Laura Huhtasaari of the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party found herself in hot water Thursday after Finland’s largest daily Helsingin Sanomat did some investigative journalism about the MP’s membership in a racist Facebook site that has pictures of black children eating watermelon in a pail that read another “bucketful of shit.”
Huhtasaari is well known to Migrant Tales. Yes, right, she’s the Islamophobe blonde with the kindergarten teacher smile who got a hand from MEP Jussi Halla-aho in her campaign.
Halla-aho was sentenced for ethnic agitation and is the leader of the PS’ far right anti-immigration wing.
Read full story here.
Certainly the revelation by Helsingin Sanomat that she belonged to the racist Facebook site “Puskaraikaajien rasistinen tausta,” or “The racist background of rapists [hiding] in bushes,” didn’t make her very happy.
In a conversation on Tweeter with Sakari Timoinen, one of Finland’s foremost anti-racism bloggers, Huhtasaari appears to lose control and blames without any proof that it was him who tipped off Helsingin Sanomat.
Timonen denies this.
So the question is how did the PS MP from Pori end up on that racist Facebook page?
Huhtasaari claims that she was linked to that page without her knowledge.
Timonen asks how is that possible since nobody had linked her to the site except herself.
To read the full conversation between Huhtasaari and Timonen here.
Huhtasaari’s style is pretty obvious. She’ll make an Islamophobic claim and then tries to back it up with some “study” that we’re kept in the dark about. In Huhtasaari’s world it’s perfectly fine to be Islamophobic because all 1.5 billion Muslims are all the same.
One of her many outrageous claims it that migration from Islamic countries is a security risk for Finland.
In the Helsingin Sanomat story by Tuomas Muraja, a respected journalist who knows the PS and its dark side like the back of his hand, Huhtasaari insists without condemning the racist content of the Facebook site that it’s important to discuss the negative side of immigration.
“In many cultures women are oppressed, which is a human rights violation,” she continues trying to justify her anti-immigration stance. “Persons with foreign backgrounds commit more rape per capita than ethnic Finns.”
After making such a claim, Muraja does what few journalists in Finland do. He challenges her claim.
He states that the number of rapes committed by foreigners is so small in Finland that one cannot, like some claim, that it is an ethnic or national trait.
Muraja cites a recent study on crime by the National Research Institute of Legal Policy (Optula), which states that the number of suspected rape cases in 2013 was 473. Of these around one third were committed by persons with foreign backgrounds.
There are about 300,000 foreigners living in Finland.
It’s sad that Finland has politicians like Huhtasaari who are trying to kill Finland’s good sense of fairness and justice with the help of fear-mongering and Islamophobia, but with a deadly smile.
* The Finnish name for the Finns Party is the Perussuomalaiset (PS). The English names of the party adopted by the PS, like True Finns or Finns Party, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and xenophobia. We therefore prefer to use the Finnish name of the party on our postings.