Tag: Sweden Democrats

Sweden is right, Finland wrong in its strategy against anti-immigration parties

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt reiterated to Helsingin Sanomat the government’s plans to isolate Sweden Democrats despite the latest polls in Sweden, which show the anti-EU and anti-immigration party making gains. Even if the Sweden Democrats have tried break free from their neo-Nazi and racist image, the party led by Jimmie Åkesson has suffered a number of scandals. 

Kuvankaappaus 2013-12-4 kello 7.43.07

Read full story (in Finnish) here.

We know from a fact that flirting with the far right, right-wing populism, isolationism and adopting a tougher anti-immigration stance can backfire badly as happened in Finland in April 2011, when the Perussuomalaiset (PS) became the country’s third-largest party in parliament.

After over two and a half years of PS opposition politics, which has been strongly characterized by racism, nationalism and neo-liberal economic ideology, what should mainstream parties have learned?

The answer to that question can be found in neighboring Sweden where mainstream parties there have isolated politically the Sweden Democrats.

Is this an effective strategy?

Yes, despite gains by the Sweden Democrats in the polls.

Time will prove Sweden did the right thing while Finland failed in the task in challenging intolerance.

If the government of Prime Minister Jyrki Kaatainen has taken an ambivalent stance on intolerance, why would PS head Timo Soini want to renounce racism in his party if it attracts votes?

It’s like asking a junkie to give up drugs.

Columnist Eric Erfors of Sweden’s Expressen: What do Halla-aho and Räsänen say about the state of Finland today?

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Finland needs every now and then a wake-up call from the outside world. Columnist Eric Erfors of the Swedish tabloid Expressen, asks how is it possible that a person like Perussuomalaiset (PS) MP Jussi Halla-aho, which he calls a ”pure racist,” was eligible to become a deputy member of Finland’s delegation to the Council of Europe?

Erfors considered Halla-aho’s appointment to the Council of Europe as asking a pyromaniac to extinguish a fire.

Kuvankaappaus 2013-11-2 kello 7.16.36

Read full story (in Swedish) here.

Erfors states that it would be highly unlikely that Halla-aho would be accepted in the far-right anti-immigration Sweden Democrats. ”No [he wouldn’t be accepted] because it would be in conflict with its new image, which the party is trying to create” he writes.

Another Finnish politician that didn’t receive high marks on his column was Christian Democrat Interior Minister Päivi Räsänen, whose lowly views of gays, immigrants who aren’t Christians and minorities like the Roma are well-known.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone why Räsänen’s approval rating among the PS is so high.

The interesting question that Erfors poses to us in Finland is how did we arrive to such a point where a “pure racist” like Halla-aho was elected to parliament and ultra-conservative Räsänen appointed interior minister? What does it reveal about the present state of this country?

For one, it shows that the views of these two politicians have a home in Finland and go down well with many voters. But we’d have to look at Finland’s history to understand why we vote a “pure racist” to parliament and approve an ultra-conservative in government.

During most of our independence, Finland viewed the outside world with mistrust and did everything possible to discourage immigrants and foreign investment from coming to this country. Imagine the myths and “us”-versus-“them” mentality you have to drive home to reinforce your suspicions of foreigners from one generation to the next.

Halla-aho’s and Räsänen’s “appeal” is today a liability to Finland because it, if anything, is impoverishing this country politically, socially and what’s important, economically.

Instead of finding proactive solutions to our problems as is common in a Nordic welfare democracy, we are regressing in our worst prejudices with the weapon of scapegoating.

Finland needs leadership to challenge these threats that have already impacted our society in a negative manner.

I’m certain that leadership will come when our cultural diversity is strong enough and can stand on its feet.

