Racism Archives - Page 146 of 208

If you’re anti-gay you’re probably anti-immigration (or don’t understand what is at stake)

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Migrant Tales

It is surprising that a country like Finland, which claims to be a Nordic democracy, we see so much opposition to gays not only from anti-immigration parties like the Perussuomalaiset (PS), but from other ones as well like the National Coalition Party.

PS MP Mika Niikko, a fierce opponent of gay rights, echoed on Helsingin Sanomat what other PS politicians think about homosexuality.

”I made a question that if homosexuality was as normal as people want us to understand, why must this fact be hidden from the employer…” he said.

For some reason, Niikko believes that employers should know their worker’s sexual preference.

It’s nothing surprising that an anti-immigration party like the PS houses anti-gay sentiment as we have seen from MP James Hirvisaari and MP Pentti Oinonen, who refused to go to the annual December 6 independence day reception because there were gay couples.

Even if Christian Democrat (KD) Interior Minister P’ivi Räsänen may appear to voice the greatest objection in government to gays rights and marriage by claiming on a TV show that homosexuality to be a sin, she’s not alone.

One of the conditions for the KD to be in government was that gay marriage would not be brought up or promoted.

MP Anne Holmlund of the National Coalition Party and former interior minister appears to be against gay rights as well. She has reportedly sabotaged a petition as chairman of the legal committee to debate and legalize gay marriage.

It’s important to note that these types of MPs and their parties that oppose gay marriage are a reflection of the general intolerance that is raising its head and gripping Finland. Approving gay marriage would not only benefit such couples but have a positive effect on all minorities.

Advancing tolerance is good for ALL minorities. Promoting or maintaining intolerance is a bad matter for minorities.

MPs that opposes gay marriage are most likely to oppose the rights of immigrants and are most likely against cultural diversity.

Our Finnish modern-day eugenicists are no different from the past

Posted on February 17, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Who are those modern-day eugenicists breathing life back into this disgraced pseudo-science whose aim was to create a master white race by wiping out other ones? If we look at Europe and the Nordic region today, we can find many politicians with the same nineteenth-century agenda but in a different context.

Some may rightfully argue that eugenics is long dead. True, but what hasn’t died is racism that manifests itself in new forms.

In Finland, you will find them in groups like Suomen Sisu, Suomalaisuuden liitto, neo-Nazi Suomen Kansalinen Vastarinta, in parliament and city councils as well as in all walks of life in Finland.

Suomalaisuuden liitto, or the Association of Finnish Culture and Identity, is one of many eugenicist-spirited associations in Finland that want to keep Finland white.

They are present as well in anti-immigration right-wing populist parties like the Danish People’s Party, Sweden Democrats and Progress Party of Norway. While these types of modern-day eugenicists can be found throughout Europe in parties like Golden Dawn of Greece, Hungary’s Jobbik and the National Front of France, their message is the same: We must keep our country white.

What these anti-immigration and xenophobic groups haven’t told us yet is how they plan to keep their countries’ white. Is it only a matter of time when they’ll begin drafting legislation to deport Muslims and other visible minorities to where they came from? Think of the consequences to our democracy and way of life if we permit this type of hatred to get the better of us.

When I moved to Finland permanently in December 1978, the first matter that surprised me was prejudice. It seemed that the only contact some Finns had with blacks was through Archie Bunker’s TV series. Finns were not only prejudiced to outsiders but placed labels on themselves as well.

If Finns housed such views of themselves, one can only imagine how they saw non-Finns like blacks and Southern Europeans.

The same idea, that we are being invaded by criminals, was evident in Finland’s immigration policy. Finland got its first Aliens Act in 1983, about 66 years after independence. Immigrants had no rights before the Act and could be held indefinitely and deported by the police without a fair trial.

The answer to how some Finns saw foreigners can be found in popular culture and in Irwin Mutakuono ja lakupelle (Mudfaces and n-clowns). The lyrics were written by Veikko Salmi.

Another racist hit by Irwin Goodman was Marcello Macaroni. The song was sung as well by Esa Pakarinen, a Finnish movie star.

If you check out former song on YouTube, it has over 1.2 million hits.

