Read the original posting here.
Category: Enrique Tessieri
Exposing white Finnish privilege #74: The anti-Semitic beast inside Jussi Halla-aho
THIS STORY WAS UPDATED
In a recent debate with Center Party chairperson Annika Saariko, the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party head, Jussi Halla-aho, was put on the hot seat after asked about his anti-Semitic blog writings.
He denied being an anti-Semite and said that the claim was a popularity stunt by Lauri Nurmi, who recently published an unofficial biography of him and made such an observation.
Why didn’t the reporter at the debate ask two questions: “Are you, Halla-aho, an anti-Semite and an Islamophobe.”
The PS and how it treats minorities, especially Muslims, expose the power and privilege white Finns have. It is like living in a near-perfect world. You can eat your racist cake with impunity and have it at the same time.
While Finland’s 100,000-120,000-strong Muslim community has little to no political power and is constantly reminded that they can never be equal members of society, the smaller Jewish community is a different story.
The Jewish community in Finland has historically suffered from anti-Semitism. A characteristic of this form of racism is that you silence the victim and plug your ears to their objections.
Matias Turkkila is the editor of the PS party’s newspaper who confirmed Halla-aho’s anti-Semitism and that of the party’s as well.
In the tweet, Turkkila overlooks or believes that we do not know who Juha Kärkkäinen is. For starters, he was fined in 2014 for publishing anti-Semitic writings of Adrian Salbuch, Ted Pike, David Duke, and others, as well as cartoons that bear a striking resemblance to the former Nazi tabloid, Der Strümer (1923-45).
The anti-Semitic writings were published in Magneettimedia, a publication of his stores that continues to be rife with anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and Nazi glorification. It is today no longer edited by Kärkkäinen but by neo-Nazis.
Continue reading “Exposing white Finnish privilege #74: The anti-Semitic beast inside Jussi Halla-aho”The media has power but it prefers driving a moped when confronting racism and the Perussuomalaiset
If there is somebody to blame for Finland’s Perussuomalaiset (PS)* problem, a big part of the blame falls on the media. In that group, you will find politicians and about 17% of Finns who vote for an openly hostile party to Muslims, people of color, and minorities.
A good example of the media’s power was seen on Monday when PS chairperson Jussi Halla-aho was questioned about his anti-Semitic blog writings. The question put Halla-aho momentarily in the hot seat, forcing a knee-jerk response. He denied (surprise, surprise!) being an anti-Semite and said that the claim was a popularity stunt by Lauri Nurmi, who recently published an unofficial biography of him.
The question took Halla-aho by surprise, and the only defense he could put up was to answer by hitting below the belt.
Halla-aho’s response and anger showed that he is vulnerable and that the media can ask politicians tough questions if it wishes. It is called having teeth or journalistic grit.
Why do we see so little tough questioning by the Finnish media when it comes to topics like racism, Islamophobia, and the PS.
Continue reading “The media has power but it prefers driving a moped when confronting racism and the Perussuomalaiset”Mitä ajattelevat Perussuomalaiset ja mitä he peittelevät?
Keitä ovat Perussuomalaiset? Elävätkö he rinnakaistodellisuudessa tai peittelevätkö keitä he ovat todellisuudessa, eli vihaamielisia islamofoobisia, etnonastionalistisia ja maahanmuuttovastaisia?
Tässä muutamia väitteitä. Totta tai tarua?
Keltainen ei ole pelkurein* väri. Se ei ole myöskään lumenväri.
Jussi Halla-aho ei ole stand up koomikko.
Emme kannusta aparthedia.
What happened in France was horrendous, the reaction of Islamophobes is just as bad
It is dreadful what happened in France when a man beheaded a teacher for showing students caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Any sensible person, irrespective of his or her background, would condemn what happened. Even so, Islamophobes from the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party were already spreading racism and trying to score political points.
Having lived in Argentina during a terrible dictatorship 1976-83, young people had three choices to change society: remain silent, move abroad, join a guerrilla group, and kill people.
Killing anyone for his or her ideas should be condemned strongly without labeling whole groups as terrorists.
One of the matters that racist parties like the PS forget is that they blame the whole group like @sallykohn tweets so eloquently.
I answered PS MP Sebastian Tynkkynen’s Islamophobic tweet.
Tynkkynen hits back at my tweet and asked what was racist about it?
Continue reading “What happened in France was horrendous, the reaction of Islamophobes is just as bad”Problems with our Internet provider
Saturday afternoon, I received the following message from my Internet provider of an “unscheduled maintenance service.” If you wanted to visit Migrant Tales, you got the following message below:
The problem started Saturday afternoon but after about eight hours, Migrant Tales was up and running and back to normal.
Apologies for the inconvenience.
Analysis: What does this year’s hate crime report reveal about Finland and its police service?
The Police University College published this week its latest suspected hate crime statistics for 2019. It showed that while hate crimes, on the whole, had retreated a tad compared with 2018, 87.1% of all suspected cases were due to a person’s ethnic or religious background.
Other suspected hate crimes were due to sexual orientation (72 cases/5.7%), disability (44/4.9%), and gender identity (21/2.3%).
While we understand that these cases, like that of sexual assaults, are only the tip of the iceberg, the important question we should ask is how to challenge hate crime more effectively.
This may be easier said than done, considering that Finland is still living in denial when it comes to hate crime, hate speech, and racism.
Nobody has yet given a fair and honest answer to how Finland, with one of the best education systems in the world and whose laws are supposed to promote social equality but not equity, has seen the growth of an openly racist and radical right party?
