Tag: Europe

guardian.co.uk: Far right on rise in Europe, says report

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Comment: A long-awaited study published today by Demos think tank asks if populism is the future face of Europe. 

The guardian.co.uk writes: “The study reveals a continent-wide spread of hardline nationalist sentiment among the young, mainly men. Deeply cynical about their own governments and the EU, their generalised fear about the future is focused on cultural identity, with immigration – particularly a perceived spread of Islamic influence – a concern.”

When asked to mention what factors they disliked most about the EU, the respondents stated: waste of money (59%), not enough control over external borders (58%), loss of our cultural identity’ (56%), more crime (46%) and bureaucracy (36%).

If we look at PS Facebook respondents, they scored higher than average than the rest. Seventy-four percent considered the EU a “waste of money,” 62% said there wasn’t “enough control over external borders,” and 69% stated “loss of cultural identity.” PS respondents scored the highest  together with Die Freiheit of Germany on “loss of cultural identity.”

Concerns over immigration and Islamic terrorism were the respondents two main concerns. The highest score was by France’s far right (Bloc Identitaire, 67% and National Front 57%) compared with an average of 37%;  PS scored 33%.  Fifteen percent (25% on average for the whole group) of the PS saw Islamic terrorism as a threat.

While the PS claimed in September that preliminary findings of the Demos study claimed that the party is violent, the think tank has denied such allegations.

Do you agree that the populist and far right parties that base their campaigns on anti-EU, anti-immigration and anti-Islam sentiment will continue to grow in Europe?

You can download the full report here.

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Peter Walker and Mathew Taylor

The far right is on the rise across Europe as a new generation of young, web-based supporters embrace hardline nationalist and anti-immigrant groups, a study has revealed ahead of a meeting of politicians and academics in Brussels to examine the phenomenon.

Read whole story.

Multilingual Mania: Dehumanizing Immigrants-Lies and More Distorted Lies

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Comment: Here is an interesting column on Multilingual Mania that could be a good wakeup call to us how anti-immigration matters could turn nasty in Europe and Finland.

What would happen if we substituted some words in the blog entry below terms like Arizona  for Europe or Finland? Do these statements sound eerily familiar today in our part of the world, even if they were said in another continent? 

“We’ve seen it over and over–measurement of the skull incompatible cultural traits to prove that African Americans people from outside Europe were inferior and deserved to be enslaved  treated as third-class citizens, the depiction of indigenous Native Americans Muslims and Africans as wild savages living in the stone age who needed to be ripped away from their cultures and re-educated assimilated, and the idea that all Arabs are either radical terrorists or culturally inferior, and far too many other instances.”

And: “The lies paint a portrait of immigrants as drug dealers, child molesters rapists, leaches, thieves, murderers, and other big, bad, evil monsters. This video discusses and confronts some of the lies, mistruths, and distortions of information that are coming out of the mouth of authority figures regarding immigration.”

The spreading of lies and exaggerations by Finnish anti-immigration politicians have been handsomely rewarded by the way of votes. It has helped a party like the Perussuomalaiset to become the second largest in Finland. Alejandro Chávez, the son of the famous United Farm Workers activist César Chávez, said: “People will suffer not the politicians (spreading these lies).”

 Do you think that media and people in this country should be more outspoken against those politicians that are using the anti-immigration card to reap political benefits?

Are we too soft on them? 

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It’s a classic trick of the racists to paint a portrait of a people so horrible that it makes anything that is done to them to be justifiable. It’s quite a brilliant idea, really, to be able to paint such a nasty picture of someone in the mind of the public without many people hardly even catching on to the trick. This strategy serves to dehumanize people, stripping them of their humanity and making them into objects that deserve to be tamed, oppressed, and controlled.

Read whole story.

