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Institute of Race Relations: ‘May we bring harmony’? Thatcher’s legacy on ‘race’

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Comment: Finland lags behind most European countries when it comes to immigration, ethnic relations and populism. One cannot avoid some of the parallels with Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s and Finland today. One reason why her New Right policies still exist after a quarter a century since she was forced from office, is because they were never effectively challenged by future governments.

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Written by Jenny Bourne

Cameron’s nativist policies begin with Thatcher.

Thatcher’s attitude to foreigners can be summed up in two phrases: ‘people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’ (January 1978) and the war cry ‘Sink the Belgrano’ (May 1983) over the Malvinas. She was, without doubt, a xenophobe, an unapologetic imperialist with a natural penchant towards the far Right. She hosted and defended the former Chilean dictator Pinochet in London, supported the apartheid regime for many years (till uneconomic) and denounced as terrorist Mandela and the ANC.

But her legacy has to be judged beyond her personal traits. She presided in the ‘80s and ‘90s over two key processes – both of which have profound ramifications for ‘race’ today. Her governments facilitated the final balkanisation of Black politics into ethnicism, and under her aegis we witnessed the rise of a strident New Right ideology with a supply chain running from the dreaming spires, via parliament and think tanks, to the tabloids. Ethnicism or culturalism have no doubt contributed to the separatism now bemoaned by so many politicians and the denunciation of multiculturalism by David Cameron. While New Right ideas (against anti-racism and cultural relativism, for empire and patriotism), once drifting in the political shallows of the Monday Club and Peterhouse College fellows, are now become the common sense.

There is no doubt that Thatcher, on taking power, was to the Right in her party on race matters, an instinctive imperialist not averse to playing the numbers game. Witness her 1978 TV interview on immigration : ‘If we went on as we are then by the end of the century there would be four million people of the new Commonwealth or Pakistan here. Now, that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture. The British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped, people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in.’ She had indeed taken on the clothes of the far-right National Front and given a fillip to racial violence which was, in the 1970s, along with racist policing, the principal problem of the inner-city.

Riots and the rise of ethnicity

But it was the riots from April to July of 1981, which burned in twenty-six cities, which caused her to change tack. Her monetarist policies had blighted the futures of working-class youth and they were ripe for rebellion. They and the declining areas they came from had to be kept in check. Lord Heseltine was allowed a regeneration budget for Liverpool, one of the most affected cities.[1] But for the rest of the country, an ethnic policy of appeasement, following on Lord Scarman’s findings of ‘disadvantage’ would be implemented.[2] Thatcher’s government wanted the communities to police their own. The Urban Programme, which had hitherto had a small budget, was suddenly increased to £270m and 200 new ‘ethnic projects’ were approved in 1982/3. The monies from this programme, with a small contribution locally, were disbursed by local authorities to local projects meeting local needs. And those needs were being ethnically defined.

While Labour (even Ken Livingstone), Liberal and Tory politicians all seemed content with this result, it was left to organisations like the Institute of Race Relations, and especially A. Sivanandan, to point out the political damage being wrought.[3] For instead of actually addressing racial injustice, the programme redefined the problem as one of cultural disadvantage and went on to reinforce cultural differences without making any changes to a discriminatory system. (Though the riots in the northern towns of 2001 and bombings in 7/7 2005 brought politicians to question the wisdom of ethnic policies and opt instead for ‘cohesion’ strategies, they were never, any more than under Thatcher, to address the structural racism, around jobs, housing, schooling, policing, immigration, criminal justice, which lay behind much of the disaffection.)

Embedding of the New Right

The second legacy comes from the new form of racism which arose under Thatcher cultivated by politicians, academics, journalists who, as a group, became known as the New Right.[4] Not based, as the fascist extremists were, on biological difference and arguing fundamentally about numbers of immigrants, it was based on cultural difference and the need to defend our way of life (which effectively also meant not interfering in racism’s free rein). Thatcher’s natural Edwardian views about British moral superiority might never have got such a political purchase had it not been for two things: that the advisers closest to her such as Alfred Sherman and Keith Joseph[5] were deeply influenced by free marketeer Milton Friedman and by free-from-all-state shackles F. A. Hayek, and that after some forty years of struggle against injustice and discrimination, black people, particularly those born here, were not prepared to accept second-class status. Thatcher and her coterie seemed quite aghast that the ‘uppity’ Blacks were openly fighting for their rights. And it was the collision over the legitimacy of cultural pluralism and the need for anti-racism that was to mark battle after battle with local authorities, over equality policies, multiracial education, including the curriculum and the teaching of history, during the 1980s.

