Do we need to know the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* MP’s track record and what he has said about asylum seekers, Muslims, people of color, and other minorities in the past? His tirade against asylum seekers was so racist that the Left Alliance bloc threatened to leave the meeting if Vallin didn’t stop talking.
Vallin, an avid Donald Trump follower who boasts about how little taxes he pays in Finland because his money is in Estonia, likes to also take pictures of day-care children and women in Muslim attire and publish them without permission on social media.
There is an old saying that goes something like this: I was a liberal in youth so I would not be a fascist in old age.
What motivates a politician to twist and exaggerate facts to stigmatize migrants? National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) MP Heikki Vestman’s speech in parliament Wednesday is a prime example of how some politicians spread Islamophobia to attract attention and gain power.
His unsubstantiated talking points motivated me to write an email to him, which he has not yet responded to.
Moreover, the MP uses code to tell us what groups he is targetting. The term “asylum seeker” usually means Muslim.
“When I heard your speech and rationale Wednesday (20 October), I wondered how a young, apparently intelligent person could house such opinionated and unsubstantiated claims about migrants. If you are honest, would you want to [live and] grow up in a country where this type of discourse is ongoing by politicians seeking power and attention? Read some history and check out how the Finns were labeled in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s.
Does the phrase “en finne igen” ring a bell?
After North America, the greatest number of Finnish immigrants, or about half a million people, moved to Sweden. In the 1960s and 1970s, Finns had a terrible reputation in the neighboring country. Whenever a crime occurred, Swedes usually responded, “it must be a Finn,” en finne igen.
Here is a question to Vestman: Why are you picking and bullying vulnerable groups of people who cannot defend themselves from your attacks?
National Coalition Party anti-immigration MP Heikki Vestman. Source: Kokoomus
Below are some unsubstantiated claims (that I translated and paraphrased) from Vestman’s speech. He was against loosening family reunification guidelines because the minors, whom he sadly referred to as “anchor babies,” could become a national security threat.
Vestman should know that having a family is a human right.
Islamophobia and other forms of racism are for some politicians their gateway to power and infamy.
Watching part of the firey debate Wednesday in parliament that led to a vote of confidence for the government, one wonders what some politicians, especially with the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party, have in their heads.
The saddest matter was the bullying and false claims about migrants, nothing more than storms in teacups.
Those politicians and parties who only think beyond their noses are doomed to hitting a wall.
They are heading towards such a fate because they believe that Islamophobic and other racist soundbites will help them to have and retain power and influence.
After launching an aggressive campaign and burning up a lot of money in themunicipal elections of June, the PS came in fourth place despite some polls, which showed it to come out on top.
The result was a huge disappointment and the party gasped for air.
If there is a crack line in the PS, their disappointing result in the municipal election is an indication that the public is growing weary of their broken-record scapegoat-migrant approach.
It has been a bad week for Helsinki University with Helsingin Sanomat uncovering an alleged discrimination case by the faculty of theology. The incident comes after the university’s department of geography students dressed up like colonizers of a popular board game, Afrikan tähti (Star of Africa).
The Helsinki University geography department gave Tuesday a public apology concerning the incident.
Surprisingly, Jasmine Fantaa’s Instagram post, which was responsible for the incident of the geography students to go viral, was taken down and could not be accessed Wednesday.
The second discrimination case alleges that theology students of Islam with Finnish surnames were picked to teach at a school over students that did not have Finnish-sounding names.
I got to know Amir* in 2016 when he was living in the Kolari asylum refugee center. Thanks to his help and those of others, the asylum seekers of the reception center organized a demonstration that ended with the deputy manager, Jari Sillantie, getting sacked.
Amir, an Iraqi, came to Finland in 2015 like so many of his countrymen.
He writes:
I’m sorry I didn’t send you a long time ago; I spent all these years in poor condition and full of stress.
I’m tired and have suffered a lot from 2015 to 2021; psychological pressure and my nerves tight. There is no such thing as mercy or humanity [here]. We have suffered a lot of stress and other things. We cried so much that we got sick to the point where we could never sleep normally again.
Asylum seekers demonstratingat the Kolari asylum reception center in May 2016.
We have been interviewed by the authorities several times and have received rejections on asylum for trivial reasons. The reason is that they don’t want to help us. If they wanted to, they would do so. Once in an interview, my wife threw herself on the floor and urinated on herself. There was no mercy or humanity despite what happened.
I have many problems in Iraq, and I even submitted papers to the authorities proving this. I was the reason why they killed two people who were with me. My friends accused me of being part of the group that killed my friends, but they were wrong. They still don’t believe me.
We had a lot of problems when I lived with my wife in Iraq. My wife’s brother got injured in a demonstration, and they burned down his house.
An asylum seeker demonstrating in Kolari in May 2016.
We started to go to a church in Finland for a while because they gave us some food and aid. My children liked going there, but something unexpected happened. One day, when we were returning from the church, another brother of my wife called. My son answered the phone, and a big problem emerged when my father-in-law, a Muslim, overheard the conversation that we had gone to church.
My father was a Christian, and I had many problems because of this in Iraq. When my father-in-law overheard us, he started to curse and curse until he began threatening us. He stated that he’d kill his daghter and me because I deceived his daughter to change religion. The threats did not stop. He started to spread them in Iraq, vowing to kills us.
