Finland Archives - Page 68 of 359

Kokoomus’ Antti Häkkänen vilifies Islam, claims to uphold human rights

Posted on November 1, 2020 by Migrant Tales

THIS STORY WAS UPDATED

In a bid to gain voters, the National Coalition Party’s (Kokoomus) MP Antti Häkkänen and possibly the next chairperson of the conservative party spreads his anti-Islamic rhetoric, again.

For those who don’t know Häkkänen, he comes from a small town called Mäntyharju in Eastern Finland and has expressed before his extreme distaste for non-white migration and especially Islam.

During 2011-2013, he was president of the Youth League of the National Coalition Party, which idolizes US capitalism and the Republican Party. His predecessor was Wille Rydman, a well-known anti-immigration hardliner, and his successor was Susanna Koski. Under Koski’s leadership, the Youth League of the National Coalition Party aimed at doing away with legislation that prohibited hate speech and that would make redundant the then Ombudsman for Minorities Office.

As councilperson for Mäntyharju, a small town in Eastern Finland, he is reported to have declined to offer, as a show of solidarity, his small meeting fee to newly-arrived quota refugees.

His tweet below of the horrific deaths in France is no surprise.

He tweets: “The enemies of an open society try to change Europe’s way of life and destroy our values. We should not bow to such pressure. Neither bowing to Islamic terrorism nor to that of an authoritarian state. Human rights and freedom must be defended by a united Europe.”

I’m certain that such a statement gave Häkkänen and Kokoomus a lot of brownie points with voters and, possibly, their future partners in government, the Islamophobic Perussuomalaiset (PS).*

Here are some questions that I’d ask Häkkänen about his pugnacious tweet:

Jussi Halla-aho is a fake and his party’s disingenuous and misleading claims

Posted on October 31, 2020 by Migrant Tales

Anyone who has followed Perussuomalaiset (PS)* chairperson Jussi Halla-aho’s political career will easily conclude that it was done on the fuel of racism and bigotry, and generous chunks of it.

Racism had become such a normal matter for the PS that on the same day when Halla-aho claimed on Marja Sannikka’s talk show that he “resents people being treated differently” due to their skin color, the party’s vice president lashes out against people of color.

https://twitter.com/Arskababa/status/1322284775575588869?s=20&fbclid=IwAR2FSaf7gAkHlSwx6fivBYmLfZ-Rt9ECJkxZSJnvXtQgbruejBbnV1rCdl0

On Marja Sannika’s talk show (in Finnish), Halla-aho was incapable of condemning racism.

States Purra (who calls, like Halla-aho on Sannikka’s show, asylum seekers “harmful” migration) stated on the same day of Halla-aho’s interview: “Wouldn’t it be high time to think that the mixing of people, religions, and cultures in the West is such a good matter? The development of mass migration and violent cultures is A PROBLEM. Beheading a person is only one example.”

Sannikka asks Halla-aho in the interview if he resents racism.

His response: “Yes, I resent any thinking that treats people differently because of their skin color. I do resent this.”

**Affirms Riikka Purra:** “Wouldn’t it be high time to think that the mixing of people, religions, cultures in the West [not] IS SUCH A GOOD MATTER? Mass immigration from the developing world and violent cultures ARE A PROBLEM. Beheading is just one example.”

One of the biggest challenges of Finnish journalism is follow-up. You throw a question to the person you are interviewing, and if he tries to wiggle his or her way out of it or speak in code to his followers, you hit the person with another question until you get the answer.

Halla-aho’s response if he resented racism was a half-ass job.

Diagree? Check out one of his tweets:

**Nobody in the Perussuomalaiset [party] wants a multiethnic or culturally [diverse] Finland, which consistently mentioned in our program and in everything that we do.” Source: Twitter**

Halla-aho’s answer could mean anything. It could be seen as a statement against affirmative action, equality but not equity.

