Kaksi kuvaa, jotka kertovat paljon siitä keitä ovat Perussuomalaiset. Kuvissa on tuomittuja kuntavaaliehdokkaita törkeästä lapsen seksuaalisesta hyväksikäytöstä parituksesta ja petoksista. Perussuomalaiset vakuuttavat, että heillä kuitenkin on “jotain rajaa.”
Missä se raja on?
Sitten tekopyhyys saa vauhtia kun Helsingin Perussuomalaiset julkaisivat mainoksen jossa näkyy nainen burkassa. Vaikka burkaan-pukeutuvia naisia voi Suomessa laskea sormilla. Mainos antaa ymmärtää ettei burkan käyttö voisi olla vapaaehtoista.
Tasa-arvo tarkoittaa todennäköisesti Perussuomalaisille sitä, ettei sinulla ole oikeus käyttää huivia, niqab, burka tai olla muslimi, koska perussuomalaiset miehet tietävät paremmin.
Rasismi riehuu Suomessa ja erityisen paljon Perussuomalaisessa puolueessa.
It is a good sign that some Finnish media like Yle are fact-checking what politicians say. However, it is a bit too late because the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* have built their popularity on making false claims about migrants.
I’m pretty certain that if we were to do a fact-check on all the claims about migrants since 2010, most of them would be false, grossly exaggerated, and outright lies.
In just a matter of a week, PS chairperson Jussi Halla-aho, who was convicted in 2012 for ethnic agitation and breaching the sanctity of religion, got called out for making false statements about migrants.
One of these false statements made by Halla-aho recently was that low-wage workers come to Finland, work for a few months, and then quit their jobs and live off social welfare. This is totally false.
Halla-aho made another false statement when he stated that one-third of income, housing benefit recipients are immigrants.
It’s one of the oldest tricks in the books used against journalists by xenophobic politicians is the following: A politician makes an outrageous claim to a journalist, who doesn’t even bother to question its veracity. Eventually, the journalist may do some investigating and find out that he or she was fed malarkey. By then it’s too late because the story is already out there.
For the PS, migrants and foreigners are a non-stop obsession. Some, like Halla-aho, have built their political career on victimizing, bashing, and spreading racist lies and exaggerations about migrants.
Jussi Halla-aho, the chairperson of the Islamophobic Perussuomalaiset (PS)*, exposed another spoonful of its ever-visible far-right credentials on Saturday by demanding a 3,000-euro a month salary minimum for migrants to get a residence permitand weakening workers’ rights.
The PS leader, who was convicted in 2012 for ethnic agitation and breaching the sanctity of religion, believed that the best way to lower unemployment would be cutbacks in unemployment security, watering down protection against dismissal, do away with national collective bargaining agreements and undermine employers the right to strike.
Considering Halla-aho’s racist views of migrants in general and Muslims in particular, his views to dismantle Finland’s welfare state do not come as a surprise.
Even if the PS is leading in opinion polls, the party’s biggest folly will be at the end of the day their racist and neo-conservative economic views.
The Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party is the biggest threat to our Nordic welfare state and democracy. Their xenophobic ideology reveals a noticeable conflict.
Gunnar Myrdal (1898.1987), a Swedish economist who did a groundbreaking study in the early 1940s about its racism, brought this dilemma to light:
“How can they [USAmericans] claim to respect the dignity of all persons, equality, and the inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and a fair opportunity, while countenancing pervasive violations of the dignity of blacks and their rights to that freedom, that justice, and that fair opportunity?”
In the same light, we can ask to whom and how social equality, one of our Nordic welfare state pillars, applies to migrants and minorities? Do these noble values apply to Muslims, people of color, and other visible migrants and minorities? Are we also living in a conflict where we preach one thing but do the opposite?
Take, for instance, one of PS’s first vice-president Riikka Purra’s reaction Fardowsa Mahamoud’s decision not to do military service because the hijab, or veil, is still prohibited.
Ever wondered the source of the strong undercurrent of xenophobia in present-day Finland? The answer is in its history. During independence, Finland has been quite an unfriendly country towards foreigners. The Restricting Act of 1939 speaks volumes. Did you know that Finland passed its first immigration act in 1983 or about 66 years after gaining independence?
The prevailing xenophobic attitude and suspicion of foreigners reveal a lot of things like the rise of the far-right Perussuomnalaiset (PS)*.
It also explains why the Finnish Security and Intelligence Service (Supo) interviewed every candidate who applied before for Finnish citizenship. I was one of them.
My interview with Supo took over two hours, and the first question that asked was, “why are you applying for Finnish citizenship?”
My answer was straightforward: “Because it’s my right.”
A tabloid Ilta-Sanomat billboard from 1992. Much of the hostility that people of color faced in the 1990s was by the media. Here, the tabloid states that Somalis conned the authorities to get asylum in Finland.
Behind that response, because it’s my right, came from my insistence that since my mother was Finnish, I too should be considered a Finn. Even if Finnish women had the right to vote from 1906, they weren’t trusted until 1984 to give Finnish citizenship to their children. Only Finnish men could do that.
Prior to the interview with Supo, I had some issues with the honorary consul of Mali in Helsinki called Jalkanen. When I went to visit him to get a visa to that West African country, he appeared inebriated and was very suspicious about me visiting Mali.
