Anjem Choudary took part in a talk in Helsinki Thursday about freeing Muslim hostages. The Muslim cleric has said a lot of controversial things in the past like Islam will overrun Europe and that Prime Minister David Cameron and U.S. President Barack Obama should be killed. He’s even predicted that a “tsunami” of Muslim immigrants will sweep Europe.
While the national media gave ample space to the cleric’s visit, Finland’s notorious Islamphobists like Perussuomalaiset (PS) MP James Hirvisaari, Olli Immonen and Juho Eerola were eerily quiet and didn’t invest a word on their Facebook pages to Anjem Choudary.
Even PS MP Jussi Halla-aho, who was sentenced for ethnic agitation, was silent about the visit.
The only Islamophobic association that tried without luck to stir up some controversy was the Finnish Defense League. Two posts with a few “likes” and the usual nutcase comments was all that they could muster.
It’s easy to figure out why Finland’s counterjihadists are so quiet: Asking the authorities to ban Anjem Choundary from attending the talk would be synonymous to shooting themselves in the foot. If they [PS] can spread hate speech and intolerance why can’t others?
Fortunately we have strong democratic institutions in Europe that are under siege not by people like Anjem Choundary necessarily but by counterjihadist groups like Suomen Sisu, Suomalaisuuden liitto and the PS, which has given a platform to people to spread intolerance.
Who is the biggest terrorist to have struck recent times at the heart of our European democratic societies? His name is Anders Breivik, a white Norwegian who admired the Islamophobia of the English Defense League, the PS and mentioned Halla-aho in his manifesto before murdering 77 innocent victims.
If we ask Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg what our reaction to intolerance should be after 22/7, he said that the country had become “more tolerant, [and] more careful not to judge people” by ethnic origin.
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.
While some may claim the headline to be provocative, it’s not too far off the mark. With what we already know about Suomen Sisu, is there a potential that it could evolve into a Finnish version of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and U.S. American Nazi Party? Absolutely.
You can read about Suomen Sisu’s (in Finnish) ethnic policies via wayback machine.
If we compare what the KKK and U.S. American Nazi Party think about “racial purity” and compare it with Suomen Sisu’s former policy statement that’s presently under revision, it’s pretty clear that these groups play in the same ideological ball park.
Even if Suomen Sisu denies it, the far right anti-immigration association used to openly promote white “racial purity.” Whatever it may say or deny today, Suomen Sisu still opposes white Finns marrying and mixing with other ethnicities, especially from the Third World.
This was clearly stated in its former official policy statement:
“All nations, races and cultures are valuable in themselves and their existence must be guaranteed. Eliminating humankind’s natural [ethnic] diversity in the name of misleading multiculturalism must end. Peoples of different nationalities shouldn’t be mixed to destroy historically developed cultures by replacing them with a global subculture.”
Suomen Sisu’s new chairman, Olli Immonen, denies that the association promotes “racial cleanliness.” No matter how much the Perussuomalaiset (PS) MP denies or words it, the main message of the far right association is the same: Finland must stay white.
The association’s former chairwoman, Paula Päivike, reinforces the latter. She was quoted as saying on Verkkouutiset.fi that ”Suomen Sisu is against ethnic purity but is in favor of maintaining multiculturalism.”
Certainly we’d have to figure out what her definition of multiculturalism is.
This becomes clear in a quote by Päivike on Verkkouutiset.fi: ”We’re speaking about the purity of nations, not races. We see people as cultures. The fact that different people need to be smeared in the same place, sure that’s nice, but it only lasts a moment. Then people mix and become one culture.”
Just like Suomen Sisu, one of the core values of the KKK is conserving the “white race” by discouraging “racial interbreeding.”
A standard KKK argument is that since god made humans ethnically diverse “like the colors of the rainbow,” why then would we want to destroy what god made?
The U.S. American Nazi Party says something similar. Take away the anti-Semitism and their open support for Adolf Hitler and replace it with Islamophobia, only then we see how close Suomen Sisu comes to that group’s thinking. Here’s how the U.S. American Nazi party sees “racial purity:”
“…an America in which our children and our grandchildren will play and go to school with other White children; an America in which they will date and marry other young people of our own race; an America in which all their offspring will be beautiful, healthy White babies.”
How come Suomen Sisu’s ideology is so similar to the KKK and U.S. American Nazi Party? This is easy since it can be traced to Suomen Sisu’s recommended reading list, where you’ll find the writings of David Duke, the former grand wizard of the KKK, and Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi war criminal sentenced to death at Nuremberg for war crimes.
Rosenberg was instrumental in giving “Aryan racial purity (sic)” its philosophical base through writings like, The myth of the twentieth century, which argued that ethnic diversity had undermined Germany from realizing its racial greatness and becoming the master race.
