Perussuomalaiset (PS)* Finance Minister Riikka Purra’s defense rests on playing the victim and underplaying her racist and hostile blog postings she wrote on Scripta in 2008, where she used the n-word, Turkish monkey, threatened to kill youths of migrant origin on a commuter train, among other anti-social postings.
On the right, a self-confident Riikka Purra. After the scandal broke, her image changed (left).
Scripta is a blog written by Jussi Halla-aho, who was convicted in 2012 for ethnic agitation and for breaching the sanctity of religion. Halla-aho was appointed in June speaker of parliament.
You can access some quotes from Halla-aho’s blog here.
A warning: Scripta is littered with Islamophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and misogynist writings.
A good example of how an Islamophobic party like the PS covers its hatred for Muslims. In the top picture, the PS claims that Muslim women are oppressed because they wear certain Muslim attire. In the second cartoon below, the PS gives its real opinion: “Why don’t you go back to where you came from? That dress has no place in Finland.” Purra made a comment in 2019 of a woman with a “black sack” which she hasn’t apologized.
One of Purra’s main defenses of her racist, homophobic, and hostile writings is that they were written 15 years ago and eight years before she entered politics. She wrote that the writings were “15-year-old comments made on the Internet 15 years ago.”
If I had to break down her defense:
One third playing the victim
One third blaming others like the media
One third defiance
Even if Purra doesn’t mention it in her blog, she was 31 years old in 2008 and a university researcher.
Her second defense argument is that her racist postings were done as “insider humor and sarcasm.”
Continue reading “Riikka Purra plays the victim and plays down her racist blog writings of 2008”