The critiques from within the New Right spanned a number of concerns about anti-racism: that it was indoctrination, denied individuality and freedom, insisted on equality of outcome and therefore was a precursor to social engineering, was policing thought, was denigrating a noble British history. For in fact, they argued, racism was being massively overplayed as an issue affecting people’s lives by leftwing agitators. Multiculturalism and multicultural education were threats because they implied that all cultures were equally valid, valuable and moral, which they were not. We were at risk of diluting national, Christian values.

Anti-racism and cultural pluralism were the scourge of the New Right: be it the changing of street names to honour new heroes or the anti-racist year 1984/5 pronounced by the Greater London Council. And very often completely untrue stories, for example, about not being able to ask for ‘black coffee’, sing ‘Baa Baa Black sheep’ or the removal of Tufty the squirrel from a Lambeth road safety campaign, made for their exciting copy. And then there were the attacks on the Swann Report on multiracial education and the Institute of Race Relations, for producing anti-racist booklets for young people. Ray Honeyford, a Bradford head teacher, forced to take early retirement after making certain pejorative observations in the Times Educational Supplement and Salisbury Review about ethnic minorities, became a cause celebre as a race martyr and then a columnist in his own right.[6]

A few opinion-formers could not have changed the discourse so decisively, save that they had at their command the Daily Mail, the Sun, The Times, Daily Express, Sunday Express, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph.[7]Academics turned columnists, proprietors turned polemicists, politicians turned leader-writers, a whole host of New Rightists (many members of the Salisbury Group which grew out of Peterhouse College and later were to produce the Salisbury Review) managed to find a place time after time to denounce the anti-racist Left. Academics like Roger Scruton, Caroline Cox, Anthony Flew and John Vincent always seemed to have an in on this subject. But then so too did Ronald Butt, Paul Johnson, Peregrine Worsthorne, Alfred Sherman, Andrew Alexander, T E Utley, Roy Kerridge, Honor Tracy and so many more. The media, the many think tanks on the Right such as the Institute for Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Social Affairs Unit, the Hillgate Group, working closely with politicians very close to Thatcher managed to have an inordinate impact.

It is almost a quarter of a century since Thatcher was forced from office and yet the ideological mark left by the New Right is profound (in part because its influence was never challenged by the Major or Labour governments). The New Right managed to change the role of the press in forming opinion on race matters and hence terms of debate forever. It took anti-racism, a struggle for justice, and established it as a form of tyranny – to be denounced as ‘political correctness’. It reclaimed patriotism and reread the history of slavery and empire as an attempt to impose collective guilt. It denounced cultural pluralists for putting national values at risk. It recast black protestors as the cause of ‘racial mischief’ and the real bigots. And in a last gasp, over the Macpherson report, it attempted to redefine racism as needing intent so as to prove it could only be attributed to individuals not institutions.

Thatcher’s New Right established what is today a commonsense nativism – which has stripped the political culture of group rights, internationalism, and history. It paved the way for Cameron’s landmark ‘multiculturalism has failed’ speech of 2011 and Michael Gove’s whitening of the history curriculum, and the much more general acceptance of views, ranging from those of Andrew Green and Christopher Caldwell to David Goodhart, that the nation is under threat from cultural pluralism ie immigrants and we need a more assertive integration policy ie assimilation.