 

 

 

Why we must challenge anti-immigration parties across Europe

Posted on by Migrant Tales

A political party that bases its popularity on anti-immigration and populist rhetoric is like playing a risky political game of Russian roulette. The game continues until the only bullet in the revolver goes off in your head. Higher bets are placed each time that the revolver doesn’t fire: more xenophobia, more hate speech, more racist rhetoric, more prejudice…

Read the major headlines of Europe’s main dailies, social media websites and Migrant Tales to understand that we are on a perilous path. Even if we wanted to change our xenophobic ways, some of us have passed the point of no return.

One story that struck me this week happened in Paris, France. A veiled woman was beaten in a bus and later arrested by the police. The victim could be a member of the Romany community in Eastern Europe, anti-Semitism in Denmark, a black minister in Italy, or a Somali refugee in Finland.

Here’s what happened:

“Ms Lamia is a professional caregiver…On June 30 2013, at 6 pm, Lamia takes the bus like any other night to go to work. When an elderly woman gets on the bus, Miss Lamia naturally gives away her seat, but the lady refuses and violently invectives Lamia about her headscarf. Follows a stormy debate: ‘Dirty Arab, go back to your country, you should read the Koran …’ screams the lady. As she is about to get off the bus to go to work, Ms Lamia faces once again the aggressiveness of the old lady. She thinks Lamia is following her, so she shoves Lamia who, this time, replies. At that moment, a tall man comes to Miss Lamia and violently slaps her. She clings to him to hold him while calling for help. It took the intervention of a few people to stop him. Requested by Lamia, the police arrives on the scene and, instead of arresting the aggressor, decides to put Miss Lamia in custody.”

The fact that this still happens in a country like France shows that we have learned very little after about 100 million died in two World Wars. It shows as well that the medicine to treat a serious illness like intolerance is insufficient. It’s like giving aspirin to a patient with terminal cancer.

Here’s another story about the rise in hate crimes against Muslims in France:

Hostility rises when Islam is in the news, for example last year when an Islamist killed seven people or when a politician accused Muslim children of stealing classmates’ snacks, the Committee against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) said. The CCIF welcomed a European Parliament decision on Tuesday to lift the legal immunity of far-right leader Marine Le Pen so she can be tried on racism charges for comparing Muslims praying in the streets here to the wartime Nazi occupation of France. The group said in its annual report (French) that anti-Muslim acts rose to 469 last year, after 298 in 2011 and 188 in 2010. The rise reflected trends cited by other recent reports that also noted increasing levels of anti-Semitism and racism in France.

Check out the weekly headlines by I CARE:

Kosovo Jails Macedonia Mass Murder Suspects
Macedonia: Spate of Anti-Gay Attacks
A Mosque in Reykjavík Threatens Icelandic Culture
Sweden: fall in number of hate crime reports
Council of Europe’s Anti-Racism Commission publishes new report on Finland 
Council of Europe’s Anti-Racism Commission publishes new report on Portugal
Council of Europe’s Anti-Racism Commission publishes new report on San Marino
Polish Jewish leader protests handling of anti-Semitism cases
Islamophobia in the Netherlands
Position of LGBT population in Serbia “improves”
Tipton mosque blast was ‘terrorist attack’, say police (UK)
Newcastle Division’s Lee Patrick wants to gas Muslims (UK)
Harpenden Town Council condemn ‘fake’ Gypsy site notice (UK)
Right-wing extremists launch bid to revive Fascist party (UK)
Disquiet over ‘shameful’ policing of racial violence in Brent (UK)
Veiled woman beaten in a bus in Paris, the police arrests the victim (France)
Anti-Muslim acts rising in France, rights group says
Marine Le Pen expected to face charges for incitement to racial hatred (France)
Islamophobia assaults in Argenteuil (France)
Need for the immediate investigation of homophobic, sexist and racist motives behind two attacks (Cyprus)

The fact that a particular political party, like the Perussuomalaiset (PS), Danish People’s Party, Sweden Democrats and others across Europe, base their  political agenda on anti-immigration rhetoric tells you that they are playing with fire and are one of the main causes of the cancer spreading throughout Europe.