Continue reading “Our Finnish modern-day eugenicists are no different from the past”

Creating political Frankensteins with the help of social media and prejudice

Posted on February 16, 2013 by Migrant Tales

In Saami mythology there’s a large-but-not-too-bright monster called Staalo, which was made from a log, lichen and a few incantations. If we look at the recent rise of intolerance in Finland and Europe, social media has breathed life back to many Staalo-like political Frankensteins.

Staalo is a monster found in Saami mythology. Source: Tajukangas.

In the case of Finland, you need a political party with some credibility among voters, like the Perussuomalaiset (PS), to ensure success that your Frankenstein will work.

One political Frankenstein creation of social media is PS MP James Hirvisaari, who is so hard up for publicity these days that he seeks publicity in the tabloids by raising issues like fecal skid marks found on the toilet bowls of parliament.

Another social media creation is PS MP Juho Eerola, who admits liking fascism and claimed the recent Jyväskylä attack by neo-Nazis as a publicity stunt by the Left Alliance.

Letting off the hook other parties in Finland by blaming only the PS would be too simple. You can find these types of political Frankensteins in all of the parties. None probably have so many as the PS.

Dutch football master Edgar Davids wrote about racism in a recent column. He compared such people to sheep without backbone.

Racism exists because still too many people don’t take it seriously. Such people rarely see matters from the victims’ point of view but from their white comfort zones.

Writes Davids: ”How can you know what racism is like if you have never experienced it? It’s very difficult to imagine.”

When more people start raising their voices by saying no to this social illness, matters will begin to change.

Dan Koivulaakso, one of the three authors Äärioikesto Suomessa’s (Far right in Finland), asks on a Kymen Sanomat column why Eerola reacted the way he did concerning Jyväskyä.

The answer is simple: Intolerance and society’s indifference to the far right and racism help keep alive these political Frankensteins.

University of Eastern Finland concerned over threats to their racism researchers

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Unions representing racism and multiculturalism researchers at the University of Eastern Finland, expressed concern Wednesday over the threats they are receiving, reports YLE in English.

In a joint statement, the unions said that such threats to its researchers should be a cause for concern, especially in a region where intolerance is on the rise.

“Our researchers into racism and multiculturalism have been subjected to threats,” said Antero Puhakka of the Negotiation Organization for Public Sector Professionals (JUKO). “Anonymous threatening letters have been posted to their homes and researchers have faced abuse on Facebook. Complaints regarding the activities of researchers and teachers have been filed with the vice-chancellor or to a higher authority.”

The JUPO representatives added that their must be zero tolerance for such harassment and intimidation.

We should never give in to racists, who have no regard for our democratic way of life and who believe they can intimidate people they disagree with. If we permit intimidation and fear to overtake our good judgement, the threat to ourselves and our society will become much worse.

Migrant Tales has been a target of death threats in the past and of harassment.

How far has the PS beachhead spread in twenty-two months?

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Migrant Tales wrote the following day after the historic April 17, 2011 election had sent shock waves throughout Finland and Europe: “Far-right populism is an illness inflicting Europe at present and it now has a beachhead in Finland.”

Back then, our blog got got cited by Time Magazine. The above quote was a response to PS chairman Timo Soini’s statement: “We [the PS] are not extremists so you can sleep safely.”

The rise of a large right-wing populist party with Counterjihadists could not have been possible without the complacency and silence of other political parties. The PS in its present state and size is a knee-jerk reaction to Finland’s ever-growing cultural diversity, the euro crisis and political establishment.

Even if the PS claims to be an option to the way politics have been traditionally practiced in Finland, it’s a mirror of the other parties in their crudest form. In those traditional parties, like the PS, you’ll find many who are just as conservative, intolerant, oppose cultural diversity and see the outside world with manifest unease.

How far has that beachhead spread in twenty-two months?

There’s bad and good news. The bad news is that the PS will remain, at least for the time being, a player in Finnish politics that other parties will eye with distrust and unease. The good news is that it’s doubtful that the party will ever match its 2011 election result. That became clear in the presidential and municipal elections, which were disappointments for Soini and the party.

Another important wild card to hit the PS was mass-killer Anders Breivik.

The Nordic region was never the same for anti-immigration populist parties like the PS after Breivik erupted with his Counterjihadist crusade and started murdering in cold blood innocent people.

These factors, together with many the many scandals that have rocked the party in recent months, have undermined the PS if not permanently from ever becoming a credible party.