References: [1] Documents released under the thirty-year rule reveal that members of the cabinet actually opposed any such regeneration and wanted places like Liverpool left to rot. It was agreed that only Liverpool could have a regeneration task force and only for one year and that the amount of money involved be kept secret. [2] Lord Scarman was asked to investigate the causes of the disturbances in Brixton in 1981 and ‘found’ a distrust of the police and a racial disadvantage, in part caused by problems within the West Indian family. [3] ‘The ensuing scramble for government favours and government grants (channelled through local authorities) on the basis of specific ethnic needs and problems served on the one hand to deepen ethnic differences and foster ethnic rivalry and on the other, to widen the definition of ethnicity to include a variety of national and religious groups – Chinese, Cypriots, Greeks, Turks, Irish, Italians, Jews, Moslems, Sikhs – till the term became meaningless (except as a means of getting funds).’ A. Sivanandan in ‘RAT and the degradation of black struggle’, Race & Class, Spring 1985. [4] There were a number of different strains within the New Right – ranging from libertarian beliefs in a laissez-faire economy and individual freedoms to the social authoritarian emphasis on maintaining order and a strong state. To learn more see New Right, New Racism by Paul Gordon and Francesca Klug, Searchlight, 1984 and The ideology of the New Right (ed) Ruth Levitas, Polity Press, 1986. [5] In 1974, with these two, Thatcher co-founded the rightwing Centre for Policy Studies. [6] A book setting out the New Right’s line on multiracial education and racism was published. Anti-racism an assault on education and value, edited by Frank Palmer, the Sherwood Press 1986. See also Paul Gordon, ‘The New Right, race and education’, Race & Class, Winter 1988 for the debates in the New Right and its ultimate influence on Tory policy. [7] For an analysis on how this worked, see Nancy Murray ‘The press and ideology in Thatcher’s Britain’, Race & Class, Winter 1986.

The Institute of Race Relations is precluded from expressing a corporate view: any opinions expressed are therefore those of the authors.

Read original blog entry here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

Scot Nakagawa: The Other Side of Anti-Black Racism

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Give me a place to stand on and I will move the earth

Archimedes

By Scot Nakagawa

I’ve argued in the past that the fulcrum of white supremacy is anti-black racism. A fulcrum, you probably already know, is what one rests a lever on to give it, well, leverage. Without it, a lever is just a stick.

I’ve called anti-black racism the fulcrum of white supremacy because I believe fear and loathing of black people is the driving force behind our racial politics. It has shaped everything from welfare policy to policing. While today unions may be working people’s best friend, regardless of race, the union movement in the U.S. has historically been as much about the exclusion of black workers as about the uplift of the working class. Today’s major unions are having to play catch-up behind this history in order to protect workers across the board because most new jobs today are like those historically reserved for blacks. In other words, non-union, low-wage, without benefits, contingent, and temporary.

Certainly we know that the original colonies were capitalized by the slave trade. And slave labor created the wealth that served both as an incentive for American independence and as the means by which it was won. And the policing of the black labor force, keeping it contained within highly exploitative systems, is the tap root of the modern American penitentiary. No wonder then that black people are so over-represented in our prison populations.

Our Constitution was designed to accommodate slavery. Even the electoral college is a remnant of a compromise that was struck between slave states and free states in forming the union.

Many have argued that anti-Indian hatred has been as powerful a force in shaping American racism. After all, native genocide was necessary in order to acquire the land and resources on which our country was founded. Anti-Indian wars were the drum beat dictating the rhythm of western expansion, and have ever since been part and parcel of the mythos of America. Any perusal of our cultural record, especially American literature and cinema, leads easily to the conclusion that murderous enmity toward American Indians has been a centerpiece of American identity.

Between slavery and native genocide, whites were able to accomplish something extraordinary in the history of the modern world. They were able to create a settler nation in which the settler class was able to almost entirely avoid participation in the exploited workforce. Long after the founding of the United States, in fact until the Civil War, European immigrants were drawn to the American frontier, with all of its hardships and dangers, by the dream of acquiring land on which they could be free from wage labor. This is the basis of the American dream. And white supremacy is why a land founded in slavery has nonetheless convinced itself that it is exceptional in the world as a land of freedom and opportunity.

And, I acknowledge that Orientalism, by which I mean the particular brand of dehumanization and othering that is suffered by non-white immigrants, is an important part of the story of American racism. The introduction of Chinese workers to the Southern workforce after the civil war was a seminal event in racial politics, further enshrining white nativism in culture and law, and making the connection between American and white more explicit than ever.

But, I still say that anti-black racism is the fulcrum of white supremacy.

