Perussuomalaiset Archives - Page 123 of 161

The PS shamefully supports neo-Nazism with its silence

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Finland is one of the few countries I know in Europe where you can openly support a neo-Nazi group and Nazism and be elected to city council. The only catch is that you belong to the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party and state that your are neither a racist nor a Nazi like Vaasa city councilman Risto Helin does.

Helin admits on YLE in English, which cites the original article on Image magazine, giving the clock with Hitler to an anti-immigration neo-Nazi group in Vaasa that calls itself Kerho, or The Club.

“I don’t see anything wrong with it,” Helin told Yle’s Swedish-language news on Thursday. “I’m not racist and not a Nazi.”

The Vaasa city councilman got elected in October. One of his campaign stunts was being pictured with a neo-Nazi blood-and-honor t-shirt.

PS MP Maria Tolppanen, who sits on the Vaasa city council, said she was “shocked and disturbed” by the news and would bring the matter up with the party leadership in Vaasa and Helsinki.

Should we hold our breathes?

Even if sensible people shun anything that comes close to Nazism, this appears not to be a problem for the PS leadership. Isn’t Timo Soini a Catholic?

Helin’s Hitler clock shouldn’t surprise us because two PS members’ names were uncovered by hackers in 2011 for applying for membership in Kansalinen Vastarinta, a neo-Nazi association. Both PS members, Ulla Pyysalo, PS MP Juho Eerola’s aide, and Tuomas Okkonen, who got elected to Lumijoki’s town council, are still members of the party.

How is this possible? Because fascism, counterjihadism and neo-Nazism are alive and kicking in the PS.

PS councilman Risto Helin’s Hitler clock, which he gave to a neo-Nazi group in Vaasa.

Council of Europe: No hate speech movement

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Migrant Tales

This campaign, No hate Speech Movement, is long overdue and in great need. It’s a good matter that we are waking up to this menace even if politicians shamelessly play it down. The reason why hate speech exists is because we permit it. In Finland we have politicians who have been sentenced for hate speech. Some of them are Perussuomalaiset (PS) MP Jussi Halla-aho, James Hirvisaari, Kotka city councilman Freddy Van Wonterghem and others.

Hate speech has reached such epidemic proportions that their representatives sit in parliament and in city councils throughout the country.

If I were on television with some of these characters, I’d demand an apology for their insults and for promoting hate towards good people who live in this country. Understanding that this will not happen, I’d take the advice of a friend and tell them before leaving the show: “You are ugly and you smell. Look it up on Google.”

Another important way to challenge hate speech is to be part in this important campaign. I’d learn what is hate speech and vow never to remain silent again.

Here’s the official video:

The long battle for ethnic equality has begun in Sweden and Finland

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Migrant Tales

One wonders how Sweden’s embattled migration minister, Tobias Billström, could make his “blonde, blue-eyed” comment on asylum seekers and get away with it without losing his job. Here in Finland we give prime television time to representatives of racist association like Suomen Sisu, whose views on cultural diversity don’t vary greatly from the U.S. American Nazi Party or Ku Klux Klan.

To add salt to the injury to Suomen Sisu’s enemies, immigrants and visible minorities, the association thanked the media for its “accurate coverage” of its annual meeting this month.

Billström got into hot water after an interview with DN. “Sometimes we have this image that people in hiding live with a nice Swedish lady in her fifties or sixties who wants to help,” Billström was quoted as saying on The Local, citing DN. “But that’s not how it is. Most of them live with their countrymen who aren’t at all blonde and blue-eyed.”

After his comment instigated a storm of criticism even from Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, Billströn apologized publicly for what he said.

Should we seethe migrant minister’s comment as an isolated case or an indication of a much wider problem gripping our Nordic societies?

Like the Perussuomalaiset in Finland, the rise of the xenophobic and anti-immigration Sweden Democrats in the polls is hardening opposition to immigrants and cultural diversity in that country. More and more politicians are pointing their fingers at immigrants for the country’s economic problems. Anti-immigration sound bites are a quick way to get support from voters and media attention.

Intolerance, which has raised its head in Sweden and especially Finland, reveals how blind our societies are to European history. If there were a class on racism at our schools, most would probably fail. Stiffening attitudes have emboldened visible racists, a new political class that capitalize on invisible racists’ fears and xenophobia.

