It is a creepy coincidence that during another 22/7 anniversary when a mass murderer in Norway killed in cold blood 77 victims in 2011, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark are ruled by governments that are hostile to people from outside the EU.
In Finland, we have two far-right terrorist investigations suspected of planning attacks against migrants.
In Finland, we have two far-right terrorist investigations suspected of planning attacks against migrants.
Source: Yle
The same language that the Norwegian killer used to justify his actions was used in Finland by Riika Purra, the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* finance minister and deputy prime minister, to denigrate migrants. Like the Norwegian killer, who warned about Muslims taking over Europe, Purra lashes out in her Scripta writings against Muslims, gays, the Romany minority, and Africans.
Apart from spitting on beggars, Purra threatened to use a gun on a commuter train to kill youths of migrant backgrounds.
Two images of PS Finance minister Riikka Purra: Confident and beaten after the revelations of her racist and violent blog posts of 2008 came to public light. Sources: BBC and Iltalehti.
Scripta is an Islamophobic, xenophobic, and homophobic blog written by Jussi Halla-aho, who was convicted in 2012 for ethnic agitation and for breaching the sanctity of religion and is the speaker of parliament.
The capacity to live with difference is…the coming question of the twenty first century.
Stuart Hall (1932-2014)
The Jamaican-born cultural theorist summed up the 2000s as one of the biggest challenges facing France and modern Western societies. The big question that Hall wanted to address was how countries like France, which are becoming ever more culturally diverse, will welcome diversity.
With the rise in Europe of the far-right anti-immigrant white supremacist sentiment, one of the issues on facing difference is the role of gut-feeling ignorance embedded in racism.
The most recent example of how Europe is undermining human rights is a case in point. Miaheal O’Flaherty, the European commissioner for human rights, hit the nail on the head in an Op-Ed piece.
“The deep politicisation of this shift was on full display when some MEPs chanted “Send them back” inside the European parliament during the vote, celebrating the removal of human beings with the fervour of a campaign rally. In the pursuit of ever stricter migration policies, the human rights protections that Europe was founded to uphold are increasingly treated as disposable.”
Perussuomalaiset (PS)* MP Sara Seppänen is no stranger to Migrant Tales. From hateful posts against non-white people to shameful cultural appropriation, Seppänen is an example of the spread of lies about migrants and minorities. Below is one of her latest racist posts.
Also, the country’s religious landscape has changed dramatically. Around 100 years ago in France there were only a few mosques. Today, in the country there are an estimated 2,500-2,600 Muslim prayer rooms and mosques compared with around 1,300 in 2010. We have to be able to debate Europe’s future openly with facts. Security, integration and immigration policy are issues that require an honest and open debate. We don’t want this to happen in Finland! Perussuomalaiset party #perussuomalaiset #maahanmuutto
Source: Facebook
I am certain that many people like me, who have lived with difference all their lives, are the last ones to reject it. Cultural diversity is a good thing, but when used as a political tool to promote racism, it turns into polarization and poison. When I moved to Finland in 1978, the country was basically white. Today, it has changed, and it makes me intensely happy, fuelling me with hope for the future. Politicians who deny difference as a natural development of societies will fail or in the worst of cases, commit crimes against humanity.
In the face of messages of hypocritical condolences to the sudden death of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham , Finland’s President Alexander Stubb considered him a friend of Finland as well as a personal friend.
Graham was not only Trump’s sycophant but an endless supporter to Israel’s aggression and genocide in Gaza.
With “friends” like Graham, it’s easy to understand why Europe and Finland are at a loss concerning their morality and iincapability of addressing the injustices and threats the world faces. It’s called hiding your head in the sand and leaving matters to chance.
Such a stance allows politicians like Stubb to condemn the genocide in Gaza but do nothing effective to address it.
Many will disagree with Stubb concerning Graham.
And there are many who are not sparing kind condolences to Graham, but exposing his evil.
Commentator George Galloway had this to say about him: “Lindsey Graham was a perfectly revolting poor excuse for a human being. I put it down to his repressed sexuality and the very murky alleyways into which took him there. I have no problem with him being gay but he did have a problem with being gay.”
Who was Lindsey Graham? He was a monster. Source; Facebook.
It should not surprise anyone that the latest racism scandal involves a member of the far-right Perussuoalaiset (PS)* party. Her name is Ritva Törmä. People who use racist and bigoted language follow a failiar pattern: make an outrageous claim , then retrract and apologize stating with a poker face that you did not mean to insult anyone.