Orientalism was the basis of Japanese American internment and contemporary Islamophobia. It informs our war and immigration policies. But American orientalism is rooted in ideological soil tilled by the justification for genocide and slavery.

Anti-Indian racism has always been about erasure. Genocide, relocation, containment, assimilation, these are the means by which we have attempted to vanquish Native Americans. In contemporary culture and politics we treat Native Americans as relics of the past or by never acknowledging native people at all. This vanishing facilitates tribal termination, violation of treaty rights, stealing land, minerals, and water, and the raiding of native trusts by our federal government to the tune of billions of dollars.

But while continued injustice toward Native Americans requires that we look away, white and black look one another squarely in the face in contemporary politics. The war on drugs, attacks on welfare queens and the food stamp president, and the notion that our social safety net facilitates dependency are all animated by anti-black racism.

Even the centrality of the story of the great American middle class in our politics revolves around anti-blackness. After all, when politicians exploit the proud history and current concerns of the American middle class, they are telling only half the story. The untold half shows that the massive government investment that created that middle class excluded black people and relied on their exploitation. That’s why the racial wealth gap actually grew larger and more durable during this period of so-called growth and opportunity. So when we stir the ire of middle class people over the erosion of their status, we stoke an anger rooted in white privilege.

For a fulcrum to be effective, it has to have a lever. Whiteness is that lever. Whiteness is shaped more powerfully by anti-blackness than by any other force because black and white people have lived in a deeply intimate and interdependent relationship throughout American history.

In America, all races fit together in a system of white political and cultural dominance. But in contemporary American life, black is the foil against which white is most powerfully defined.

Read original blog entry here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

It’s the cultural diversity, stupid!

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Would it be fair to say that the biggest challenge facing Finland during this century is accepting its cultural diversity and deconstructing our white national identity in order to make our society more inclusive? Will this happen easily?

The central issue being debated in Finland today about immigrants boils down to one question: How much cultural diversity are we willing to accept?

There aren’t any political parties in this country, except for the Perussuomalaiset (PS) and its extremist Suomen Sisu faction, which are openly against white Finns marrying people of different ethnicities. Even so, it’s clear that this attitude is quite widespread in our society.

If we’d like to see an even bigger picture of how this works in practice, we could take Cuba’s Fidel Castro example of how he got rid of his political dissidents by allowing them to flee en masse to neighboring Miami.

Less dissidents, more perceived unity.

Finland has seen over 1.2 million emigrants move mainly to the Americas and Sweden between 1860 and 1999. Just like Castro, Finland benefited in the same way. Apart from the socialists and communists that fled Finland after the Civil War of 1918, Finland was able to forge unchallenged a social construct like the “noble” white Finn.

It didn’t matter that hundreds of thousands of Finns had moved to other parts of the world and intermarried with other ethnicities. The way Finnish language evolved in Finnish immigrant communities, and how our view of our changing identity changed as a result, interested only a few.

Paradoxically, we wanted our Finnish expats to retain their Finnish culture and identity at all costs. Today, however, we want our immigrants and newcomers to do totally the opposite: Be like us (white Finnish) we tell them. Learn our culture, speak our language adopt our way of life.

The Finnish Lutheran Church has started to take a strong stand against racism like this story about multicultural families reveals about the discrimination their children face in our society. If there are people who are on the frontline of our ever-growing cultural diversity, they are these exemplary mothers.

Any person who thinks that immigrants don’t want to adapt and succeed in their new homeland know very little about immigration. An unsettling question arises: How can you integrate into a society that doesn’t accept you?

It’s clear that white Finland will not cede much of the high ground to cultural diversity. Expect then the following: lip service about two-way integration but what is really happening is one-way integration (assimilation) in most cases. Wherever two-way integration occurs, it usually happens on a short leash.

A good example of the latter is the following statement I heard from a politician in private. “There is room for immigrants in this country” but “building mosques is out of the question.”

Since it was easy to assimilate “foreigners” in the last century into Finns, it’s a bit more complicated in this century. It was easier in the previous century. All you needed was language, be white, adopt a Finnish surname and substitute your “foreign” background for ardent nationalism.

You’ll need much more than a surname change and a few nationalistic sound bites to be accepted as a Finn with equal rights in this century.

