I’m not surprised that Riikka Purra, a Perussuomalaiset (PS)* MP obsessed with slandering Muslims, gives misleading statements about female genital cutting (FGC), also referred to as female genital mutilation (FGM).
The term FGC is in my opinion less judgemental and value-laden than FGM.
Without offering advice and assistance to women who have undergone FGC and protecting others from this practice, it is clear that the PS has a clear agenda. They would care less about these women because their hatred for Muslims blinds them.
Finland’s hostile environment against Muslims, especially spearheaded by the PS, is further proof of the latter. Once again as well we are seeing how the PS paints Muslims with a single brush.
A tweet below by Purra proves my point. She mentions that a separate law on “mutilation” has been in force in Sweden for a long time. “Convictions are a couple, and all the problems of honor culture [honor killings], forced marriages, and mutilation is present.”
She puts the icing on her racist tweet: “The problem only revolves around migrants who come from certain countries.”
What does Purra mean? Being an Islamophobe, she means Muslims.
One interesting matter about how Perussuomalaiset (PS)* politicians spread racism is how they try to hide it in sheep’s clothing. The trick, from the PS perspective, is to spread in code as much as possible your racist views.
An interview on Saturday in Yle’s Ykkösaamu with PS chairperson Jussi Halla-aho showed just that, the wolf sheep’s clothing searching out his victims inside parliament.
I sent the host four questions that I’d hope Yle’s Ykkösaamu would ask Halla-aho:
Do you want to stop asylum seekers from coming to Finland?
As in your past writings, do you still consider the Holocaust an exaggeration and the Nuremberg Trials a farce?
Do you believe that we should ditch human rights (UN and EU declarations)?
Are you an anti-Semite? What about being an Islamophobe?
Observing the PS for several years, it is interesting to note how their use of language has changed and how they speak in code. They rarely label Muslims directly but prefer to call them asylum seekers or people from the Middle East.
Another matter put into the mix of their hateful rhetoric is justifying by redefining what is racism. This became evidently clear on Yle’s Ykkösaamu when Halla-aho was asked about such a social ill.
The US presidential election’s long-anticipated result bore fruit on Saturday with Joe Biden projected as Pennsylvania’s winner and getting him over the 270 electoral threshold defeating incumbent Donald Trump. Four years of political capriciousness and reckless buffoonery by Trump came to an end.
It has been a terrible and exhausting four years following a man who is the epitome of privilege and power. In all respects, Donald Trump is the embodiment of a modern autocrat and fascist.
Autocrats are usually shortsighted. Once they believe that they are invincible, like Trump did, that is when their downward slide begins.
Even if it would be naive to think that President-elect Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, will change the United States during their administration, they may have slowed or averted for the time being a colossal train wreck for the country.
Trump’s reelection would not only have been a hammer blow to the US’ democratic institutions but dragged the country into a racial civil war.
A sixteen-year-old Muslim teenager was approached by her teacher and asked her why do Muslims kill people as we saw in France?
I am certain that the question must have surprised and shocked the teenager. Why did the teacher ask her such a question about such an outlandish incident?
Certainly, irrespective of his or her cultural, ethnic, or religious background, any sensible person would not support the killing of other people.
The incident with the teenager also exposes anti-Muslim racism and the misperception that all Muslims are one solid block. If a Muslim kills a white European in an act of terrorism, somehow all Muslims are responsible for what happened and should give an explanation.
Attacking Finland’s Muslim community is not hard for the likes of Jussi Halla-aho and the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party. It is, however, a different story when anti-Semitic rhetoric comes to play.
Halla-aho’s racism and, in particular, his anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and Afrophobia are well known. Of these three, anti-Semitism is the biggest threat to his political future.
The PS chairperson’s racism has long roots, and therefore we should do everything possible to prevent a politician who built his political career on racism and becoming prime minister.
The Jews have political power and resources to counter anti-Semitism. This is not the case for Muslims and people of color. It explains why Halla-aho prefers to be quiet about his anti-Semitic writings.
About two weeks ago, Halla-aho was confronted about his anti-Semitic writings. The PS head naturally denied being an anti-Semite and dismissed the claim by Lauri Nurmi, who recently published an unofficial biography of him and made such an observation. He called it a publicity stunt.
Gideon Bolotowsky had a straightforward opinion about Halla-aho’s anti-Semitic writings. The well-known representative of Finland’s Jewish community was quoted as saying in Uusi Suomi: “Based on these [Halla-aho’s] texts, he is definitely an anti-Semite and an anti-Judaist.”
Four years ago, I wrote about the surprise US presidential election, which elected Donald Trump. I compared the election outcome to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous words after the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. He said that the surprise attack on December 7, 1942, was “a date that will live in infamy.”
Four years of Trump’s administration have been days in infamy covered with thousands of lies, misleading statements, and hostility towards minorities.
Even if it looks like Trump will lose the election, we should not be that naive to believe that Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, will change everything.
The fact that the United States could vote for a corrupt and autocratic president reveals a lot about the sickness that the country is presently suffering for a very long time.
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
James Baldwin (1924-87)
Ir, there is one matter that the killings in France have reinforced, it is the disenfranchisement of the Muslim community of France. How is it possible that two deranged persons that caused tragic deaths to end up with the Franch state placing a gun at the Muslim community’s head?
The short leash that Prime Minister Emanuel Macron wants to place on France’s 5.7-million-strong Muslim community speaks volumes about the racism in that country.
Not only is the French state aiming to educate its own Muslims under the new anti-separatist law, but it plans a crackdown on more than 50 Muslim organizations. One of these includes anti-racist organizations such as the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF).