Like the KKK and U.S. American Nazi Party, Suomen Sisu assures us with a poker face that it’s not a racist association at all but simply defending white Finns from Third World minorities.
No matter how you look at it, Suomen Sisu will always be a KKK- and Nazi-spirited far right association whose main point is ethnic purity.
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.
Perussuomalaiset (PS) chairman Timo Soini was asked Tuesday by YLE what he thought about PS MP Olli Immonen being elected as the new chairman of Suomen Sisu, an extremist anti-immigration association. Soini offered his usual cock-and-bull answer by comparing Suomen Sisu to a harmless hunting, farming or youth association.
It appears that YLE has learned a thing or two from BBC’s HARDtalk, when Soini was put on the hot seat about racism in his party. YLE understood the wider context of the story and correctly pointed out that Soini had no objection to one of his MPs being chairman of an extremist association.
Another PS MP, James Hirvisaari, said last month that he was pressured to resign from Suomen Sisu.
Suomen Sisu has been called a lot of things in the past, from Nazi-spirited to extremist by the Finnish Security Intelligence Service (Supo). The group still lives in the murky world of eugenics, a disgraced pseudo-science whose aim was to create a master white race by wiping out other ones.
Suomen Sisu openly supports “racial hygiene” and discourages white Finns from marrying foreigners.
Yle spoke to Immonen, who admitted last year never visiting the very neighborhoods that he claims are becoming ghettos in Eastern Helsinki.
“For example, we can see small examples of neighborhoods where certain national groups want to live and marginalize themselves from the rest of society,” he said. “This type of development must be stopped.”
Immonen’s comment about ghettos mirrors his negative views of cultural diversity, which is the main core of his anti-immigration stance. According to him, immigrants don’t have a right to live in the same neighborhood.
The PS MP, who is a security guard by profession, forgets that the most normal thing in the world for immigrants is to live together. That’s how many Finnish immigrants lived when they migrated to the Americas. Some even founded colonies in countries like Argentina and lived near-isolated from the outside world.
Let’s not expect anything but the usual denials from Soini concerning Immonen. Why? Because he’s leader of a party that has given a political voice to a record number of racists, Islamophobes, immigrantphobes, isolationists, anti-EU supporters, male chauvinists, homophobes, neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.
Asking Soini to condemn Immonen for being a member of a Nazi-spirited association is like asking two foxes starved for many days to behave inside a chicken coop.
Perussuomalaiset (PS) MP James Hirvisaari, who was convicted for ethnic agitation in December, announced Saturday on Twitter that he was “pressured” to resign from the extremist Suomen Sisu association. He announced on Friday that he was resigning from Suomen Sisu because he was too old to belong to “a youth organization.”
Hirvisaari tweets, “The truth: I was pressured to resign from Suomen Sisu.”
In his usual far right tone, Hirvisaari wrote on his blog: ”[I didn’t resign] because there was something wrong with the association, but because it is a youth organization.”
And continues: “I thank Suomen Sisu’s smart young men and women for their inspiring, intelligent, peaceful and authentic love for the fatherland and for their company and great example.”
So what does this latest piece of news about Hirvisaari’s motive to resign from Suomen Sisu tell us? It reveals that there is a big struggle in the PS between the far right faction led by MP Jussi Halla-aho and the party’s chairman Timo Soini.
Hirvisaari now regrets resigning from Suomen Sisu.
Is this tweet by Hirvisaari an outright declaration of war against Soini?
Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik cited five Finnish groups in his manifesto, 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence. These were the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party, Suomen Sisu, Suomalaisuuden liitto, Suomen kansan sinivalkoiset and Vapaan Suomen liitto, according to a report by theFinnish Security Intelligence Service (SUPO).
Writes YLE in English: “Texts similar to the manifest of Anders Behring Breivik have been published in Finland which [Maria] Paaso says shows an ideological preparedness to commit violent acts.”
While these latter groups haven’t carried out the same type of terrorist acts like Breivik did in July 2011, both are strongly bonded by Counterjihadist and/or populist radical right (PRR) ideology.
Some well-known Counterjihadists in Finland are PS MP Jussi Halla-aho, MP James Hirvisaari, MP Olli Immonen and others.
Counterjihadism is a radical ideology that speaks out against immigration and the Islamization of Europe. Counterjihadists like Breivik blame “multiculturalism” for the spread of Islam in Europe.
As most sensible people know, multiculturalism is a Canadian integration policy that was implemented in the 1970s. Counterjihadist ideology, however, sees multiculturalism as an immigration policy that permits Muslims and non-Europeans to emigrate and live in Europe.
Some well-known European Counterjihadist websites are: gatesofvienna.blogspot.com, jihadwatch.org as well as brusselsjournal.com. To these you could add Halla-aho’s Scripta blog in Finland.
Contrarily, PRR groups base their ideology on populism, radicalism and right-wing position on the left-right scale.