Ten matters that ignite the debating spirit of Migrant Tales

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

Migrant Tales will never censor opinions that aren’t racist. One of the strengths of this blog has been its diversity of opinions  on immigration,  Finnish identity and other topics.  Even so, some matters get our adrenalin circulating faster than others. Here are the top 10:

  1. People telling an immigrant that while all foreigners live off welfare, he or she is the exception
  2. The Perussuomalaiset (PS) worldview (provincial and simplistic answers of the world like on immigration)
  3. Exclusive views about Finnish culture and what it is (time-warp syndrome)
  4. Tight definitions of who can claim a place under the Finnish sun (denial of immigrants’ and minorities’ historicity in Finland)
  5. Racism repackaged as freedom of speech (eg A PS MP or a Finn assuring us that racism is a minor problem in this country)
  6. Racism as racism
  7. People who still romanticize about fascism in the twentieth century (PS MP’s Juho Eerola’s fascination with Benito Mussolini’s economic policy, for example)
  8. People who romanticize about fascism in the twenty-first century (Counter-Jihadists)
  9. Far-right and right-wing populist parties that lure votes by spreading hatred of immigrants (Danish People’s Party, Progress Party and Sweden Democrats to name a few)
  10. Short-sighted politicians who lack leadership and who are too weak and corrupted spiritually to defend everyone’s civil rights

The meaning of the veil and why some want to ban it

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

Switzerland’s lower house of parliament voted Wednesday 101-77 to outlaw veils like the burqa when using public transport or visiting authorities, reports AP.  The measure, which is being spearheaded by the Swiss People’s Party, will go for a vote in the upper house before federal elections next month.

Oskar Freysinger, a Swiss People’s Party lawmaker, said that the aim of the ban was “to avoid a religious war.”  Freysinger campaigned in 2009 to prohibit the construction of minarets in Switzerland.

What is surprising about these types of bans is the extent some parties and countries will go to brush diversity under the rug. Lawmakers, who should know better in Switzerland, should understand that placing restrcitions on how Muslim women should dress in public is not the only issue. What they are doing is  making a mockery of our democratic values and the important role of  diversity in it.

What is the use of speaking of freedom of worship and freedom of thought if on the other hand we deny diversity?

A colleague put it in the following terms: “Acceptance of difference (and the creative energy from that acceptance) must be done on the terms of those who differ, not the terms of those with power.”

It is important that lawmakers throughout Europe as well as the public should remain vigilant against laws that limit our freedom to be different.

Veil-ban laws in Switzerland expose the weakness of such societies even if they can hide behind formidable military and economic might.

guardian.co.uk: English Defence League filling vacuum left by mainstream politics, says report

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Comment: An effective way for Finland to come to grips with its far-right problem in parliament would be to see how countries like Britain deal with these types of threats.Two thinktanks, Right Response and Chatham House, are warning that out-of-touch politicians on a grassroots level have left a vacuum for far-right groups like the English Defence League. 

Matthew Goodwin of Right Response claims that mainstream parties had become increasingly professional and managerial. “(They are) concentrating on political marketing techniques and relying on computer-generated canvas returns, tightly-scripted phone banks, focus groups and opinion polls,” he said, “rather than on face-to-face contact, except at election time. Extreme parties often had more innovative websites too.”

He continues: “The rise of extreme parties was not only linked to anxiety over threats to jobs, social housing and the welfare state posed by immigrants. Mainstream parties needed to challenge more forcefully claims national cultures were under attack and that meant going beyond making an economic case for immigration and arguing instead for cultural diversity.”

Such observations by the author of Right Response could very well apply to Finland and explain partially why a right-wing populist party like the Perussuomalaiset (PS) won 19.1% of the vote in the last election. Instead of challenging the anti-immigration and anti-Muslim claims of some of the PS candidates, mainstream parties except for the Greens started to flirt with that party’s xenophobic message.

It appears that in Finland we are having a difficult time admitting how severe of a social ill is racism and if there are far-right anti-democratic politicians in parliament. Migrant Tales has maintained for a long time that the Suomen Sisu wing of the PS led by MP Jussi Halla-aho and his cronies are extremists that should be isolated from Timo Soini’s party.

Social Democratic Party Presidential hopeful Paavo Lipponen has warned earlier about the threat of the far right in the PS. He continued to drive home this message today on MTV3’s Huomenta Suomen Torstaikapinetissa show: “A clear far-right streak exists in the Perussuomalaiset party,” said Lipponen. “We must now ask whether this is Perussuomalaiset (party’s) line and if it accepts this type of politics.” 

Conservative MP for Northampton North, Michael Ellis, was quoted on guardian.co.uk as stating that he had “every confidence” that the coalition government would combat “the rise of the ‘new far-right'” and the potential for “lone wolf'” terrorism.

“One must only look at the terrible atrocity this summer in Norway at the hands of a murderous terrorist – in the name of a crazed war against Islam,” he said, “to see the relevancy and currency of this report.”

