By Enrque Tessieri
Perussuomalaiset (PS) party presidential hopeful Timo Soini’s excuses about racism in his party are getting more surreal by the day. At a presidential debate Wednesday on MTV3, Soini claimed that racism wasn’t a problem in the PS and confined to “one, two or three” cases compared with a half a million people who voted for the party in April.
Is Soini in total denial about this serious issue in his party? It appears that as more of these cases come to light in the PS, the more fantastic Soini’s explanations get.
Let’s analyze what he said on MTV3 and ask who are those “one, two or three” cases that the speaks of?
The most recent one is that of PS MP James Hirvisaari, who got fined for hate speech and incitement against an ethnic group. We have as well PS MP Jussi Halla-aho, Teuvo Hakkarainen, Freddy van Wonterghem and others… Oops! That already makes more than three without mentioning Ulla Pyysalo and Tuomas Okkonen, who applied for membership in the neo-Nazi association, SKV.
Soini conveniently forgot to mention PS MP Olli Immonen, who believes that a “race war” is imminent between Europeans and Muslims.
If you go to Immonen’s official website, you will see a smiling Soini pictured behind the PS MP. Just below him are links to “Just say no to Islamisation” and anti-immigration forums like Homma and Scripta.
Only “one, two or three” cases?
I don’t think so.