No more PS BS and politicking by French President Emmanuel Macron

Posted on October 29, 2020 by Migrant Tales

“Another underlying message also becomes clear in the meantime: ‘Muslims pose a threat to our society and have to be tamed,’ which is reminiscent of the ‘civilizing’ mission of the French colonial conquerors.“

Farid Hafez*

THIS STORY WAS UPDATED

Any sensible Muslim or person will condemn what happened in France concerning the beheading of a teacher. As Hafez points out, the incident is being used by President Emmanuel Macron to push through his anti-separatist bill and load his guns for the presidential elections of 2022.

Guess who he is facing in the presidential election? Right. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen who has, like her father, built her whole political career Islamophobia.

An old blame-game-the-whole-group emerges.

”The state needs to understand that those who provoked chaos and terrorism did not attend mosques they were not integrated into the Muslim community, they were repeat offenders, criminals, who came and went from prison,” said The Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF). “They had a path in violence, and because of this we stigmatize a whole population?”

Should we be surprised that Finland’s Perussuomalaiset (PS) party,[1] which, like Le Pen, uses Islamophobia to gain voters and political power, is crying murder?

PS MP Leena Meri threw some Islamophobic punches at the government last week and had difficulty pronouncing Black Lives Matter, which she considered a violent association.

“Honorable government,” she asked in last Thursday’s session of parliament, “why haven’t you condemned what happened [in France]? Are you numb?”

We can rephrase the question back to Meri: “Has your Islamophobic rhetoric and racism shown an alarming trend in Finland?”

Apart from the political brownie points, Macron is trying to reap, and we see the same disturbing pattern of how we label the whole Muslim community for the outlandish deed. We see this happening with the PS.

“The crackdown on more than 50 Muslim organizations, including anti-racist organizations such as the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), is the best example of what the state aims to do with this [anti-separatist] legislation,” writes Hafez in aa.com. “While the human rights advocacy group CCIF is collecting data to create awareness on anti-Muslim racism and helps the victims of anti-Muslim discrimination, the singling out of this organization reveals a very worrisome dimension of Macron’s policies: Erasing Muslim visibility from the public space altogether.”

No more PS BS and politicking from Macron.

*Hafez is a political scientist at the University of Salzburg. He is also a non-resident senior research scholar at Georgetown University’s The Bridge Initiative, and the co-author of the European Islamophobic Report.

[1]

Helsinki Times: A rebuttal to Perussuomalaiset* MPs Veikko Vallin and Veijo Meri

Posted on October 25, 2020 by Migrant Tales

Read the original posting here.

Exposing white Finnish privilege #74: The anti-Semitic beast inside Jussi Halla-aho

Posted on October 23, 2020 by Migrant Tales

THIS STORY WAS UPDATED

In a recent debate with Center Party chairperson Annika Saariko, the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party head, Jussi Halla-aho, was put on the hot seat after asked about his anti-Semitic blog writings.

He denied being an anti-Semite and said that the claim was a popularity stunt by Lauri Nurmi, who recently published an unofficial biography of him and made such an observation.

Why didn’t the reporter at the debate ask two questions: “Are you, Halla-aho, an anti-Semite and an Islamophobe.”

The PS and how it treats minorities, especially Muslims, expose the power and privilege white Finns have. It is like living in a near-perfect world. You can eat your racist cake with impunity and have it at the same time.

While Finland’s 100,000-120,000-strong Muslim community has little to no political power and is constantly reminded that they can never be equal members of society, the smaller Jewish community is a different story.

The Jewish community in Finland has historically suffered from anti-Semitism. A characteristic of this form of racism is that you silence the victim and plug your ears to their objections.

Matias Turkkila is the editor of the PS party’s newspaper who confirmed Halla-aho’s anti-Semitism and that of the party’s as well.

Turkkila claims that the “fierce” attack made by Yle against Kärkkäinen is part of a plan to destroy Juha Kärkkäinen’s businesses. He claims that one of the journalists that did the radio program is a member of the Left Alliance. Turkkila asks in the tweet: “@yleuutiset why do you allow a Left Alliance activist to use your platform to aim [at Kärkkäinen]?” He adds that *Yle* should follow its own rules and not publish material to advance the world view of others. Source: Twitter.