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James Meikle

Mainstream political parties must tackle far-right groups through doorstep hearts and minds campaigns that tackle anti-Muslim sentiments at local level, according to two reports on challenging extremists.

Read whole story.

MTV3: Lipponen jyrähtää jälleen: Perussuomalaisissa asuu äärioikeistolaisuus

Read whole story.

Le Monde Diplomatique: Lessons from Norway

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Comment: The box story below in the September issue of Le Monde Diplomatique (LMD) is a good read that attempts to see what lessons can be learned from Norway after Anders Breivik went on the rampage on July 22.

One matter that we must accept, according to the story, is the rise of far-right radicalism, anti-immigration and Islamophobic sentiment in Europe. Even so, we cannot say that they will automatically produce more Breiviks.

Writes LMD: “These ‘radical’ views are not the sole preserve of a disparate violent fringe — they are becoming legitimised as part of the political discourse. The ‘one long scream of resentment,’ in the words of the late historian Tony Judt, ‘at immigrants, at unemployment, at crime and insecurity, at ‘Europe’ and in general at ‘them’ who have brought it all about” is being heard by more people than ever before. Yet there is a danger of reading too much into these opinions as the catalyst for an individual atrocity.'”

One matter we should keep clear, however, is that far right or right-wing populist views are deteminental to our society. “These (far-right) parties should be opposed not because they may have tangentially ‘inspired’ individual acts of symbolic violence, but because their programme is dehumanising, sectarian and threatens the basis of a stable, cohesive society,” concludes LMD.

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By K Biswas

What do the tragic events in Utoya and Oslo tell us about the status of far-right, anti-immigrant or Islamophobic politics in Norway, Scandinavia and the rest of Europe? Commentators and “security experts” — many of whom were initially convinced of the Islamic nature of the attacks — have spent the past month speculating.

Read whole story.

Spiegel Online International: Anti-Roma Protests Turn Violent in the Czech Republic

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Comment:  The racism and the prejudice that the Roma minority face throughout Europe is a shameful reality of our times.  It is a grim reminder of the fate that some immigrant groups and their descendants can face in this part of the world.

One of the matters that has always surprised me about racism is that it is one of the worse forms of cowardice because you are attacking in many cases the most defenseless members of society.

The violent attacks against the Roma in Hungary and now in the Czech Republic are clear examples that Europe still has a long way to go to resolve its serious ethnic issues.  Such violence in the Czech Republic is being perpetrated by neo-Nazi groups like the DSSS.  

There are an estimated 9 million Romany living in Europe today. Most of them (1.9 million) live in Romania.

A couple of week a Roma couple that I’ve known for many years dropped by for a cup of coffee at our home. Whenever we meet we exchange a few words about their situation in Finland. The man was very candid when I asked him why the Roma in Finland didn’t get more invovled in politics. “We have learned that lying low and being quiet is the best defense against our enemies,” he said.

This tactic does not appear to be working too well in countries like the Czech Republic, Hungary and others.

Finnish authorities have not done a good job in dealing with Eastern European Roma either that have temporarily moved to our country.

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For weeks there have been riots between Czech locals and newly settled Roma in northern Bohemia. What started as a series of brutal but isolated fights has grown into a popular movement in small towns along the eastern German border. Right-wing extremists have fanned the hatred.

Read whole story.

BBC: Ed Miliband condemns David Starkey’s race comments

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Comment: The reason why racism has flourished recently in Finland through parties like the Perussuomalaiset (PS) is because it hasn’t been condemned strongly enough.

Sensible politicians and common citizens in Finland who know better, should look at how racism is condemned in countries like Britain.

Why is this important? Because there is no such thing as selective racism in a society. Racism affects everyone and those who encourage undermine our values and our way of life. 

What kind of response should parties like Kokoomus, Social Democrats and the PS to racist comments?

Thank you @Mastersson for bringing this story to Migrant Tales’ attention.

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Labour leader Ed Miliband has described historian David Starkey’s comments on race as “disgusting and outrageous”.  Mr Starkey told BBC Two’s Newsnight “whites have become black” after four days of rioting across England.

Read whole story.

Exposing the language of anti-immigration groups in Finland and Europe

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

One of the most surprising factors behind the hate speech of anti-immigration groups is that it is never portrayed as hatred. Racists never admit in public they are racists nor do far-right groups claim that they are extremists.