In the northern city of Oulu, there have been four stabbings since April with the latest one ocurring in Junel. All the victims are non-white Finns.
Törmä, who is a nurse, posted the following after the fourth stabbing:
“The people are fed up with the harassment, violence, and crime committed by these Muslims. Muslims are getting what they deserve. Let them go back to their own country to read the Quran and spread its message of joy. Christianity prevails in Finland,” she wrote.
After the first phase of spewing racist trash, Törmä goes into apology mode.
“I would like to publicly apologize to any parties or individuals whom I may have offended with my words. That was by no means my intention”
Not HER intention?! Isn’t that a cheap excuse?
And then she offers an explantation for her racist outburst: “I am very disappointed by how aggressively, disparagingly, and insultingly I was attacked in the comments—comments that were directed personally at me,” she said. “I’m going to file a police report.”
One of the big questions Törmä brings is how a politician can make racist statements and all she has to do is apologize and “that she did not mean to insult anyone.”
There are many similarities between Hitler’s rise to power and far-right parties like the Perussuomalaiset (PS).* Even if the context is different from the 1920s and 1930s, the same nationalist and racial hatred and fuel arepresent today.
The most recent example of funding policies for the social and healthcare sector by social welfare and health, Wille Rydman, could not highlight this threat more clearly.
Like his party, Rydman is tainted by hubris and racism. Just like Nazis were given legitimacy during Hitler’s reign in power, Rydman has found a similar home in the PS and Prime Minister Petteri Orpo’s government.
Rydman is no stranger to Migrant Tales. In 2022, Helsingin Sanomat published an investigative story where several young women, some of whom were minors, claimed he had harassed them.
Rydman has called asylum seekers who came in 2015 “desert monkeys” and used other racist words for blacks, Muslims, and Jews. He wrote that a certain flower, the lily of the valley, spreads and multiplies like Somalis. Rydman said he’d be ready to forbid the person wearing the hijab instead of the veil.
And let’s not forget the selfie with Meghan Markle, who distanced herself after finding out Rydman’s troubled history with minors and racism. The fact that he wanted the selfie reveals Rydman’s conflated ego.
Rydman has taken in the funding policy crisis and outraged critics, his recent decision to slash social work research in half to 4 million euros,
It’s clear that when you go to bed with a party like the PS that is determined to undermine the rights of migrants and minorities, nothing good can come out of it.
Prime Minister Orpo looks toothless to solve the crisis with Rydman and the PS.
Welcome to modern Finland, where racism and bigotry are normalized.
Migrant Tales context:The column was published in Finland Bridge (Suomen Silta), commemorating my first year in Milan.
Time has gone by flying in Italy’s financial capital Milan, since I arrived from Bogotá, Colombia, in July 2000 after a two-year stint in that troubled South American country.
Moving to Italy was not as easy as I had originally thought. When people tell you that the city is closed for business in August, it means that the urban center of almost 1.4 million people turns into a ghost city during the summer’s slowest month.
Just because you know Spanish does not mean that you’ll earn Italian instantly. Finding a place to live in September felt like an almost impossible endeavor. I slept from hotel to hotel for about three weeks until I was able to rent a humble bedroom in an old apartment for a modest sum of 500 dollars!
From August to September, when it’s very hot and humid in Milan, I naturally didn’t have any time to romanticize about returning to Italy, even if my great-grandparents were from these parts before departing for the shores of South America in the late 1890s.
But I got lucky. I eventually found a very nice place to rent in the heart of the city in an over-century-old, picturesque apartment building. Every month was a big leap forward in my integration process with Italy. The more I learned the language, the closer I felt to my new home.
Mediolanum
Even if I have thought on and off about my Italian great-grandparents, Dante and Ida, I started to think more about them a few weeks ago.
I have tried to picture what Milan was like at the end of the 19th century, when Italy was a kingdom. Would the irt matter to greet me back then be the sound of horse-riven carriages? Would I see well-dressed men and women contrasting like night and day with the mass of illiterate and impoverished Italians walking on Via Torino, a main street in the heart of the city that leads to the breathtaking Gothic cathedral, the Duomo? Or would I feel the strong undercurrent or revolt against the autocratic King Umberto I?
