country. Their daughter is 13 years old and she speaks at least five languages. Since she is the only one who can speak Finnish, she not only interprets language but the family’s anxiety and fear. 

What a brave teenager she is. Always ready to help her parents at any time of the day.

How many more children and teenagers like her of families seeking asylum in Finland?

Many.

The Finnish Immigration Service (Migri), with the backing of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s government, has used asylum seekers as pawns for their own political aims.

Many asylum seekers who came to Finland in 2015 will soon have waited for almost four years for their residence permits.

What is Migri’s response to these people?

Grin and bear it – let’s see for how long.

The Iraqi family that feared being deported has a respite. They are away from danger, momentarily.

Finland’s immigration and asylum policy is inhumane and brings suffering to people who have seen their fair share of it.

When is this societal bullying going to end?

Migrant Tales’ first-ever “WARNING: ISLAMOPHOBIC AND XENOPHOBIC CONTENT ON STEROIDS (Katie Hopkins, Tiina Wiik and Junnes Lokka)

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Katie Hopkins, the former columnist who got the boot from the Daily Mail and who has had to pay exorbitant sums for defamation, visited Oulu this week and was the special guests of Tiina Wiik and Junes Lokka, both who have made a name in the same way as Hopkins – by spreading bigotry and Islmophobia.

The Washington Post devised a new rating, the Bottomless Pinocchio, when fake statements are repeated over and over again. President Donald Trump is a prime example of the latter. Others that win Bottomless Pinocchios are Hopkins and the Perussuomalaiset* party.

Tabloids like Iltalehti not only show their shoddy journalism as in a column published by Mika Koskinen,

Erna Bodström, a migration researcher and human rights activist, exposed on Twiter Koskinen’s mistakes.

Sakari Timonen, one of Finland’s most popular columnists, described Koskinen’s column as “crap that attracts a lot of flies.”

Read more about the Bottomless Pinocchio here.

Iltalehti is a tabloid that does not hide its adoration for racists like Katie Hopkins. Here is a story about her visit to Oulu. The headline reads: “Super popular foul-mouthed media personality flew to Oulu to look into the rape of children – [she’s been] accused of racism and  Nazi sympathies led to her firing [in May 2017 after she was shown the door from LBC for Tweeting ‘a final solution’ after the Manchester Arena bombing].”

Hopkins Tweets that she tried to meet the mayor of Oulu, Päivi Laajala, without success.

Continue reading “Migrant Tales’ first-ever “WARNING: ISLAMOPHOBIC AND XENOPHOBIC CONTENT ON STEROIDS (Katie Hopkins, Tiina Wiik and Junnes Lokka)”