Pastor Ansku Jaakkola says that racism in Jyväskylä is far worse than many think

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Difficult times bring forth exceptional people. One of these is Pastor Ansku Jaakkola of the Adventist Church in Jyväskylä, who believes that racism in her Central Finnish city is far worse than many think.

Näyttökuva 2013-04-10 kohteessa 16.44.48

”Our new [foreign] friends have told us that yelling and harassment happens on a daily basis,” she was quoted as saying on Keskisuomalainen. ”It happens at stores, in the streets and at school.”Jaakkola admitted that it’s difficult for white Finns to understand what racism is if they have never experienced it.While she admits to having been treated well when she lived abroad in England, Marshall Islands and other countries, she states that our society should speak out more against intolerance.

?”It shames me when I hear about people treating others unfairly because of their ethnic background,” she told Migrant Tales. ”It surprised me how general and how much it occurs [in Jyväskylä].”

Jaakkola says that fear and ignorance are the causes for racism in our society.

Jyväskylä has been in the national spotlight recently because of an attack by neo-Nazis against a book presentation in January. In the same month there was a story in the local newspaper about a young dark-skinned woman who was in a toilet.One of the white Finnish women standing in line exclaimed upon seeing the black woman: ”I’m not going to [sit on the same toilet bowl] as that n-word,” she told a woman behind her. ”You go ahead if you dare.”

How can Finland tackle intolerance today if it cannot come to terms with its past?

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Finland’s present political and social dilemma could be best described in the following manner: On the one side it has a difficult time acknowledging ever-growing intolerance in its society, but on the other slowly understands that one major source of that intolerance are groups like the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party.

The PS has grown into a major political force in Finland not by its own merits per se, but because other political parties and the media have been near-silent to its right-wing populist anti-EU, anti-immigration and especially anti-Islam political message.

If the PS ever got to government, and if its chairman Timo Soini ever became prime minister, it would make conservative Christian Democrat interior minister, Päivi Räsänen, look like a liberal.

If this ever happened, the situation of immigrants and visible minorities in Finland would deteriorate further. They would feel the full brunt of populism and intolerance that is openly promoted by the PS.

While we can debate the extent of intolerance in Finland, probably one matter that we can state safely is that our tolerance for cultural diversity needs to improve. We cannot improve on this front as long as we close our eyes and plug our ears to the social ills that racism, prejudice and discrimination are fueling in our society.

It’s futile for a white Finn to state if there is racism or not in our society because he or she has never experienced it. How could he?

We do ourselves great harm by denying or playing down those voices that claim they are victims of racism, prejudice and outright discrimination. This type of silence only encourages and fuels more intolerance.

But back to our dilemma: If we are to challenge the sources of our intolerance, our society needs to do a lot more soul-searching that will carry us back to the depths of the last century. Certainly there we’ll find the sources of our intolerance and the causes for the rise of an anti-immigration party like the PS.

Here’s an interesting article on Yliopppilaslehti about one of those historical skeletons in our collective closet.

It’s futile to understand who we are today if we don’t come to terms with our past. Some sticky unanswered questions include our relationship with Germany and the Nazi regime, the Continuation War, our hatred for the Russians, the Civil War of 1918, cold war-era censorship, and the social construct of Finnish national identity in the last century as well as other ones.

This is the dilemma facing Finland today: If we don’t come to grips with our past, we will be in danger of repeating the same mistakes.

Migrant Tales takes part in German Broadcasting Company program on hate speech

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Those that promote anti-cultural diversity sentiment are not only out to destroy your arguments but your self-esteem. Migrant Tales has proven over again that what we say on this blog has importance and does get noticed in Finland and abroad. The German Broadcasting Company aired on Friday a program on hate speech in which we took part.

We have gotten noticed on publications like Time, Sveriges Radio, YLE’s Suora linja,UNHCR in Greece and others. The BBC and TV4 of Russia have gotten in touch with Migrant Tales as well.

The point is simple: If we have an important message to get out because it is heard faintly by the local media, politicians and public, that message gets eventually noticed. People think we get funding and that enables us to publish Migrant Tales. Wrong. We are for now a hand-on-heart operation with a clear mandate.