The most worrying matter is neither the visible nor invisible racists in our society, but the silence of the majority. Silence isn’t always silent, however. It can manifest itself at a talk show with two representatives of Suomen Sisu or when a migration minister makes a racist comment.

Since too many journalists and politicians haven’t been victims of racism, they simply don’t get it. In order to help them understand what is at stake and what is being debated, we could replace terms like immigrant and visible minority with women.

How many would go public and denounce women in the same way that immigrants are today? Few, if any.

Why?

Because women have fought and gained greater gender equality.

Contrarily, too few have stood up for immigrants and visible minorities. Even so, the long path towards ethnic equality has begun and there’s nothing that can stop it.

The reaction of anti-immigration groups and parties in Finland or outrage sparked by a minister’s statements about asylum seekers are the best indication that that battle is taking place today in earnest.

Of Birds and Feathers: The PS, the Sweden Democrats, and Their American Bedfellows

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Migrant Tales

By Barachiel

“Birds of a feather flock together.”

I don’t know how or if this saying applies to personal relationships, but it is true in the world of politics. And though they undoubtedly hate to admit it, the populist parties of the Nordics and Europe are not exempt. The PS’ problematic relationship with Suomen Sisu is proof enough of this. But even though we are well aware of the ties between populist parties like the PS and racist groups like Suomen Sisu, what about the ties to intolerant people and groups abroad?

There are many. With enough unsavory people to sufficiently embarrass the populist parties.

While the links between the populists and their American fans may not always be reciprocal, they nevertheless shine a light on the ultimate mindset of the populists. If parties like the PS and their immediate neighbor organization, the Sweden Democrats, really weren’t racist and xenophobic, I doubt they’d get attention from the people listed below, among countless others.

This indeed would be a case of birds of a feather flocking together. Or more fittingly, moths mingling with butterflies around the bug-zapper of intolerance.

Theodore Beale, a.k.a. Vox Day

Theodore Beale, better known by his pseudonym Vox Day, is a blogger and columnist for the extreme-right U.S. website WorldNetDaily. Like most of the contributors on that site, Vox Day propagates all manner of anti-Obama and anti-government conspiracy theories, as well as attacks on minorities. This is what Vox Day said about Finland and the PS on WorldNetDaily in 2011:

Being a more pragmatic nation than most, the Finnish people are the first to openly reject the idea that sending millions of Euros to other European countries and importing large quantities of foreigners is beneficial to the nation of Finland. Unlike Americans, the Finns recognize that a foreigner who comes to Finland is not a Finn. He is merely a foreigner in Finland, and his interests have little in common with those of the Finnish people.

Vox Day
“The End of Europe”
WorldNetDaily
May 9, 2011

Meanwhile, on his regular blog, Vox Day criticized The Wall Street Journal for editing a letter-to-the-editor by PS boss Timo Soini. Invoking conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Vox Day expressed support for Soini occupying the Oval Office:

Since the election of Mr. Soetoro [Obama] has demonstrated that absolutely no documentation is required of an American presidential candidate, why not nominate Mr. Soini for the presidency? He’s a damn sight better than anyone else the Republicans are likely to choose, he isn’t too old, and as the leader of a popular, electorally successful party, he can’t possibly be called unelectable.

Vox Day
“The Wall Street Journal Scrubs The True Finns”
VoxPopuli.BlogSpot.com
May 11, 2011

Even for an extreme site like WorldNetDaily, Vox Day’s attacks immigration are unabashedly racist. In late 2012, Vox Day wrote WorldNetDaily piece in which he called for a whites-only secessionist movement, lamenting “the U.S. bifactional ruling party’s hatred and contempt for white Americans who still hold to traditional values” and “the infestation of even the smallest American heartland towns by African, Asian and Aztec cultures.”

Vox Day, it should be noted, is an expat living in Italy.

Elsewhere, Vox Day has called for “traditional Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture” to be reclaimed through ethnic cleansing, and has reasoned that: “If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.”

VDARE.com

VDARE.com – named after Virginia Dare, the first reputed white settler to be born in the North American colonies – is a non-profit anti-immigration website that has been officially listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Founded by Peter Brimelow, former editor of the ultraconservative periodical National Review, VDARE.com posts all manner of propaganda pieces by anti-Semites, white nationalists, and race-baiting pseudo-scientists.