The Perussuomalaiset (PS)* is not only a racist party but one that brings out the worst side in the Finns when it comes to bigotry. It should not come to any surprise that the lion’s share of the most infamous Islamophobes in Finland are from the PS.
If Finland’s second-biggest party in parliament is openly Islamophobic and turns a blind eye to far-right ideology among its ranks, should we be surprised that so little is being done politically to challenge a social ill like racism?
The biggest problem in the police service’s relationship with racism and different minority communities in Finland is the low priority that this social ill has. Sometimes, one gets the impression that the police fear more the reaction of a minority community to what happened to a victim of its group than readily condemning hate crime.
Another matter that is a blow to police trust in resolving hate crime cases rapidly. Many who have reported racist harassment and threats to the police understand that your case may take months to resolve. In such cases, the police may even overlook the bias motivators as happened in Jämsä with an asylum seeker.
Another case that received wide coverage in June was an eighteen-year-old Muslim, who was chased and physically attacked by locals in Teuva, a town in western Finland.
See also:
- Two bullying cases in Finland, two standards by the police and society (26.9.2020)
- Was the stabbing of an eighteen-year-old Somali Finn a hate crime? (8.8.2020)
- 10-year-old girl beaten by adolescents in Vantaa, Finland, for not being white (9.4.2019)
- UPDATED: Muslim girl beaten unconsious by fellow children in the Finnish city of Espoo (19.12.2018)
- The violent attack against a Pakistani migrant in Vantaa should be treated as a hate crime (11.3.2018)
Suspected hate crimes in Finland near flat in 2019 versus 2018. Only the tip of the iceberg.
Suspected hate crimes reported in 2019 totaled 899 cases, which is 1.21% less from 910 cases in the previous year, according to the Police University College of Finland.
As in previous years, the lion’s share (72.3%) of suspected hate crimes was due to ethnic or national background, which rose by 2.52% fro 650 from 634 cases. Religion was the second-biggest group (14.8%) of hate crimes totaling 133 cases, down by 14.2% from 155 cases in the previous year and down 43.4% from 2017.
Reports the Police University College of Finland: “In 63 percent of the cases, the victims of the crimes based on ethnic or national origin were males and in 37 percent of the cases, victims were females. Most common crimes targeted against the males were assaults whereas majority of the crimes
targeted against females were defamation.”
And adds: “In relation to the number of people with foreign citizenship and living in Finland, those holding a citizenship of Somalia experienced the highest frequency of crimes motived by ethnic or national origin in 2019. From all the reports of offenses based on ethnic or national origin, nine percent of offenses were against a member of a Roma minority. Of these, the most common suspected crimes were defamation.”
Some NGOs like the European Network Against Racism (ENAR), state that Muslim women are the most vulnerable to Islamophobia. In France, 81.5% were women, and over 90% in the Netherlands suffered attacks due to Islamophobia.
Seventy-nine percent of Muslims do not report their most experience of discrimination to any competent organization, according to ENAR.
If this is true elsewhere, then it suggests that hate crime reported in Finland is the tip of the iceberg and hate crime against Muslim women underreported.
If racism costs the US $16 trillion, how much has it cost Finland?
The Islamophobic Perussuomalaiset (PS)* have been quick to point out how much migrants (all?!) are an economic burden to Finland. A new study by Citigroup claims that ethnic inequality and inequity have cost the US a staggering $16 trillion!
While parties like the PS and other ones who follow their racist tune believe that social exclusion and racism are cheap, they should think twice.
“Racial inequality has always had an outsized cost, one that was thought to be paid only by underrepresented groups,” said Citigroup Banking Chair Raymond McGuire in a statement. “What this report underscores is that this tariff is levied on us all.”
The high cost of racism is not only maintained institutionally but through outright lies. One of these is by the PS that talks about migration as one whole when they mean Muslims and people of color.
e: Twitter (Maria Ohisalo)
If racism has cost the US trillions of dollars, how much do you think it has cost Finland?
Billions of euros, possibly?
MORE
Why is due justice taking so long in the suspected Teuva hate crime case of Finland?
One case in particular that took place in Teuva on June 6 is still under investigation, and there is no indication when those guilty will face charges. The case involves a Muslim insulted and chased by some townspeople forcing his car off the road into a ditch and assaulted.
If you speak to the victim, whose name is Fares A-O, there is an abundance of evidence that shows that one clear bias motive was his ethnic background.
Here is a simple forumula to determine a hate crime:
Tejuka, a Teuva newspaper, published in June a spread and an editorial about what happened to Fares.
Writes Tejuka: “…soon [the attackers] forced [Fares] on the ground and started to rough him up by hitting and kicking him. Someone held Fares in a chokehold while others continued to hit him. Fares could no longer breathe. Somebody yelled: ‘Kill that mamu (a derogatory term for migrant)!”
Fares ended up taken to the Seinjäjoki and later to the hospital in Vaasa where they conducted tests and treated his wounds.
While what happened in Teuva is a hate crime case, it is also one of the worse to come to public light this year.
Indeed, the police can give a million excuses why this particular case is taking such a long time to investigate. One of these could even be the Covid pandemic, but the police officer in charge of the investigation did not mention it as a reason.
It is clear that a person that goes through such a traumatic event wants justice to move swiftly as opposed to slowly. The incident happened in June, or five months ago.
Apart from dealing with one’s trauma of what happened, Fares said that one of the most challenging matters was the slow pace of the investigation.