Considering that we’ve been around for almost six years and grown to be an active anti-racist blog that promotes cultural diversity, isn’t it surprising how our most infamous counterjihadists and racists don’t dare come close to our blog.

Doesn’t that tell you something?

It tells me that most of these anti-immigration pundits and groups would rather avoid us because we can expose their false arguments but putting in jeopardy their political careers and credibility.

Another important matter to keep in mind is that nobody in the immigrant community controls which topics should be brought up. Our community is a democracy and defends the rights of others to express themselves as long as they don’t insult others. The more opinions we hear, the better.

Thank you for making Migrant Tales into what we are today.

Migrant Tales Literary: The racist and his rabid dog

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Migrant Tales

By Leo Honka

The racist shows off

his rabid dog

on a short leash

footsteps and gleaming eyes

speak of satisfaction

on the pavement and media attention

thanks to his rabid dog.

Like flies on flypaper

struggling to survive

the racist too owns a rabid dog.

On a short leash he walks, walks

but doesn’t know

the true nature of the beast

that knows no master

and can bite back, hard

like Anders Breivik.

What should we do!?

A racist and his rabid dog

in our midst and on our streets!

Send them both to the municipal racist pound!

Give them a shot of tolerance, a possible cure!

So the racist

will no longer show off his rabid dog

on a short leash.

Finland’s tolerance for cultural diversity is being tested to the limit these days

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Finland’s tolerance to Otherness is being tested to the limit these days. If we look at it from a political perspective, the knee-jerk reaction is clear. Denying that there isn’t a connection between the stellar rise of an anti-EU, anti-immigration and anti-Islam party and our ever-growing cultural diversity is understanding a little or erroneously the issue at hand.

It would be wishful thinking to believe that the Perussuomalaiset (PS), which won 39 seats in the 2011 election versus 5 in 2007, that there is a return to the past when the political landscape was dominated by three major parties: National Coalition Party, Social Democrats and Center Party.

Returning back to the political good old days without Timo Soini’s PS is just as unrealistic as stopping Finland’s ever-growing cultural diversity. Intolerance and cultural diversity are here to stay and will set the pace of things to come in Finland in the future.

As far as intolerance is concerned and the rise of parties like the PS appear to throw sand in the gears of cultural diversity, the good news is that history and our sheer numbers will have the final say. We will one day have the power to tell our own narrative as Finns.

Professor Jeremy Gould spoke to Otava Opisto Folk High School students and staff on Friday.

Professor Jeremy Gould of Jyväskylä University gave us the big picture in a recent talk he held near Mikkeli. According to him, there is very little narrative coming from immigrants and visible minorities concerning our ever-growing cultural diversity.

“Nearly everything written about ethnic relations in Finland is by researchers with no personal experience of racism,” said Gould. “Obviously, this limits the depth and relevance of their insights.”

It would be too simplistic to blame only the PS for Finland’s ever-growing intolerance. Such a social ill has been fueled as well by the silence of other political parties, the media and general public.

Not only is silence and lack of leadership a problem, associations that claim to further the rights of immigrants and visible minorities are just as guilty as those who decide to remain silent to the threat of intolerance.

If we accept white Finns, or visible minorities who speak like Uncle Toms, to champion for our rights and to our narrative, we have nobody else to blame but ourselves for our failures.

The big challenge in this century for Finland is deconstructing its twentieth century national identity. In its place there will be a more inclusive Finland where there is a lot of room for everyone to embrace this country as their home.

Maaseudun Tulevaisuus: Soini sees himself forming government after the 2015 elections

Posted on April 6, 2013 by Migrant Tales

What are we to think and believe about Timo Soini’s opinion piece on Maaseudun Tulevaisuus, where he claims that the next government formed after the 2015 parliamentary elections will comprise of three major parties? Certainly Soini sees his party emerging as the victor and Finland’s next prime minister.

Read Maaseudun Tulevaisuus news story on Timo Soini here.

It’s clear that if Soini’s Perussuomalaiset (PS) party wins the 2015 elections, the National Coalition Party will not be in government due to that party’s big differences with the PS concerning the European Union and the euro.

Moreover, Soini has said in the past that he could never work with neither the Greens nor Swedish People’s Party.