There’s still time to tackle the biggest threat to our societies today, which is right-wing anti-immigration populist ideology, and wake up those who pay homage to them with their silence.

Racism Review: Sweden – No Longer the Exception to Western Racist Rule

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Authored by Tobias Hübinette and L. Janelle Dance

Since May 20, 2013, mass vandalism, material damage and outbursts of rioting in the poor and non-white suburbs of Greater Stockholm have dominated Swedish and international news media. This civil unrest was sparked when, on May 12, the police shot and killed a 69-year-old man from Husby, one of the marginalized suburban communities of metropolitan Stockholm. The shooting is still under investigation. The burning of cars, other types of arsons, and attacks on the police erupted in Husby on the evening of May 19th and quickly spread to many other similar suburbs of Greater Stockholm such as Fittja, Tensta, Flemingsberg, Hjulsta, Jakobsberg, Hagsätra, Rågsved, Skärholmen and Skogås. As we write this post, after six nights of uninterrupted suburban unrest, the vandalism and the violence have also spread to other Swedish cities like Gothenburg, Örebro and Linköping. Although the US and UK embassy warnings to keep out from such districts are clearly exaggerated—the scale of the unrest cannot be compared to similar previous waves of riots in for example the US, the UK or France—a feeling of a serious social crisis is gaining ground in the political debate as leading government officials and the Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt urge a stop to the material damage.

This is not the first time that Sweden is experiencing a series of riots; the last time was between 2008-09. However, it is arguably the first time when voices from the suburbs are entering the public debate as a new nascent social movement. At the helm of this movement, which has gained the spotlight in recent years, are teens and young adults who are also usually born and raised in Sweden (the so-called second generation). More than ever before, these youth are denouncing police harassment, the declining social welfare services in the suburbs and the dramatically increasing disparities between rich and poor—a development which is heavily racialized as the proportion of poor white Swedes is below 5% while the proportion of poor Swedes of color hovers around 35-45%. Representatives from this movement have, for example, alerted the media to the use of racial slurs among the police who patrol the suburbs, and above all they have been able to express an unprecedented analysis of a New Sweden, which is becoming heavily polarized along racial lines.

For decades Sweden has proudly viewed itself as the most progressive country in the world, as “the conscience of the world”. Furthermore, Sweden’s antiracist image and radical anti-discrimination, migration and integration legislation are well known all over the world. However, recently Sweden has also become the OECD country showing the highest difference in unemployment between foreign-born and native-born Swedes, while its big- and mid-size cities are characterized by one of the most extreme ethno-racial residential segregation patterns in the Western world. Thus, it is not in the context of the old Sweden of exceptionalism but in the wake of the New Sweden of exclusion that we must understand the frustration, the desperation and the rage that can be found particularly among young people in the suburbs. This second generation has grown up in Sweden but due to stigmatized postal addresses and “non-Swedish” appearances they are not accepted within the majority society at large, without taking into account these worrying statistical correlations.

There are also other political groups that are exploiting the current suburban unrest. A fact overlooked by the media is that these other groups do not live in the suburbs yet exacerbate the unrest. While ignoring these instigators, the media focuses on spectacular videos and photos of burning buildings and cars and policemen fighting with youngsters. Firstly, there are indications that white Swedish leftist activists have encouraged and participated in the riots, something that also happened in 2008-09. Their sole political agenda is to sustain and encourage even more social antagonism at the expense of an even stronger stigmatization of the poor and non-white suburbs among the white majority population. Furthermore, Swedish extreme right-wing activists are also active in the events by portraying themselves as “ordinary Swedes” who want to help the police as “citizen guards”, a popular yet loaded discourse that the media all too often buy into. Saturday night for example, around 200 Nazi activists more or less invaded Tumba in Southern Botkyrka in the southern part of Greater Stockholm, and started to hunt down and beat up any youngster who was deemed to be a “rioter”.