At the time I worked for Apu magazine, and wanted to do a travel piece on Mali and Niger.
At the meeting with Jalkanen, his suspicion grew as we spoke. He then called a friend of his who was a Supo agent. He asked him to pry into my secret Interpol files to make a background check. His Supo friend called back quite rapidly.
Jalkanen started to speak after hanging up the phone with his friend.
Like many children of Finnish parents, I, too, spent summers in the countryside with my grandparents. During all of these years, I thought, incorrectly, that I was a Finnish citizen or had a right to citizenship. I was wrong.
Until 1984, children of Finnish men had the right to pass on citizenship to their children. Even if women got the right to vote in 1906, it took about 66 years after independence for women to win this right.
This meant, in effect, that I was treated as a foreigner in this country. I had to get residence permits and at one point a work permit for each job I had.
One day, at the Aliens’ Office, I asked one of the employees why I had to apply for a residence permit if I was a Finn because of my mother. The response shocked me to the core.
Being a foreigner in Finland in the 1980s meant a lot of red tape. Residence permits were first granted for six months and a work permit for each job. On top of this, your human rights, which were considered suspect since it spoke out against the former Soviet Union, were violated.
“In our opinion, you are not a Finn,” she snapped.
Twenty-year-old Fardowsa Mahamoud’s questioning why the hijab, or veil, is not permitted in the Finnish military brought a sense of déjà-vu. About six years ago, Busman Gill Sukhdarshan Singh won after a year-long legal battle to wear a turban at work.
In Finland, Sikh bus drivers won the right to use turbans at work, while in the United Kingdom granted such a right in 1969.
Singh’s struggle and Mahamud’s rejection by the Finnish military are all examples of how some sectors of Finland continue to believe that they are the only one’s living in this country. Even if our official adaption policy is supposed to be a two-way street, it is a one-way process (assimilation), full stop.
Mahamud wanted to enroll in the army to serve later as a peacekeeper, which is her dream. Her efforts came to an abrupt end when an interview with the Karelia Brigade said they did not permit hijabs for safety reasons and that uniforms had to have the same appearance.
“I was disappointed to learn this,” she was quoted as saying in Yle News. “I wouldn’t have applied for service if I didn’t accept what they wear in the army, but the hijab is my choice and decision. It’s important to me.”
The Perussuomalaiset (PS)* is a far-right and racist party that will fail in the end because its core values are based on malarkey. Parties like the National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) that want to form bedroom alliances with the PS will fail as well.
The chairperson of the National Coalition Party(Kokoomus), Petter Orpo, is well-known as a politician who vacillates on different issues. When it comes to migrants, he tends to blow with the wind.
Orpo has said in autumn that he would not mind forming a government with the PS where its leader, Jussi Halla-aho, would be prime minister. He confirmed his party’s willingness to form a government with the PS in Friday’s Maaseudun Tulevaisuus, a newspaper with ties to the Center Party.
One reader commented on Maaseudun Tulevaisuus about such a government: “I haven’t seen yet such an eerie nightmare where Kokoomus and the Perussuomalaiset are ruling the country.”
“If the ruling parties suffer a big defeat [in the municipal election], the least they must do is change the direction of their policies,” Orpo was quoted as saying. “If a party in the government suffers heavily, it may make you wonder if you want to be a member of the government.”
Prime Minister Sanna Marin fired back at a session of parliament Thursday at the far-right Perussuomaliset (PS)* party. Making Finland an open and safe country is crucial if it wants to attract newcomers to the country.
“Madam Speaker. Violence on streets, violence at homes, violence at schools are all severe matters, severe matters of which all of us are concerned.
I will now address the Perussuomalaiset point because it also gives a distorted picture of the type of people that live in Finland. It’s not so that every person who has come from elsewhere [to Finland] is a violent criminal, a person who does wrong. In this country, we have numerous groups of people who come from elsewhere and who work tirelessly, raise families, and are concerned about Finland’s future in the same way as people born here.
The phenomenon, violence on streets, violence at homes, violence at schools is a serious matter that we must address. Still, it is also wrong that we give here [in parliament], the very picture that the Perussuomalaiset spread, that every migrant is a person who does not fit in this society. It isn’t like that at all.”
Kristian Sheikki Laakso, or Sheikki Laakso, is a Finnish MP for the Islamophobic Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party who is, as with his 38 PS MP colleagues, is filibustering the EU rescue package. One of the most “interesting” speeches before parliament was by Laakso, who read excerpts of Little Red Riding Hood.
Laakso begins his speech: “Once she gave her a little cap of red velvet, which suited her so well that she would never wear anything else. So she was always called Little Red Riding Hood…Oh, grandmother,” she said, “what big ears you have. The better to hear you with, my child,” was the reply.
The MP, who suffered bankruptcy and ended having 84 foreclosure orders and receivables to the tune of 219,000 euros, cuts short his speech by excusing himself to the madam speaker of the house. “I accidentally read the evening fairy tale to my grandchildren.”
He continues by stating that it is difficult to distinguish between “a fairy tale and reality” concerning the EU rescue package, which would be approved if voted on.