The interesting question we should ask is why is Soini creating waves about elections that are two years off? Since the PS leader doesn’t have anything significant to show to voters after being two years in the opposition, he is apparently forced to play for high stakes: It’s government in 2015 or bust.

Even if opinion polls have shown the PS to be breathing down the necks of the National Coalition Party and Social Democrats, it’s still a question mark how well they will do when elections arrive. After the historic victory in April 2011, the PS’ showing in the presidential and municipal election was a clear disappointment for the party.

It’s a good matter that Finnish voters have not fallen for the PS’ rhetoric and populism. Two years in the opposition have not helped the party’s credibility, which has been undermined by near-constant scandals, bursts of racism, ethnic agitation sentences, and anti-EU rhetoric without solutions.

If we are honest about the PS, voters have little idea what the party would actually do if they led the next government.

If the the PS is able match its historic result of 2011 and if any party, especially the Social Democrats, went to bed with Soini, it would be a kiss of political death.

Certainly that day would be one of the darkest days especially for immigrants, visible minorities, Swedish speakers and cultural diversity in general if the PS is able to match its 2011 result in 2014 EuroMP and 2015 parliamentary elections.

While such a threat may remain, some analysts believe that despite Soini’s popularity, most Finnish voters would not trust him as prime minister.

They like to see the PS as a sort of a show and a thorn in the traditional parties’ side.

Three news stories that expose the challenges facing Europe: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-Roma and official approval of the latter

Posted on April 6, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Three stories this week spoke volumes about the challenges facing Europe during these times: discrimination against Muslims is widespread in many European countries; a string of anti-Semitic attacks have been reported in Eastern Europe; and Hungary’s top journalism prize is awarded to an anti-Semitic and Roma basher.

Despite their geographic differences, all three stories are related shedding light on the cancer that is spreading in our region. Intolerance is exceptionally resilient, surviving in the postcolonial era even after two devastating world wars that cost the lives of an estimated 100 million people.

If we had to picture how xenophobic groups are using hate speech to further their agendas, we could use a rabid vicious-looking dog being walked on a short leash by a zealous owner. The dog attracts lots of attention and the owner is happy about this.

What the owner doesn’t know is that the dog knows no master and can bite back hard like he did with Anders Breivik, who murdered on his counterjihadist crusade 77 victims in Norway in July 2011.

Another matter that the rabid dog owner doesn’t want to know, or is ignorant of, is that numerous rabid dogs on short leashes with owners can spark conflicts and wars between nations.

A shadow report on racism by ENAR, the European Network Against Racism, expresses concern about widespread Islamophobia in many European countries.

It claims: ”…damage to Islamic buildings, and protests against the building of mosques even in countries, such as Poland, where some Muslim communities have been established and integrated for centuries. Muslim women and girls are particularly affected, facing an extreme form of double discrimination on the basis of both their religion and their gender. In France for instance, 85% of all Islamophobic acts target women.”

In Eastern Europe, where the economic recession has hit some countries very hard, nationalism and neo-Nazi anti-immigration groups have been on the rise. A spate of anti-Semitic attacks were recorded in the Ukraine, Poland and Hungary in recent days.

Anti-Semitism, which is one of the poisonous fruits of intolerance inflicting Europe these days, is not only on the rise in Eastern Europe but throughout the continent.

The media plays a crucial role in forging attitudes. Even so, the media mirrors what their readers think.

Rerenc Szaniszlo, an anti-Semitic radio broadcaster in Hungary who got fined for calling the Roma ”apes,” was awarded Hungary’s top journalism prize. He has a dubious reputation for spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on his shows.

It’s a good matter that there are some self-respecting Hungarian journalists still around who saw this as a sham. Ten Transcics Prize for journalism winners from other categories handed their prizes in protest, according to The Independent.

All three cases above reveal something disturbing but known to us for a long time in Europe. Attacks on minorities have become so common in some parts of Europe that even journalists, who fuel such intolerance, are awarded coveted journalism awards.

The day will come when the crimes against minorities will be exposed. Their horrors, which reveal social exclusion, wrecked lives, abuse and exploitation, will one day awaken a wider audience to act and defend those democratic values we hold so dear and which are under threat these days.