It was yesterday when I tweeted with a person who expressed extremist views about immigration as Perussuomalaiset (PS) MP Teuvo Hakkarainen does on a Facebook posting stating that as a result of the carnage we saw in Nice, France, we should close our borders and prohibit people from the Middle East and Africa from entering Finland.
UPTDATE: According to Yasser Louati, a French human rights activist, claims that the attack that took place in Nice is a failure of the French government and that the state of emergency imposed by it hasn’t helped to make people in France more secure.
Louati states in an interview [1]: “You have a person from Nice killing people from nice [so] why would bombing Syria and Iraq give us more security?”
Certainly PS MP Hakkarainen sees an opportunistic chance to score brownie points with the blood of victims only a few days after PS MP Leena Meri made a bigoted statement together with two homophobic ones by MPs Mika Hartikainen and Laura Huhtasaari. The statements made by the three MPs were played down by PS chairman Timo Soini as something “funny” and “eccentric.”
In light of these politicians and Hakkarainen’s suggestion that Muslims and black Africans should be kept out of Finland, there’s no other conclusion that is reinforced: The PS is a racist and extremist party. They are not just any extremist and racist party but one that shares power in government together with the Center Party and National Coalition Party (NCP).
Who’s to blame for xenophobia? Not migrants.
Anonymous multiculturally challenged people making a point.
As long as you have a party like the PS and a government that permits racist statements with silence, xenophobia will continue to grow and devastate Finland.
Like the United Kingdom with Brexit, we too are playing with fire when our wishful thinking encourages us to search for empty nationalism in dark places like when we stick our heads in the sand.
The reason why the United Kingdom is in a colossal mess today and became, thanks to the referendum a divided and impoverished nation, is because of the lame response of those who should know better.
PS MP Hakkarainen’s post on Facebook.
The PS has not only revealed our denial of social ills like racism, but it mocks simultaneously at our most noble Nordic values as a nation. It tells us that we are the victims of hypocrisy because those values like social equality don’t apply to us.
If the government lasts until the parliamentary elections of 2019, it’s clear that by then Prime Minister Juha Sipilä will hand over a divided country inflicted by social ills that will search for itself with its head in the sand.
* The Finnish name for the Finns Party is the Perussuomalaiset (PS). The English names of the party adopted by the PS, like True Finns or Finns Party, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and xenophobia. We, therefore, prefer to use the Finnish name of the party on our postings. The direct translation of “Perussuomalaiset” is “basic” or “fundamental Finn.”
[1] Thank you Michael McEachrane for the heads-up.