In these troubled times for Muslims, there is a good matter to remember:
In a bid to gain voters, the National Coalition Party’s (Kokoomus) MP Antti Häkkänen and possibly the next chairperson of the conservative party spreads his anti-Islamic rhetoric, again.
For those who don’t know Häkkänen, he comes from a small town called Mäntyharju in Eastern Finland and has expressed before his extreme distaste for non-white migration and especially Islam.
During 2011-2013, he was president of the Youth League of the National Coalition Party, which idolizes US capitalism and the Republican Party. His predecessor was Wille Rydman, a well-known anti-immigration hardliner, and his successor was Susanna Koski. Under Koski’s leadership, the Youth League of the National Coalition Party aimed at doing away with legislation that prohibited hate speech and that would make redundant the then Ombudsman for Minorities Office.
As councilperson for Mäntyharju, a small town in Eastern Finland, he is reported to have declined to offer, as a show of solidarity, his small meeting fee to newly-arrived quota refugees.
His tweet below of the horrific deaths in France is no surprise.
He tweets: “The enemies of an open society try to change Europe’s way of life and destroy our values. We should not bow to such pressure. Neither bowing to Islamic terrorism nor to that of an authoritarian state. Human rights and freedom must be defended by a united Europe.”
I’m certain that such a statement gave Häkkänen and Kokoomus a lot of brownie points with voters and, possibly, their future partners in government, the Islamophobic Perussuomalaiset (PS).*
Here are some questions that I’d ask Häkkänen about his pugnacious tweet:
Anyone who has followed Perussuomalaiset (PS)* chairperson Jussi Halla-aho’s political career will easily conclude that it was done on the fuel of racism and bigotry, and generous chunks of it.
Racism had become such a normal matter for the PS that on the same day when Halla-aho claimed on Marja Sannikka’s talk show that he “resents people being treated differently” due to their skin color, the party’s vice president lashes out against people of color.
On Marja Sannika’s talk show (in Finnish), Halla-aho was incapable of condemning racism.
States Purra (who calls, like Halla-aho on Sannikka’s show, asylum seekers “harmful” migration) stated on the same day of Halla-aho’s interview: “Wouldn’t it be high time to think that the mixing of people, religions, and cultures in the West is such a good matter? The development of mass migration and violent cultures is A PROBLEM. Beheading a person is only one example.”
Sannikka asks Halla-aho in the interview if he resents racism.
His response: “Yes, I resent any thinking that treats people differently because of their skin color. I do resent this.”
Affirms Riikka Purra: “Wouldn’t it be high time to think that the mixing of people, religions, cultures in the West [not] IS SUCH A GOOD MATTER? Mass immigration from the developing world and violent cultures ARE A PROBLEM. Beheading is just one example.”
One of the biggest challenges of Finnish journalism is follow-up. You throw a question to the person you are interviewing, and if he tries to wiggle his or her way out of it or speak in code to his followers, you hit the person with another question until you get the answer.
Halla-aho’s response if he resented racism was a half-ass job.
Diagree? Check out one of his tweets:
Nobody in the Perussuomalaiset [party] wants a multiethnic or culturally [diverse] Finland, which consistently mentioned in our program and in everything that we do.” Source: Twitter
Halla-aho’s answer could mean anything. It could be seen as a statement against affirmative action, equality but not equity.
“Another underlying message also becomes clear in the meantime: ‘Muslims pose a threat to our society and have to be tamed,’ which is reminiscent of the ‘civilizing’ mission of the French colonial conquerors.“
Any sensible Muslim or person will condemn what happened in France concerning the beheading of a teacher. As Hafez points out, the incident is being used by President Emmanuel Macron to push through his anti-separatist bill and load his guns for the presidential elections of 2022.
Guess who he is facing in the presidential election? Right. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen who has, like her father, built her whole political career Islamophobia.
An old blame-game-the-whole-group emerges.
”The state needs to understand that those who provoked chaos and terrorism did not attend mosques they were not integrated into the Muslim community, they were repeat offenders, criminals, who came and went from prison,” said The Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF). “They had a path in violence, and because of this we stigmatize a whole population?”
Should we be surprised that Finland’s Perussuomalaiset (PS) party,[1] which, like Le Pen, uses Islamophobia to gain voters and political power, is crying murder?
PS MP Leena Meri threw some Islamophobic punches at the government last week and had difficulty pronouncing Black Lives Matter, which she considered a violent association.
“Honorable government,” she asked in last Thursday’s session of parliament, “why haven’t you condemned what happened [in France]? Are you numb?”
We can rephrase the question back to Meri: “Has your Islamophobic rhetoric and racism shown an alarming trend in Finland?”
Apart from the political brownie points, Macron is trying to reap, and we see the same disturbing pattern of how we label the whole Muslim community for the outlandish deed. We see this happening with the PS.
“The crackdown on more than 50 Muslim organizations, including anti-racist organizations such as the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), is the best example of what the state aims to do with this [anti-separatist] legislation,” writes Hafez in aa.com. “While the human rights advocacy group CCIF is collecting data to create awareness on anti-Muslim racism and helps the victims of anti-Muslim discrimination, the singling out of this organization reveals a very worrisome dimension of Macron’s policies: Erasing Muslim visibility from the public space altogether.”
No more PS BS and politicking from Macron.
*Hafez is a political scientist at the University of Salzburg. He is also a non-resident senior research scholar at Georgetown University’s The Bridge Initiative, and the co-author of the European Islamophobic Report.
