Did anyone watch Friday’s Pressiklubi with writer Jari Tervo, Left Alliance MP Silvia Modig and Tuomas Enbuske? Tervo shun with his comments against racism while Enbuske was a flop.
The host, Ruben Stiller, asked all three guests if the’ve ever felt fear or uncomfortable around foreigners.
See full program (in Finnish) here.
Enbuske has hosted twice extremist politicians like former MP James Hirvisaari, who was sentenced for ethnic agitation, and advertised on his television show headlines like “Why do Somalis rape?”
The Enbuske & Linnanlahde Crew Show took down the headline and was reprimanded by the Council for Mass Media (JSN) in August. The questionable headline, which labelled all Somalis as “rapists,” was posted by a subcontractor that MTV3 uses to advertise their programs.
This is what Enbuske said when asked by Stiller if the guests ever felt fear or uncomfortable around foreigners:
“I haven’t had racist ideas…at least not for a long time. I don’t really like the term Islamophobia because I’m an Islamophobe. I don’t like Islam, the Christian religion, Scientology…it’s not a coincidence that in Muslim countries homosexuals and women don’t have rights. It’s horrible and they’re much worse than [former Christian Democrat Interior Minister] Päivi Räsänen [said and] the law is substantially worse in those countries [than in Finland].
It’s not their fault and we should not shy away from helping them. It’s not they’re fault if they were born under such governments.”
As the reader can appreciate, Enbuske just painted with a single brush all Muslims, suggesting that countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran are no different from Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey or Bangladesh.
The question of gay rights in the Western world is only a recent phenomenon. All we have to do is go back four or five decades to see how homophobia was rampant in many countries where gay marriage is today a reality.
Sadly nobody reacted on the show to what Enbuske said.
University of California at Riverside Professor Reza Aslan put it well in an interview he recently gave on television that journalists in Finland and elsewhere could take note of.
Said Aslan at the end of the interview:
“Again, these kinds of oversimplifications I think only cause more danger. There is a very real problem. ISIS is a problem. Al Qaeda is a problem. These militant Islamic groups like Hamas, like Hezbollah, like the Taliban have to be dealt with. But it doesn’t actually help us to deal with them when, instead of talking about rational conflicts, rational criticisms of a particular religion, we instead so easily slip into bigotry by simply painting everyone with a single brush, as we have been doing in this conversation, mind you.”