In the tweet, Turkkila overlooks or believes that we do not know who Juha Kärkkäinen is. For starters, he was fined in 2014 for publishing anti-Semitic writings of Adrian Salbuch, Ted Pike, David Duke, and others, as well as cartoons that bear a striking resemblance to the former Nazi tabloid, Der Strümer (1923-45).

The anti-Semitic writings were published in Magneettimedia, a publication of his stores that continues to be rife with anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and Nazi glorification. It is today no longer edited by Kärkkäinen but by neo-Nazis.

The media has power but it prefers driving a moped when confronting racism and the Perussuomalaiset

Posted on October 20, 2020 by Migrant Tales

If there is somebody to blame for Finland’s Perussuomalaiset (PS)* problem, a big part of the blame falls on the media. In that group, you will find politicians and about 17% of Finns who vote for an openly hostile party to Muslims, people of color, and minorities.

A good example of the media’s power was seen on Monday when PS chairperson Jussi Halla-aho was questioned about his anti-Semitic blog writings. The question put Halla-aho momentarily in the hot seat, forcing a knee-jerk response. He denied (surprise, surprise!) being an anti-Semite and said that the claim was a popularity stunt by Lauri Nurmi, who recently published an unofficial biography of him.

**Read the original story (in Finnish) here.**

The question took Halla-aho by surprise, and the only defense he could put up was to answer by hitting below the belt.

Halla-aho’s response and anger showed that he is vulnerable and that the media can ask politicians tough questions if it wishes. It is called having teeth or journalistic grit.

Why do we see so little tough questioning by the Finnish media when it comes to topics like racism, Islamophobia, and the PS.

What happened in France was horrendous, the reaction of Islamophobes is just as bad

Posted on October 18, 2020 by Migrant Tales

It is dreadful what happened in France when a man beheaded a teacher for showing students caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Any sensible person, irrespective of his or her background, would condemn what happened. Even so, Islamophobes from the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party were already spreading racism and trying to score political points.

Having lived in Argentina during a terrible dictatorship 1976-83, young people had three choices to change society: remain silent, move abroad, join a guerrilla group, and kill people.

Killing anyone for his or her ideas should be condemned strongly without labeling whole groups as terrorists.

One of the matters that racist parties like the PS forget is that they blame the whole group like @sallykohn tweets so eloquently.

I answered PS MP Sebastian Tynkkynen’s Islamophobic tweet.

**Tweet: “Remember what happened has nothing to do with Islam, because Islam is a religion that promotes peace.”**

Tynkkynen hits back at my tweet and asked what was racist about it?

Analysis: What does this year’s hate crime report reveal about Finland and its police service?

Posted on October 10, 2020 by Migrant Tales

The Police University College published this week its latest suspected hate crime statistics for 2019. It showed that while hate crimes, on the whole, had retreated a tad compared with 2018, 87.1% of all suspected cases were due to a person’s ethnic or religious background.

Other suspected hate crimes were due to sexual orientation (72 cases/5.7%), disability (44/4.9%), and gender identity (21/2.3%).

While we understand that these cases, like that of sexual assaults, are only the tip of the iceberg, the important question we should ask is how to challenge hate crime more effectively.

This may be easier said than done, considering that Finland is still living in denial when it comes to hate crime, hate speech, and racism.

Nobody has yet given a fair and honest answer to how Finland, with one of the best education systems in the world and whose laws are supposed to promote social equality but not equity, has seen the growth of an openly racist and radical right party?

The Perussuomalaiset (PS)* is not only a racist party but one that brings out the worst side in the Finns when it comes to bigotry. It should not come to any surprise that the lion’s share of the most infamous Islamophobes in Finland are from the PS.

If Finland’s second-biggest party in parliament is openly Islamophobic and turns a blind eye to far-right ideology among its ranks, should we be surprised that so little is being done politically to challenge a social ill like racism?

The biggest problem in the police service’s relationship with racism and different minority communities in Finland is the low priority that this social ill has. Sometimes, one gets the impression that the police fear more the reaction of a minority community to what happened to a victim of its group than readily condemning hate crime.