VDARE.com – through an irregular columnist named Rafael Koski, a Ph. D student from northern Europe – has taken to writing laudatory, rabble-rousing pieces about the PS…

The True Finns have been taking votes from left, right and center, by exposing the incompetence and arrogance of the ruling elite. True Finns have gained a lot of votes from the Social Democratic Party, which has abandoned its traditional focus on fighting for the economic improvement of workers and adopted the crazy-left focus fighting against reality. (cf. U.S. Democrats.) The other two parties, the centre-right Center Party (rural population) and National Coalition (city bourgeoisie), are Europhiles and have been losing their nationalist voters to the True Finns.

Rafael Koski
“Death Of Nation State Exaggerated: Immigration-Skeptic True Finn Party Roiling Finnish Politics”
VDARE.com
April 14, 2011

And the SD, too…

Swedish media elites and the Establishment parties made fools of themselves by calling the Sweden Democrats a Nazi party trying to get away with Goebbels-style propaganda . . . The party got a publicity victory by showing that it is being treated unfairly by the Establishment parties and their media supporters. The reaction against the Sweden Democrats overshadowed all other election themes and ensured that protest votes would end up to the Sweden Democrats.

Rafael Koski
“The Sweden Democrats—Alone Against Establishment Extremists”
VDARE.com
September 10, 2010

Who else does VDARE.com take stock in besides Koski? There is Kevin MacDonald, a college professor who says that Jews are genetically predisposed to undermine whites by pushing for non-white immigration; John Derbyshire, a disgraced National Review columnist who claims that “white supremacy…is one of the better arrangements history has come up with”; and Jared Taylor, a white nationalist who founded the “racial-realist” webzine American Renaissance.

What other topics does VDARE.com cover? Apart from attack pieces on what it calls the “Treason Lobby” – VDARE.com’s term for human rights groups who defend immigrants, such as the ACLU – the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented articles entitled “Freedom vs. Diversity”, “Abolishing America”, “Anarcho—Tyranny: Where Multiculturalism Leads”; and “Why Immigrants Kill.”

Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN)

Known for its national television program The 700 Club, hosted by far-right televangelist Pat Robertson, CBN airs “news” stories which seemingly confirm Robertson’s contention that “Satanic” Muslim immigrants are out to conquer the world. Two CBN “reporters” – “terror analyst” Erick Stakelbeck and foreign correspondent Dale Hurd – have emerged as significant U.S. mouthpieces for European “counter-jihadist” parties, including the SD.

A March 2009 report by Hurd that aired on The 700 Club presented the SD as legitimate critics of Sweden’s immigrant community, with no mention of the party’s historical roots in neo-Nazism. Hurd took the party’s word for it that it wasn’t racist; dismissed criticism of the party as manufactured smears from Sweden’s “liberal media”; and cast two members, Kent Ekeroth and Erik Almqvist, in a martyr-ific light, along with the party in general…

KENT EKEROTH (Sweden Democrats international advisor): “I filmed the police chief [at a counter-demonstration of Islamic extremists in Malmö] and asked him why are they [sic] not reacting to [violence], why are they not doing anything. And he–he simply answered, ‘It’s their right according to the Swedish constitution to be there.’ We apparently did not have that same right because we were forced out of there, so…”

DALE HURD (voice-over): “Swede Ted Ekeroth [sic] helped film the Arab-left counter-demonstrations. He saw Arabs throwing rocks at a ninety-year-old Holocaust survivor.”

KENT EKEROTH: “Hopefully, you can show some of the clips from our demonstration for Israel, which is always peaceful and always with a message of peace. And theirs is always the quite opposite — death, hate, and killing of Jews.”

[…]

DALE HURD (voice-over): “But the Swedish Democrats [sic], who stand up for traditional Christian values and limits on immigration, have been stigmatized by the Swedish media as ‘fascist’ and ‘bigoted.'”

ERIK ALMQVUIST: “The media has tried to portray us as extremists, racists — we’re almost inhuman.”

DALE HURD (voice-over): “Erik Almqvuist, national youth leader for the Swedish Democrats, faces regular death threats and was almost killed recently in a left-wing knife attack.”

ERIK ALMQVUIST: “The multicultural system in Sweden has polarized this society. We have ethnic polarization. We have also political polarization.”