However for ordinary white Swedes reading and watching the news it is highly probable that all the inhabitants in the suburbs are associated with violence and rioting. In the end, the Sweden Democrats (a former Nazi party which has transformed itself into a populist anti-immigration party and which, according to opinion polls, is the fourth or the third largest party in Sweden) will maybe become the biggest political winner due to the suburban unrest. Now, the Sweden Democrats will most probably gain even more support among the voters. Of course, representatives from the party have already made use of the events by calling for stronger police interventions and the introduction of temporary state of emergency measures in certain urban districts.

Once “exceptional” Sweden is no longer the exception to the general Western rule of blaming the racialized victim. On the contrary, white Swedes are remarkably unexceptional as they behave like racist and conservative white Americans. Ordinary white Swedes, who claim to embrace antiracism, equality and social democracy, look at the riots in Stockholm and blame marginalized youths for the institutional discrimination, political marginalization, and structural racism that have become common place in the former “conscience of the world”.

Tobias Hübinette is an Associate Professor and researcher at the Multicultural Centre in Botkyrka, Sweden. L. Janelle Dance is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska and a visiting scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. Dance is currently living in Sweden.

Read original blog entry here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

Bachmannstein: or, The Modern Icarus

Posted on by admin

A Finnish friend recently asked me why I chose to take an American angle with my inaugural post here on Migrant Tales, “Of Birds and Feathers: The PS, the Sweden Democrats, and Their American Bedfellows. What could political trends in America tell us what we don’t already know about the phenomenon of the PS and their counterparts across the European Union?

I submit that American (and foreign) political goings-on, especially in recent times, can help anti-racists and immigrants defeat forces such as the PS with the right amount of cunning and patience. And being an American who has studied the far-right in my home country since my teenaged years, I know a lot more about the PS’ Yankee friends there than Finland-centric contributors at Tales. Not that the other contributors aren’t knowledgeable themselves in their own right. But if you want to understand people like the PS, you may have to look at outside of Finland to succeed in doing so.

As you may recall, at the start of Obama’s presidency, the United States went through a wave of right-wing populism engineered by a collective movement called the Tea Party. With its uncompromising rhetoric, xenophobic hostility, and politics of resentment, it was something of an inspiration to the far-right parties that sprung up in Europe at roughly the same time. I have often heard European populists, sometimes during personal interactions, compare themselves to the Tea Party. And vice versa. Which may be problematic soon, the Tea Party is not doing so well.

Despite the Tea Party’s projected successes in the 2010 mid-term elections – big enough that they inspired left-wingers to write excessively pessimistic op-eds like, say, this – those successes were somewhat limited in the final result, and nothing has gone right for the Tea Party since. Obama was re-elected. Gay marriage, something the Tea Party staunchly opposes, is poised to become legal, or at least more likely, in the U.S. The constantly changing racial makeup of the American electorate threatens the relevance of the Tea Party’s “angry white male” power base.

Fox News and Glenn Beck, the Tea Party’s main cheerleaders in the media, have destroyed their mainstream credibility and, in Beck’s case, have migrated to the outermost fringes of American political discourse. Most Tea Party candidates were either defeated or unseated in 2012. Sarah Palin is about to disappear as a national figure, as is Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), whose disastrous presidential campaign and subsequent public appearances have exposed the extent of her avarice. The doom and gloom among the American left has proven premature in the case of the Tea Party.

If we chart the decline of the Tea Party with the decline of European populists, a pattern emerges. Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician who in many ways inspired Islamophobia to take root in parliaments across the continent, saw his party lose half its seats in the Dutch parliamentary elections last year, not long before the Tea Party defeats of 2012. Since April 2011, the PS has consistently performed poorly in elections despite its high poll numbers. Remember how the PS’ polls went as high as 19% before the municipal elections, yet they only got 12% of the vote – half of both what the pollsters predicted and the 2011 election result?