Another matter that is a blow to police trust in resolving hate crime cases rapidly. Many who have reported racist harassment and threats to the police understand that your case may take months to resolve. In such cases, the police may even overlook the bias motivators as happened in Jämsä with an asylum seeker.

Another case that received wide coverage in June was an eighteen-year-old Muslim, who was chased and physically attacked by locals in Teuva, a town in western Finland.

See also:

Suspected hate crimes in Finland near flat in 2019 versus 2018. Only the tip of the iceberg.

Posted on October 9, 2020 by Migrant Tales

Suspected hate crimes reported in 2019 totaled 899 cases, which is 1.21% less from 910 cases in the previous year, according to the Police University College of Finland.

As in previous years, the lion’s share (72.3%) of suspected hate crimes was due to ethnic or national background, which rose by 2.52% fro 650 from 634 cases. Religion was the second-biggest group (14.8%) of hate crimes totaling 133 cases, down by 14.2% from 155 cases in the previous year and down 43.4% from 2017.

Reports the Police University College of Finland: “In 63 percent of the cases, the victims of the crimes based on ethnic or national origin were males and in 37 percent of the cases, victims were females. Most common crimes targeted against the males were assaults whereas majority of the crimes
targeted against females were defamation.”

And adds: “In relation to the number of people with foreign citizenship and living in Finland, those holding a citizenship of Somalia experienced the highest frequency of crimes motived by ethnic or national origin in 2019. From all the reports of offenses based on ethnic or national origin, nine percent of offenses were against a member of a Roma minority. Of these, the most common suspected crimes were defamation.”

Some NGOs like the European Network Against Racism (ENAR), state that Muslim women are the most vulnerable to Islamophobia. In France, 81.5% were women, and over 90% in the Netherlands suffered attacks due to Islamophobia.

Seventy-nine percent of Muslims do not report their most experience of discrimination to any competent organization, according to ENAR.

If this is true elsewhere, then it suggests that hate crime reported in Finland is the tip of the iceberg and hate crime against Muslim women underreported.

Alejandro Díaz Ortiz: Odyssey in the Finnish Immigration System

Posted on October 7, 2020 by Migrant Tales

My name is Alejandro Díaz Ortiz, I am a Puerto Rican artist, musician, songwriter, graphic designer, and filmmaker who has lived in Finland for the past 9 years. I have been creating art and composing music here ever since I first arrived. Therefore, many know me for my performances in public spaces, gigs, concerts, and other cultural/community events I have participated in over the last years. 2020 has been particularly exceptional because I just released my first single, “Say No” this year.
I am writing this article because I am currently facing deportation after a mentally devastating 4 years waiting process, and for reasons that I considered to be unfair and unjustifiable. Everything has been very well documented since I started my legal fight with Migri back in 2016.

Besides my artistic practice, I have been working as a restaurant chef for several years, which means that I have had constant income sources. I have learned the language, my networks and friends are here, so Finland has become my home for almost a decade.
The notice of deportation states that I have not provided credible evidence of my income and that they have denied me a residence before. Firstly, it is a false statement because I have sent Migri copies of my working contracts and payslips (previously provided by my attorney), proving that my monthly income is more than the minimum of 1,198€ net salary required them. For instance, my last contract is from January of this year, where I am still working in a permanent position. However, later I found out through the help of a new lawyer and one Finnish activist that my application was being handled as a “visa through family ties” even though I was specifying to my lawyers that I am applying for work, not family. Therefore, that limit requirement of 1198e a month was not for my case as the amount is higher for those applying through work. They used this against me. This fact had never been pointed out to me by either Migri or my former lawyers. Still, I was making an average of 1,600 euros a month, which should have been enough either way.

Secondly, the first time Migri denied me a residence permit, it happened based on a false accusation for a crime that I didn’t commit to which I appealed at court and eventually won. The court absolved me from all charges. Still, Migri considered the previous case as one of the reasons given for the second negative decision. All of this happened before I applied for a permanent visa, which I did later shortly after the Court of Appeal decision. It seems the court did not get the memo and still used it to reject my application.