The 700 Club
Christian Broadcasting Network
March 12, 2009

With the benefit of hindsight, I’m sure I am not the only one chortling as Ekeroth and Almqvist insist – those two specifically – that the SD are neither violent or racist.

Both men became infamous after a video – shot a year after the 700 Club interview – showed them engaging in racist and thuggish behavior, resulting in the “iron pipe scandal.” Not only did that scandal expose Ekeroth and Almqvist as hypocrites, but also exposed as Hurd as an ideologue-posing-a-journalist who openly refused to look into the SD’s agenda. Hurd certainly didn’t cover the iron pipe scandal when it broke.

Hurd seems supportive of racists from both sides of the pond. His 700 Club reports include sympathetic stories on the violent English Defence League and the white nationalist “Identitarians” of France. Hurd’s public Facebook page shows pictures of him interviewing Jean and Marine Le Pen; as well as posing with ultraconservative writer George Gilder, who once called African and Native American cultures “destructive cultures”, “tragic failures” and “virtual social suicide.”

With supporters like these, how could the PS, the SD, and other anti-Islam parties present themselves as comfortably mainstream? Again, I doubt that rabid scribes like Vox Day and propagandists like VDARE.com and CBN would pay so much attention to these parties if they weren’t bigoted.

YLE ensures that opinion pieces and news will be easily identifiable in the future

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Migrant Tales

YLE emailed a Migrant Tales reader, who expressed concern Friday about an opinion piece written as news by Perussuomalaiset (PS) MP Olli Immonen. It was an odd coincidence that Immonen’s opinion piece was published in such a manner, considering that the PS MP is the new chairman of Suomen Sisu, a far right anti-immigration association.

The email sent by Teijo Valtanen, the regional and radio current affairs director, states: “Because in your opinion it wasn’t easily enough to distinguish that [what Immonen wrote] was an opinion piece, we will check these columns written [weekly on Fridays by Oulu region] MPs to ensure that they stand out sufficiently from news and are easily identifiable as opinion pieces.”

Thank you YLE. Even if Valtanen states that the broadcaster will take special care so that this mistake doesn’t happen again, this is exactly what should be always done. It’s the readers right to know if he or she is reading an opinion piece or a news story. Opinion is opinion and news stories are supposed to be fairly written without editorializing the topic.

In countries where the media is controlled by autocratic governments that have little respect for human rights, a strongman’s opinion can be presented as “news.”

Since the media plays an important role in our Western society to ensure Montesquieu’s checks and balances, the newsroom should be always off limits to representatives of the judiciary, legislative and executive.

Taking into account the attitude of some politicians especially from the PS, some of them would be more than happy to control what the media says. This became self-evident right after the PS’ historic victory in 2011. Both MPs Jussi Halla-aho and James Hirvisaari, who have been sentenced for ethnic agitation, tried to tell the media how they should write about the populist party.

Hirvisaari, who wanted the media to stop nicknaming the PS persu, which could be seen coming from the word perse, meaning anus, claimed in 2011 that YLE should be made redundant because it brainwashes the public.

Why shouldn’t we be worried if an opinion piece written by a party member who loathes the media appears as news?

Our reaction to such a mistake clearly showed that that we want politicians, especially like Immonen, to stay out of the newsroom.

The media does its job when it places politicians under scrutiny, especially those who want to undermine its role and compromise its independence.

What Finland can learn from countries like the U.K. about racism

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Migrant Tales

We can learn a lot from countries like the United Kingdom, where multiculturalism is an official social policy. Few won’t deny that the U.K. as well as other European countries don’t know what racism is if we look at their direct involvement in the slave trade and in the systematic genocide of indigenous peoples outside Europe.

What does the U.K. do differently from us in Finland when it comes to racism? They take a social ill like racism more seriously than us. Few if any sensible politicians, except from xenophobic parties like the BNP or UKIP, deny that racism isn’t an issue in the country or that this is caused by immigrants.

Despite the rise of an anti-EU and anti-immigration party in 2011 in this country, the Perussuomalaaiset (PS) and its leader Timo Soini continue to play down racism with quaint sound bites like, “I cannot be a racist because I am a Catholic.”

Soini tried this line on HARDtalk and got torn to shreds. PS MP James Hirvisaari, an anti-immigration extremist who was sentenced for ethnic agitation, tried the same approach on a blog entry, Kristitty ei voi olla rasisti (A Christian cannot be a racist).