Even if Soini claims that the municipal election was a clear victory for the PS, it was anything but that if we compare it with their parliamentary election victory. Half of those that voted for the PS in April 2011 had ditched the party by October 2012.

While the PS has been a great source of scoops for Finland’s yellow press, it must be a disappointment for some of its supporters. What has it accomplished in parliament except for poisoning the air with its Finnish teaparty populism?

Even if the PS appears to have suffered unconvincing election setbacks in the presidential and municipal elections, the party is on a collision course with itself as well.

Right after the municipal elections of October 28, Soini announced that the PS will become the biggest party in Finland in the EU parliamentary elections of 2014.

Making such promises and having to eat your words will not help the PS but deepen its problems.

A party that cannot root out its racists, fascists and political opportunists can never lead a good country like Finland, unless we wish to destroy what we’ve worked so hard to build.

See also Finland election: A perilous watershed.

City of Joensuu: Challenging and beating intolerance one step at a time

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Our reaction to intolerance in Finland has paid off. At least it did for me late-Friday night in downtown Joensuu when I was about to parallel park my car.

Thanks to associations like JoMoni working in close cooperation with local authorities like ELY-keskus, Joensuu have challenged intolerance. In many respects, it’s like the success of the North Karelian cardiovascular disease project of the 1960s and 1970s. Source: City of Joensuu.

A young man holding two beer cans, who was standing next to a parked car with his friends, wouldn’t move when I asked him to. He just stared back and started laughing.

He eventually moved to the side. That’s when he yelled: ”Damn n-word.”

I got out of my car and asked him what he called me.

”Nothing,” he responded.

While this situation may appear insignificant, it was an encouraging example of how hard work and countless anti-racism campaigns in Joensuu have changed matters.

The young man and his friends probably knew that they could get into hot water with the law if they continued to provoke me with their racist remarks. This was Joensuu 2013, not the 1990s.

The North Karelian city used to be a hotbed of skinhead activity and racism in the 1990s. Back then, a black basketball player of the local Kataja team was beaten up and moved back to the United States.

The message of those who play down racism, and thereby embolden this social ill, is clear: We’re too powerful, too strong for you to confront.

Wrong: You are being challenged. We will send you back to where you came from.

PS MP Hirvisaari goes off the wall as Finnish appeals court upholds Van Wonterghem’s hate speech sentence

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Migrant Tales

The Finnish appeals court announced Wednesday that it has upheld a district court decision to fine Perussuomalaiset (PS) Kotka city councillor Freddy van Wonterghem for inciting ethnic hatred.

While Van Wonterghem is a small fry in the anti-immigration party, far-right PS MP James Hirvisaari blew his stack by slamming the appeals court decision on his Facebook page as “sick, sick.”

“The Kouvola appeals court would end up under sea but it’s lucky that it will even be transferred to Kuopio,” Hirvisaari wrote. “So lawyers are in favor of whipping to death a raped girl. There’s no other way that [van Wonterghem’s] sentence can be understood.”

It is surprising that Hirvisaari and van Wonterghem, who have built their political careers on spreading hate speech, are now upset that it’s legal pay-back time. Without the PS party, social media and Hirvisaari’s hate speech, it’s doubtful that this railroad engineer would have ever been elected to parliament.

Van Wonterghem commented on a blog entry written by Migrant Tales that he had no regrets about what he wrote in the summer of 2011. He said that if a Muslim girl would die it was a good matter since it would be one less woman giving birth to a member of that religious group.

Hirvisaari, who belongs to the legal committee of parliament, said on Uusi Suomi that deputy state prosecutor Jorma Kalske and state prosecutor Mika Illman were “politically corrupt.”

Kalske laughed off Hirvisaari’s claim.

“I can’t remember during my 40-year career of ever hearing an MP that is a member of the legal committee using this type of langauge against the judicial authorities,” he said.

The chairman of the legal committee, Anne Holmlund of the National Coalition Party, doesn’t consider it appropriate for a member of the legal committee or MP to criticize Finland’s legal system in the way that Hirvisaari does.

Nipping prejudice in the bud with our example

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Migrant Tales

We must find effective ways to nip prejudice in the bud. The worst matter we can do when it happens is our silence, which emboldens and strengthens intolerance to see a new day. How you may ask can we challenge such social ills? The answer is simple: our example and leadership.

