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.
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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.