It’s pretty obvious that Hirvisaari, who must be worried about his image as a racist and extremist, must have asked Soini what to do about this. The head of the PS must have advised him to write a blog entry and argue that he, a Christian, cannot be racist.

Even if the credibility of such claims from Soini, Hirvisaari and others are questionable to say the least, they reveal two matters about those who make them: (1) They have no idea what racism and how damaging it is and therefore don’t take it seriously; and/or (2) know what racism is but are its junkies because it feeds their hunger for power and brings them media attention.

PS town concillor Mika Hiltunen is the latest politician to face ethnic agitation charges. There are, unfortunately, many others who build their political careers on spreading racism, prejudice and intolerance in all forms and shapes.

You may ask why doesn’t the media see things the same way like Migrant Tales. It does. The problem is that 99% of the national media is run by white Finns who have never faced racism. People like Soini and his band of followers aren’t yet a threat to them never mind white Finns.

If there is a model we could start to look at on how to deal with racism in our country, one good country to start is the U.K. never mind Canada and Australia. All three countries have adopted multiculturalism as their official integration policy.

Check out what happened to councillor Christ Joannides of the Conservative Tory Party after he made Islamophobic comments on his Facebook page. Right. He got in hot water and is now facing a police investigation but he hasn’t been kicked out of the party.

The Tories continue to have their racism issues in the party as this story on North London Newspapers reveals. To give the boot or not, that is the question.

Contrarily, Migrant Tales wrote about Tory MP Aidan Burley and how he was sacked from the party after attending a “Nazi” stag party.

By breaking his campaign promise, that any PS politician, especially an MP, would get sacked if sentenced by court for ethnic agitation, sends a mixed message: We’re sort of against racism but we’re not really. Carry on.

Shameful and disgraceful behavior coming from the leader of Finland’s third-largest party in parliament.

While racism and the PS may be in vogue today, history will judge them as a racist party that never got it when it came to cultural diversity.

What will happen to Finland if the PS matches its parliamentary election result in 2015?

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Should we be worried by the latest polls, which show the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party vying for second place? What does the rise of the PS say about the present state of Finland? What will happen if the party matches its 2011 election result in 2015?

Right after the disappointing municipal election, PS head Timo Soini promised that his party aims to become the biggest in 2014, when Finland holds European parliamentary elections.

If you are an optimist, the rise of the PS in 2011 could be seen as a knee-jerk reaction to Finland’s ever-growing cultural diversity, globalization and especially to the economic crisis that has hit the European Union and our country.

In my hometown of Mikkeli, we had our first refugee center in the early 1990s. The initial reaction was hostile, sometimes even violently towards the newcomers. That fortunately changed with time and today it’s nothing uncommon to see immigrants in Mikkeli.

While matters have changed for the better, others like institutionalized racism, prejudice and intolerance haven’t. They linger on because nobody has challenged these problems seriously enough.

Kansainvälinen Mikkeli, an association promoting cultural diversity and internationalization, approached by email some candidates before the April 2011 parliamentary election who wanted to tighten immigration policy and cut funding to such groups. Kansainvälinen Mikkeli published these responses on their Facebook page and thereby opened debate with these candidates.

The email was important because it showed these candidates that their views concerning immigrants were being heard.

While it’s clear that time will change matters for the better in this country for immigrants and visible minorities, what if the PS match their last parliamentary election result in 2015? What would happen if they become the biggest party two and a half years from now and its leader, Soini, becomes prime minister?

While the latter scenarios are unlikely, such an election victory by the PS in 2015 would end up polarizing our society ever more. Soini’s and the PS’ answer, with the silent blessing of the bigger and some smaller parties, would play down intolerance by denying it as a minor problem.

It’s pretty clear that immigrants and visible minorities will never be treated as equals in Finland as long as they leave this important work to others. We must rise to the occasion and we must take charge of our own future.

One of the reasons why the PS has grown to such a big party and why our answer to their discourse has been so ambiguous, is because too many white Finns don’t feel threatened by them.

Leadership is needed more than ever today to drive home a fact that Finland is a culturally divers society.

No matter how much the racists and extremists kick and bitch about this fact, that’s what’s written in stone.

