THIS STORY WAS UPDATED
Perussuomalaiset (PS)* First Vice- President Riikka Purra asked in a tweet: “In your opinion, is it racist to call an African rapist human scum?”
Indeed, it is racist! It is especially racist if you are a white politician who is a member of an Islamophobic and Afrophobic party.
Can a human, irrespective of the crime, be referred to as subhuman?
Her question is a bit similar to what former UK Prime Minister David Cameron called migrants trying to enter Britain as a “swarm,” which is a term applied for fish and insects.
It is not appropriate for anyone, especially politicians, to refer to people as “scum” or a “swarm.”
In the interview with Susanne Päivärinta on Wednesday, the chair of the parliamentary administration committee, which oversees immigration policy, Purra could not name the three biggest national groups in Finland.
She told Päivärinta that they were the Russians, Estonians, and Somalis. Wrong. The three biggest groups are Estonians, Russians, and Iraqis.
Purra talks big and spreads Islamophobic fear but has problems with her facts like what percentage of foreign nationals live in Finland.
She didn’t even know.
Purra is a disingenuous politician whose anti-immigration rhetoric is a sham.
* The far-right Perussuomalaiset (PS) party imploded on June 13, 2017, into two factions, the PS and New Alternative, which is now called Blue Reform. In the last parliamentary election, Blue Reform has wiped off the Finnish political map when they saw their numbers in parliament plummet from 18 MPs to none. A direct translation of Perussuomalaiset in English would be something like “basic” or “fundamental Finn.” Official translations of the Finnish name of the party, such as Finns Party or True Finns, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and racism. We, therefore, at Migrant Tales prefer to use in our postings the Finnish name of the party once and after that the acronym PS.