If the Tea Party and European populists have anything in common besides rhetoric, it’s the fact that they are banal and self-destructive. I could compare both to the Greek mythological figure Icarus, who got nifty artificial wings but was too arrogant not to fly too close to the sun. The Tea Party had a chance to set the U.S. agenda after the 2010 elections, but they were so self-absorbed and uncompromising and narrow-minded that they squandered it. The PS is in the same position, and may (and likely will) go out the same way. Same with the Sweden Democrats, which is in a more precarious position than it lets on.

So if you are an immigrant or ideological opponent of the PS, I don’t think you should fret quite yet. The PS looks powerful now, but like the Tea Party before it, it does not truly appreciate the democratic process and thus cannot adequately function within it – the party’s poor election returns are partly a testament to that. The worst enemies the PS has are not the immigrants or the leftists, but the egos of its own members.

It’s two-and-a-half years until the next election. Two-and-a-half looooooooong years. Long enough for the PS to make a mistake that it cannot sweep under the rug.

Could Finland and the Nordic region see Golden Dawn-like fanatics in the future?

Posted on by Migrant Tales

The news from Greece is getting more distressing as Golden Dawn neo-Nazi thugs continue to terrorize sensible Greeks, immigrants and other minorities with the collusion of the police. An investigative report by The Guardian exposes how bad things are in Greece at present and why matters will get far worse. Could we see something similar happening in Finland and the Nordic rgion? 

Kuvankaappaus 2013-4-1 kello 23.52.15 A policeman wearing a Golden Dawn t-shirt under his uniform. See original post here.

Writes the Independent of London: “Actual fascists in actual black shirts are actually marching around Athens waving swastikas and burning torches, and maiming and murdering ethnic minorities, and world governments appear frighteningly relaxed about it as long as the Greek people continue to pay off the debts of the European elite.”

For a person who saw military dictatorships come and go in Latin America in the 1970s like I did, the ever-worsening situation in Greece  is a cause for concern.

The fact that up to 50% of the police is some districts of Greece voted for Golden Dawn, shows how volatile and dangerous the situation is in that country. Taking into account that many Greeks have lost confidence in their rulers and democracy, a blow to the credibility of the police is another straw on the camel’s fragile back.

Migrant Tales wrote in September about the round up of 16,836 foreign nationals were brought for questioning  during the first month that Xenios Zeus was instigated. Xenios Zeus means “god of hospitality” in Greek.

Here’s one recent case of those many beatings taking place in Greece daily by Golden Dawn thugs and the police on I can’t relax in Greece blog.

Just like the Jews were persecuted by the Nazis after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, the same is going in many parts of Europe and especially in Greece. Apart from Jews, refugees, immigrants, gays and Muslims are the new scapegoats.

While we erroneously believe in scapegoating the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society because they have no political and economic power, we will end up the losers. How? By watering down and putting into cold storage our civil rights to deal first with imagined menace x and then menace y.

The political culture in the Nordic region is different from Greece. Even so, it doesn’t mean that we couldn’t have our own Nikolaos Michaloliakos running amuck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4AXJx3IzdY

While some far-right politicians may not speak like Golden Dawn leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos, they hold the same thoughts on immigration, minorities and anything too foreign or non-European for their tastes.

Without a doubt, one of Michaloliakos’ political soul mates in a Nordic context is Pia Kjærsgaard of the Danish People’s Party (DDP). Other ones include the Suomen Sisu faction of the Perussuomalaiset (PS): Jussi Halla-aho, James Hirvisaari, Olli Immonen, Juho Eerola and other hardliners, who are openly neo-fascists or flirt with neo-fascism.

Taking into account the election successes of anti-immigration parties in the Nordic region before, there was one person that stopped them on their heels for the time being: Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 victims on his crusade to save Europe from Muslims.