If you loathe cultural diversity you most likely are suspicious of wolves and biodiversity

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Migrant Tales

A news story on Green Party’s Vihreä Lanka asks if the wolf population of Finland has fallen to under 120 from an estimated 120-135 by Game and Fisheries Research. How many and what threat do they pose to people is part of an ongoing debate in Finland that is very similar to how some Finns see cultural diversity and immigration.

News stories about killing wolves that are a threat to inhabitants are quite common in Finland. Read whole story here.

The wolf is a protected species in the EU. Even so, poachers, like vigilanti mobs, are taking the law in their hands. One story by YLE this month suggests that one wolf pack in South Savo was probably poached by hunters.

Should we be surprised that Perussuomalaiset (PS) MP Pentti Oinonen, who staunchly opposes gay rights, wants to wipe wolves off the biodiversity map in Finland? He said that there were some 30,000 wolves ready to ”migrate” to Finland from Russia.

Comparing wild and dangerous animals to immigrants is nothing new. On a thread on Facebook with TU tennis, Ulla Pyysalo compared immigrants to animals and plants. ”Yes, transplanting animals or plants in a new environment has always ended in failure,” she wrote last year on Facebook.

Pyysalo said that immigrants are like racoon dogs. ”I heard just recently that hunters are encouraged to kill these raccoon dogs,” she writes. ”God dang it how racist and terrible [my comment is]. Eeek help! DDDD,”

Pyysalo is PS MP Juho Eerola’s aide who applied to join a neo-Nazi association.

Ever since the PS rose from political obscurity to become the third-largest party in parliament with 39 seats in 2011, the atmosphere for anything that strays from the perceived norm has worsened.

Any person who is against cultural diversity and gays like Oinonen must feel uncomfortable about biodiversity. Their prescription to the problem is biosameness like so-called monoculture (sic!) if we speak of society.

The adverse atmosphere against diversity and immigrants has sadly now targeted wolves.

How far to the right will the PS and Suomen Sisu take Finland?

Posted on March 16, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Even if Suomen Sisu president Olli Immonen and Jussi Halla-aho, both MPs of the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party, tried to assure television viewers Thursday on A-Talk that the association is neither racist nor far right, nothing could be further from the truth.

In order to keep immigrants and visible minorities disenfranchised, Suomen Sisu must come up with new arguments and sound bites to justify their intolerance.

One of the matters that Suomen Sisu does is spread stereotypes about certain immigrants. Tabloids like Ilta-Sanomat paved the way for such stereotypes in the early 1990s, when Finland’s immigrant population started to grow.

Claude M. Steele’s whistling vivaldi reveals how detrimental stereotypes can be.

The provost of Columbia University writes: “But this book offers an important qualification to this creed: that by imposing on us certain conditions of life, our social identities can strongly affect things as important as our performances in the classroom and on standardized tests, our memory capacity, our athletic performance, the pressure we feel to prove ourselves, even the comfort level we have with people of different groups – all things we typically think of as being determined by individual talents, motivations, and preferences.”

If what Steele claims holds any truth, the spreading of generalizations and stereotypes about certain ethnic groups in Finland can be devastating.

The A-Talk show made one matter clear: Suomen Sisu’s new synonym for racism is its loathing for cultural diversity. Instead of attacking all immigrants, they are now pointing their guns at Muslims and non-white people from outside the EU.

As Migrant Tales wrote on Friday, Immonen’s and Halla-aho’s opposition to cultural diversity and their support for assimilation (one-way integration) was near-constantly revealed on the program while denying at the same time that Suomen Sisu wasn’t a racist and far right association.

The new Suomen Sisu president couldn’t have put his opposition to cultural diversity clearer on A-Talk: “Is there anything wrong [that an association] says that different [ethnic] groups and cultures shouldn’t mix, which I interpret as a multicultural society and what we don’t want to have in Finland?”

Even if one natural symptom of denial is convenient memory loss, Immonen disagreed that Suomen Sisu was against people of different ethnicities marrying and having children. Just like the Ku Klux Klan and the U.S. American Party, Immonen, however, believes that it is only a question of time when Christian Europe and Muslims will be at war.

He was quoted as saying right after the April 2011 election on Iltalehti: “Due to the present trend of multiculturalism, I believe we will see in the future of Europe a number of terrorist strikes and civil war in which the other warring adversary will be notably the representatives of Islam.”