Racist rants are usually accompanied by Nazi slogans like this one found in Mikkeli, Finland.

One of the worst mistakes some make when speaking about other groups is to generalize. When we generalize we water the seeds of our prejudice, which eventually bloom and reinforce our intolerance.

A study by Janet Swim and Laurie Hyers in the United States asked the following question to women if they heard a sexist joke: Would you put them in their place, or would you be too nice to confront?

The study showed that 50% of the women participants said they’d ignore the comment, while 16% would actually comment on its inappropriateness. Two percent would grumble and do nothing.

I suspect that when it comes to racist jokes or comments, the number of people that would ignore them would be much higher than 50%.

Our reaction should be like Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s, who said that his country had become after Anders Breivik’s attacks a “more tolerant, [and] more careful not to judge people” according to their ethnic background. His answer was more democracy, openness and tolerance, not less.

If you are at a meeting with colleagues or friends and they make a racist joke, tell them that it’s inappropriate.

Our reaction to intolerance should be first and foremost a reaction.

Post-Jyväskylä: Where do we go from here?

Posted on February 2, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Considering how the media treated before the April 2011 election racism and far right ideology and how social media sites were teeming with racist online lynch mobs, we are today waking up from the hangover of our state of social inebriation. The aftereffect will not go away in a day, week, or month but will take a very long time to wear off.

Instead of alcohol, Finland has been consuming and experimenting with racism, nationalism and far right ideology as answers to our ever-growing cultural diversity The more it drinks, the more we lose touch with reality and what is good for us.

Was it a coincidence that the attack in Jyväskylä marked exactly the eightieth anniversary when Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany as chancellor and transformed the country into a totalitarian state?

When speaking of far right violence and racism in Europe, we cannot avoid addressing social ills like intolerance.

Claiming that social exclusion of white Finnish youths is one of the main factors behind what happened in Jyväskylä is only addressing part of the problem without seeing the whole picture.

Reading a number of editorials about what happened in Jyväskylä, only one by Savon Sanomat cited racism as the real culprit. It wrote: “An even greater threat from organized extremist movements is a sort of daily racism that is targeted against immigrants and even to our [Swedish-] language minority. Attitudes in Finland have changed course, which isn’t anything to brag about.”

The Kuopio-based daily makes a valid point. Every day racism, xenophobia and attacks against our Swedish-speaking minority feed far right and populist-nationalist groups. They are the 98 octane fuel that permit it to spread their intolerance.

Bears hibernate in winter but so can countries for many years when they live in a state of denial. Finland is no longer a nation owned and controlled by just white Finns. It is a fact that we are an ever-growing culturally diverse nation.

Let’s not give an Andres Breivik the opportunity to commit murder on a mass scale before we understand that our response to intolerance was inefficient.

Everyone in Finland has the right to be treated as an equal member of society and with respect.

Some sectors of our society have a very hard time accepting this. They are not only white marginalized Finnish youths, but a far bigger group that extends to all sectors of our society.

PS’ second vice president doesn’t condemn but “gives advice”to Jyväskylä’s neo-Nazi attackers

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Perussuomalaiset (PS) second vice president, MP Juho Eerola, did not condemn the attacks in Jyväskylä by suspected neo-Nazi thugs but advised them how to do it more effectively, reports National Coalition Party’s online Verkkouutiset. Writes Eerola: “The next time don’t look like “patriots” when you plan to enter such an event. Don’t go as a group but be [inconspicuous] in the crowd.”

Eerola’s views are shameful if not worrisome. They reveal how some PS members hold rights rights like freedom of speech and the right to assembly in contempt.

The PS MP denied on Friday’s Helsingin Sanomat that he was giving advice on how to carry out the attack and should express his ideas more precisely the next time.

Eerola’s aide, Ulla Pyysalo, had applied for membership in the neo-Nazi Suomen Kansallinen Vastarina (SKV) but refused to resign from her post unless she found a new job by the end of the year.

Eerola, whose sympathies with fascism are well known, defended Pyysalo and did not see any reason for her to resign. He said he’d be more worried if his aide belonged to a far-left organization.

One of the matters that worries me about t people like Eerola and his band is they think they can rewrite history and put our way of life in cold storage in order to please their views, which are harmful to our society.