Deciphering the language of groups like the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party may be difficult for some. The language they use to label immigrants and minorities has nothing to do with fairness nor our values found in the spirit of our laws.

Take for instance the far-right Suomen Sisu association wing of the PS led by MP Jussi Halla-aho and their loathing of the term “multiculturalism.”

Migrant Tales bloggers know that multiculturalism is a Canadian social policy used to integrate immigrants and promote cultural diversity. There are only three multicultural (social policy) countries in the world: Canada, Australia and Britain.

In Finland, multiculturalism is used to mean ethnic and cultural diversity with some sprinkles of Canada’s multicultural social policy.

If we look at the PS and other populist and far-right parties in Europe, multiculturalism means a totally different thing. For these groups, multiculturalism is a shady concept or policy that permits Muslims and Africans from moving to Europe and Finland. When these groups commonly speak of “uncontrolled immigration” they mean that too many or no Muslims and Africans should be allowed to move to Europe.

In the same way they have definied mulituclturalism to fit their political agenda, they have soiled the good name of immigrants and refugees.

Certainly the usual language of racism will be used to justify their loathing of these groups. One of their favorite arguments is that these people “are so barbaric that they can never adapt to our society.” Thus their racism and hatred is justified because a certain group is so different from us.

But the big hole in their argument of groups like the Counter-Jihadists is that they don’t have any solutions on how to make diversity work. Their solution is a constant whining about “ghettos” and “maladapted” immigrants when in fact the grand majority of these people have jobs, pay taxes and lead normal lives.

Moreover, if European society is already culturally diverse how do they plan to make it less diverse? What do they plan to do with the millions of Muslims and other minorities living in Europe?

The fact is that anti-immigration groups don’t have any answers. The only answers they will give you in public is blatant bigotry that flirts with your stereotypes and racism.

If you ever meet up with a representative or a person who loathes immigrants and other minorities in Europe, why not ask him or her what they plan to do with these people.

The answer they may give may shock you.

Are immigrants and Multicultural Finns becoming a social movement in Finland?

Posted on by Migrant Tales

I rebel, then I exist. Albert Camus (1913-60)

By Enrique Tessieri

The news coming out of our television sets in recent months show protests in the Arab world, Greece and recently in London. Similar demonstrations have sparked in Chile and Israel. Despite differences between these protests, the message is the same: We don’t trust our traditional rulers any longer.

In which form these mass protests appear differ from country to country. On April 17 we saw such a protest in Finland, when the right-wing populist Perussuomalaiset (PS) party won 39 seats from 5 in the last election in 2007.

The PS victory has the same message as other ones globally: It is a big thumbs down to the country’s traditional parties and rulers.

Migrant Tales has said on many occasions that there is nothing wrong with protesting and fighting for the rights of others. However, if you link racism and xenophobia to “your struggle” you water down the noble message of your movement.

It would be naïve and short-sighted to think that just because the PS won a big victory in April, they will continue to collect  the fruits of discord. Since immigrant groups and parties like the Greens and others now see a clear adversary, the PS, it means that they are growing in strength as well.

French sociologist Alain Trouaine has studied social movements for a very long time, ranging from the May Movement of Paris in 1968 to the Solidarity movement of Poland in the 1980s.

Social movement, according to him, “are central and burn at the heart of society.”  In other words, social movements permit society to renew itself. This happens constantly.

One social movement in the making made up of immigrants and Finns could be Minun Suomeni on kansainvälinen – My Finland is International on Facebook.

What is remarkable about this Facebook page is that it already has the ability to mobilize demonstrations thanks to its over 45,000 “friends.”

Those who ask why immigrants and Multicultural Finns are hardly acknowledged, have no history or exist for the majority of Finns ask key questions about how larger groups exclude smaller ones.

If immigrants and Multicultural Finns don’t have a history or a nascent one at the best in Finland, how can they ever aspire to demand more rights never mind control and shape historicity? Since a group doesn’t have any history or very little of it recognized by the majority it means that it does not effectively exist. It is a bit like the debate on whether there is racism in Finland. By denying that there is racism are we affirming that we are not a culturally diverse society?

That is why I believe that one of the consequences of the rise of the PS will be more vocal social movements led by immigrants and Finns that will struggle and fight for greater recognition and acceptance by society.