Populism means hostility to representative-pluralist politics. The PRR sees democracy as nativist, authoritarian and populist, according to a study by the University of Leicester.
Breivik is an excellent example of what Counterjihadism and PRR ideology are and can breed in countries like Finland. In Norway we tragically saw how it came to fruit.
The Internet is the breeding ground for Counterjihadist ideology in Europe and Finland. Some of these forums in Finland are Hommaforum and Scripta. Two PS members, Matias Turkkila and MP Halla-aho, are their editors respectively.
Turkkila was named in May by the PS as the new editor-in-chief of the party’s newspaper and web page.
The aim of Counterjihad and PRR groups is simple: keep Europe and Finland white (culturally and ethnically) and place as many obstacles on cultural diversity as possible.
One should never underestimate an ideology like Counterjihadism or any other one that is exclusive and bases its ideology on “race and blood.”
If there are threats to our Nordic and European way of life today, we will find them right under our noses. Two of these are definitely Counterjihadism and PRR.
As the euro financial crisis deepens so does the rise of far-right violence across Europe, according to a report by the Institute of Race Relations. Finland stands out as one of the 100 cases documented by the report. It states that academics studying immigration in this country are forced to withdraw from public discussion rather than face intimidation and threats to their families.
Migrant Tales has been as well the focus of attacks, death threats and intimidation.
The report, Pedlars of Hate: the violent impact of the European far Right, documents the cold-blooded shooting of a Moroccan during Black February as a clear warning sign for Finland.
The far right has found a good platform in the PS.
The report states on page 8: “The Satakunta Police Department is investigating whether Facebook comments made by a [former] True Finns [Perussuomalaiset] elected councillor in Köyliö constitute incitement to racial hatred. After a 21-year-old Moroccan man was shot dead in Oulu in March [see page 15], Tommi Rautio posted that the murderer should be given a medal because there is ‘a war going on and in every war decorations are handed out.'”
While there are some encouraging signs that politicians and the media see PS politicians like Jussi Halla-aho and his Suomen Sisu followers as extremists, it’s still not too late to defeat the far-right menace that has attacked Finland.
How much of a threat is the far right in Finland? Are matters going to get far worse before they improve?
In the future, when Finnish historians of different ethnic backgrounds look at the present parliamentary term 2011-15, they will most likely conclude that it was the darkest period for Finland and immigrants in the new century. A prelude to this sombre period were the municipal election of 2008 and how it reflected a shift in the national mood.
It would be naive, even an exercise in self-deceit, to claim that the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party isn’t one obvious culprit. The municipal elections of 2008 and 2003, when PS MP Tony Halme was elected to parliament, speak volumes about how racism and xenophobia started to lift their heads in this country.
Despite being one of the worst periods in our recent history, where some groups and politicians aim to make racism and xenophobia as normal and acceptable as karjalanpiirakka, it has brought out the best in some of us. For some, like Migrant Tales, it has been a clarion call.
If this period has brought out the best in some of us, it has brought out the worst as well.
Finland’s anti-immigration groups like to feed the public red herrings.
Some regretful examples come form of silence and lack of leadership by the Finnish media and some politicians. The success of the PS in the April elections is proof of the inarticulateness, complacency and even the flirting of these two groups with anti-immigration parties and groups.
The PS has provided us with monthly scandals beginning with MP Teuvo Hakkarainen’s first day in parliament to the recent suggestion by councilman Tommi Rautio to give a medal to a cold-blooded killer.
A word of advice to anti-immigration extremists: Everything you write will come under scrutiny by future generations. Those future generations, which will be made up of Finnish researchers from different ethnic backgrounds, will highlight the racism and xenophobia that inflicted part of our society today.
When they give their lectures at our universities on ethnic studies or history, they will show to their students the shameful evidence left in the writings of numerous anti-immigration politicians like PS MP Jussi Halla-aho and his Suomen Sisu crowd, for example.
Time will increase the shamefulness of these racist writings. What is written today by some of these racists will look eerily similar to what some groups wrote about blacks during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Recognizing this will be the first important step in liberating our society from the illness that has afflicted it.
Perussuomalaiset (PS) party chairperson Timo Soini’s silence after the Supreme Court announced that it would fine PS MP Jussi Halla-aho for defaming a religion and inciting ethnic hatred, speaks volumes about the power struggles in the right-wing populist party.
Who are the PS’ powerbrokers today: the extremist Suomen Sisu wing led by Halla-aho, or its chairman Timo Soini?
The answer to that question will be revealed tomorrow when the PS announces its replacement for Halla-aho as chairman of the administration committee.
If the PS names Juho Eerola, it will be a clear indication that Soini has lost his grip on the party.
Eerola is a close ideological ally of Halla-aho who resigned his membership from Suomen Sisu last week.
PS MP Tom Packalén, a policeman, is Eerola’s challenger.