It’s pretty clear what will happen in Finland if the PS’ chairman, Timo Soini, ever becomes the prime minister of Finland. It will mean greater clout for Suomen Sisu to spread its far right ideology and policies, which will not only polarize society but even threaten to put in cold storage our noble Nordic democracy and values such as social equality. Racism, xenophobia and intolerance in general will become more normal as our society strays from our present democratic values.

Halla-aho said that Suomen Sisu, which was founded in 1998, has played a crucial role in fostering anti-immigration sentiment (he calls it critiquing immigration) in Finland through platforms like Hommaforum and the PS.

Even so, there is nothing Finnish about Suomen Sisu’s ideology, which is copied from other far right groups in Europe. The only difference is that it is put in a Finnish context.

How different is the neo-Nazi party of Greece, Golden Dawn, from Suomen Sisu? One of its MPs Illias Panagiotaros claims in the video below: “[Immigrants] having a very nice life with extra good food, heating, air-conditioned [living quarters] and at the same time Greeks, millions of Greeks, don’t have foot to eat. They don’t have a place to stay, they don’t have anything.”

As far as we know, immigrants in Greece live in overcrowded apartments and detention centers. Many fear walking in public for fear of being attacked by far right mobs and the police.

Considering that Greece’s population is about 11 million, Panagiotaros claim that “millions of Greeks” are without food while the immigrants live a plush life is a gross exaggeration to put it lighly. It is, however, a common argument used by far right groups. It is used by Suomen Sisu and politicians like PS MP James Hirvisaari, who claims without proof that immigrants get more social-welfare benefits than white Finns.

If Finland lost its nerve by making the PS the biggest party and giving Suomen Sisu more power, it would be a slippery slope that would lead us down a slippery slope called Hungary, gripped by the same xenophobia that Suomen Sisu spreads in Finland.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BUulplUxRc

Our response to intolerance in the EU and Finland must be first and foremost a response

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Every great ~~journey~~ challenge begins with a single step.

A Chinese proverb slightly changed

A study by the European Network Against Racism (ENAR), reveals how racism and intolerant attitudes are becoming more prevalent in the European Union. What to do?

Read ENAR study here.

A recent example of how racism and intolerance spread roots in Finland is Timo Soini’s comments on PS MP Olli Immonen’s election as chairman of Suomen Sisu.

Soini did no condemn (why would he?) Immonen’s election but compared the extremist anti-immigration association to a harmless hunting, farming or youth association.

Not only is the PS chairman and his followers responsible for fueling more intolerance in Finland by playing down or denying such a social ill completely, the silence of the big parties is equally worrying.

One researcher in the ENAR study, Mutuma Ruteere, exposes what is not only happening throughout Europe but in Finland. He said that the problem is not only the discourse coming from far right parties, “but in the fact that established mainstream parties do not reject such discourses and even often support them.”

Bingo!

If there are two shameful watersheds that will be remembered for bolstering intolerance in Finland, they were made in 2010 by National Coalition Party’s Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen and Social Democratic Party economy minister, Jutta Urpilainen. Both said that “debating immigrant issues in this country didn’t make you a racist” and massa maan tavalla (in Rome do as the Romans do), respectively.

If we look at the most recent polls, the National Coalition Party and the Social Democrats are paying a high political price, together with the Center Party, for flirting with an anti-EU, anti-immigration and especially anti-Islam party.

The silence of the largest parties, coupled with the opportunity to capitalize on anti-immigration and anti-EU sentiment in Finland by the PS, is what has gone terribly wrong with this country.

The more Finland denies collectively that it doesn’t have an issue with intolerance, the more it will continue to feed such a social ill.

We need the courage to challenge and ghostbust those myths that promote intolerance. There you will find the root of our prejudices and hatred.

One of these took place in the last century when Finland did everything possible to stop immigrants from moving to this country. As we lost hundreds of thousands of able workers to Sweden, we covered up for our mistakes with the help of ethnic myths about ourselves. In the process, we undermined diversity and fueled nationalism.

The ENAR study expresses concern over the rise of uninhibited forms of racism that have emerged throughout the EU. A good example is using freedom of expression or claiming how whites are victims of racism as justifications for promoting the status quo of intolerance.

Migrant Tales has written about this on many occasions. The aim of those who are against diversity is to point out how different a group is, which helps justify their racism and feelings of hostility for that group.