All the suffering my wife has endured has caused her to commit suicide more than once. I have visited many psychiatrists and taken a lot of medicine. My wife, even my little son, went to see a psychiatrist.
We don’t have anyone here or in Iraq who would care for us. And on top of this, the police are now telling us to leave and go back to Iraq. They have threatened to cut off all financial aid, housing, everything. I asked them where we were supposed to go with three young children.
I have thought many times that I have wasted seven years of my life in Finland. I was given an ultimatum together with my wife’s children to go back to Iraq. They gave me 30 days to decide. Next week I’ll be expelled from the refugee center, and I don’t know what will happen to us after that.
*Amir is an assumed name used to protect his identity because he is an asylumseeker. The story was lightly edited.
Sexual assault, especially suspected cases, is heatedly used by anti-immigration parties like the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* and public services like the police to demonstrate how some foreigners are. The police admitted today to a mistake in tabulating suspected sexual assault cases during 2020.
The mistake originates from a foreigner suspected of sexually assaulting his wife 141 times. Since the person was reported as 141 individual suspects, the amount for 2020 is therefore too high.
The police and Statistics Finland have confirmed the mistake.
The correct percentage of all suspected sexual assaults last year was 27.2%, not 38.5%.
Another interesting finding of the sexual assault statistics is that Northern Europeans, not Western Asians (Middle Easterners, Persians, and other nationalities), committed most suspected sexual assaults.
Why didn’t the media make a bigger deal about this fact?
Northern Europeans had the most sexual assault cases (58.9%), as many as 80% of alleged sexual assault against children.
Another important legal point that media coverage forgot to mention is that a person is innocent before proven guilty by a court of law. The number of convicted cases for sexual assault is only a fraction of the suspected ones. In 2019, 12.9% of all suspected cases were handed convictions.
The Finnish government of Prime Minister Sanna Marin plans to overturn the country tightened immigration law and family reunification requirements, which came into force a year later after a record 32,477 asylum seekers came to Finland in 2015. The then government of Center Party Prime Minister Juha Sipilä, the anti-immigration Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party was a partner together with the National Coalition Party (Kokoomus), tightened the immigration law that, among other matters, made family reunification harder.
If passed, the new law will come into force in 2022.
While some may claim that there is nothing dramatic about doing away with tightened rules that came into force in 2016, there was already a tightening of the law in 2011.
Isn’t it a surprise that Helsingin Sanomat did not publish a person of color to go with the story? The Finnish media usually publish such pictures when migrants or asylum seekers are the topic. Read the full story here.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that one of the main factors behind these changes was the anti-immigration Perussuomalaiset (PS) party’s growing popularity in the polls and its historic election victory in April 2011.
Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party MP Sebastian Tynkkynen was convicted for a third time of ethnic agitation, according to Yle News. The two previous convictions were handed down in 2016 and 2017.
The Oulu District Court handed Tynkkynen, who is the PS’ third vice president, 70 day fines amounting to 4,400 euros.
The PS MP naturally denied any wrongdoing, and that conviction ran against his right to free expression.
“Why was it necessary to speak [out against Muslims who are a danger to society], taking into account what was happening behind the scenes with respect to the sexual abuse of children and how it undermined security in general,” he was quoted as saying in Iltalehti and continues: “I saw back then that I had a moral obligation to speak out against this.”
A “moral obligation” to speak out against sexual harassment? How disingenuous of you, MP Tynkkynen.
Let’s look at media coverage and how the police and politicians reacted to sexual harassment cases of minors in Oulu in 2018-2019. Back then, MPs like Tynkkynen were fueling the fires of fear against asylum seekers, which are mostly Muslims.
One of the biggest challenges and shortfalls of Finland’s integration law is that it is one-sided: Here is a list of things you must do to adapt to our society. This aim is very general, and if you start to study it closer, you will find no answers.
While language is essential, and Finland places a lot of emphasis on this, it is not your get-out-of-jail pass to live “integrated” and happily forever. As people of color and other minorities know, integration is a two-way street.
Considering the present political landscape and how much minorities influence the public policy of migrants and minorities, we are still a long way off and on the wrong path to achieve a society that respects difference.
If we look at school children in one of the world’s best education systems, why is it that some dark-skinned people are ashamed because they aren’t white enough? This fact forms part of a backdrop of discrimination and bullying at some Finnish schools.
Treat with tweezers whenever percentage figures are used to depict sexual assault cases by migrants.
A government-commissioned study published Thursday concluded that migrants are over-represented in suspected sexual assault crimes, perpetuating a toxic narrative. Such generalizations give ammunition to Islamophobes like the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party to maintain and reinforce racist stereotypes.
To look at how the Finnish media reported the study, we’d have to look at what the media and study did not mention.
For one, the study cites suspected sexual assault cases but also mentions convictions. The media took the bait and cited with gusto suspected cases and concluded that “migrants are overrepresented” in sexual assault crime, accounting for 37.5% of all cases. That compares to 57.4% of sexual assaults by Finns.
In Finland, as in other Western countries, a person is innocent until proven guilty by a court of law.