With the economic crisis worsening and the election victories of anti-immigration parties in the Nordic region before 22/7, parties like the DDP, Progress Party of Norway, Sweden Democrats and the PS would have been riding the crest of a wave of popularity.

Without Breivik, they would today reveal their same racist arrogance in the same way as the Golden Dawn does in Greece.

The attack by neo-Nazis of a book event on the far right in Jyväskylä in January, the rise in hate crimes in 2011, police indifference to racism, the political rise of the Perussuomalaiset in the 2011 election are just a few signs that matters are heating up in this part of Europe as well.

 

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

Posted on 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 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.

Kuvankaappaus 2013-3-25 kello 15.32.06

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.

Another scandal hits far-right Sweden Democrats

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Sweden Democrat (SD) MP Lars Isovaara is resigning his seat after he spat at a parliamentary security guard, reports The Local. The latest scandal to the far-right party follows an earlier one this month after Swedish tabloid Expressen published a video of an SD MP who got rowdy  in public and hurled racist and sexist insults. 

SD party chairman, Jimmie Åkesson, stated that Isovaara’s behvior had eaten away his credibility, adding that the former MP has ”personal problems.”

Writes The Local: ”Isovaara reportedly oinked like a pig and spat at a security guard in the early hours of Wednesday morning after he had reported a robbery. He called the Expressen newspaper himself and urged them to publish the story, however the paper later published information that suggested the robbery never took place.”

In neighboring Finland, the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party has seen numerous scandals ranging from drunken and disorderly behavior to  applying for membership in a neo-Nazi party.

How many of these PS MPs and party members have faced the music and resigned on their own will?

None.

 

 

Turun Sanomat: Finland Democrats eye PS’ anti-immigration vote

Posted on by Migrant Tales

The Finland Democrats, which bases its political agenda on the far-right Sweden Democrats, aims to become a new party and compete for the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party’s anti-immigration vote, reports Turun Sanomat. The creation of a new anti-immigration party reveals the ever-negative debate in Finland surrounding immigrants and immigration.  

The PS is the only party that has attracted large number of votes due to its anti-immigration stance. Anti-immigration groups like Vapauspuolue, Muutos 2011 and other so-called taxi parties have failed to lure large number of votes.

A “taxi party” in Bolivia is one that is so small that all of its members can fit inside a taxi.

Click here to see original Facebook post.

The new party, which will be spearheaded by Jussi Yli-Paavola, established a new Facebook group Monday where the Finland Democrats “aim to defend the rights of Finns…a poor country that cannot be the social welfare office of EU brokers and Africans. We have to act before it’s too late!!”

An anonymous Finland Democrats’ member denied on Turun Sanomat that PS MPs like James Hirvisaari were going to form part of the new party. He said, however, that PS members are welcome to join the Finland Democrats if they wished.

Click here to see original Facebook post.

Apart from Hirvisaari, other far-right anti-immigrant PS members such as Freddy Van Wonterghem, Harri Tauriainen, Jani Viinikainen and Jani Salomaa are speculated to form part of the new party, according to some social media sites.

  Click here to see original Facebook post.

Even if the Finland Democrats will need more than luck to challenge the PS, it is a worrying sign how a small-but-vocal group of Finns aim to make far-right ideology and intolerance acceptable in this country.

UPDATE (7:45pm Finnish time): Turun Sanomat published a story earlier today based on a bogus statement sent supposedly by the Finland Democrats. The statement claimed that a number of PS members, including James Hirvisaari, had joined the new party. The updated story in Turun Sanomat, which was cited by Migrant Tales, has a Finland Democrat source that denies any PS members such as Hirvisaari, Van Wonterghem, Tauriainen, Viinikainen and Salomaa joining the Finland Democrats.

Thus the aim of the bogus statement was to fool Turn Sanomat and apparently punish it for publishing an armband story written by Hirvisaari’s former aide, Helena Eronen, back in April.