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if, by some odd circumstance, I had the chance to meet and speak to my great-grandparents. If magic and mystery would answer my wish, I’m certain that after our initial surprise, my encounter with my great-grandparents would be overcome by happiness. We’d also be scratching our heads on how we were able to fool the one-dimensional, black-and-white picture, which always allows me to see my deceased relative but keeps them caged in their opaque world, looking out.
Being 141 years old, my patriarchal great-grandfather would speak first. The past is a strange place because secrets are always kept in theftproof vaults. For this reason, there’s not much that I can tell you about my life because Death is a good guardian of such matters. But if you look around carefully, however, I have left a lot of evidence of who I was through the name of your grandfather.
As a child, one of my favorite books that changed my life as Juls Verne’s ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.’ I always want to be free like Captain Nemo. He was a polyglot, a wanderer who had been everywhere but was from nowhere. He was a free man in the true sense of the word, together with his submarine the Nautalis. A man can only be free when he lives in solitude.
I also named my son Nemo because, translated from Latin it means ‘Nobody.’ Maybe one becomes somebody when you acknowledge you’re a nobody.
Tell me about the future, the place you live now.
Dear Dante: there were no red carpets when I arrived in Milan. The only Italian I wore on that clear, very hot summer day was my surname and a few rudimentary sentences in Italian. Strange how time turns matters around. The cultural and linguistic shock I suffered during the first months in Italy must abt womthing similar to what you and Itda must have felt when you moved to South America.
How were your first years in Buenos Aires like, Dante?
When we arrived in Argentina after a brief stay in Brazil with It nd little Nemo, Buenos Aires had seen one of its hottest summers ever. The capital city of Argentina felt like home in many ways. The facade of the newer buildings reminded me of those you could find in a big city in Italy.
Buenos Aires, however, feels as if it were divided into many tiny principalities. If you walk, and it would be a very long walk at them from one end of the city to the other, you could hear people busily conversing in foreign languages like Italian, French, Turkish, Armenian, and, of course, Spanish. The 1914 census showed tat halo of Buenos Aires’ population was foreign-born!
Even if I were in a plot to assassinate King Umberto I and sent to a prison on the island of Pantelleria, I had to escape and leave Italy. My life changed radically when I came to South America. But this does not mean that I cannot continue to believe in a better future, even if I had faily miserable in building a better world as an anarchist.
I always had hoped of seeing my parents gain in Tuscany, but it never happened. My farewells to them were final, like the one that I will give you now…
Afterthoughts
I consider myself fortunate even if I know so little about my great-grandparents in Italy and Finland. But we’re not really supposed to know too much about them because it would interfere with Death’s work, whose job is to guide such people to worlds where most likely past names, antionlities, professions, and other human details have little meaning.
Or is it that whenever a relative dies, that person’s spirit sometimes passes as a phantom baton to the next generation with secret writings of wisdom? Sometimes on that baton, there are maps, even a compass, to assist you in your future travels.
How do you think I made it to Milan?
‘During the Roman Empire, Milan was called Mediolanum.
Since March, hysteria has struck some municipalities in Finland. Even if it is not in the government program, the far-right anti-immigration Peruuomalaiset (PS)* have done their best to fuel anti-Muslim racismas the April 2027 general election nears.
One of the questions that the Finnish media, in particular the tabloids, which are responsible for reinforcing and spreading xenophobia and anti-Muslim racism, leads with a provocative headline: Lahti prohibits the burka at comprehensive schools.
The burka, which covers the face of a woman?
How many burka-users are there in Finland? According to some, there are none.
The term “burrka” was incorrectly used to mean niqab.
Should we be surprised that the initiative came from the council members of the PS?
Writes Ilta-Sanomat: “No widespread practice of covering the face has been observed in schools in Lahti. According to the initiators of the proposal, the issue concerns safety in the school environment.”
One of the characteristics of the ban is not only its mixed message, but the fact that at Finnish comprehensive schools, there is no widespread use of the niqab and buka, which is nonexistent. All of the initiatives to ban such clothing have come from the PS.
Even if it is clear that the PS are campaigning on their racism, the qustion that should concern us is why Swedish People’s Party Education Minister Anders Adlecreutz has not stood up for the Muslim pupils at schools but allowed such bans to spread? Caving into PS pressure, Adlecreutz approved the removal of Salam, a textbook used to teach Islam to comprehensive school pupils.
Sanewashing: the act or practice, especially in the media, of trying to make actions seem sane and normal when they are not.
Tabloids like Iltalehti and Ilta-Sanomat are the worst sanewashers and help to further spread racism and tear teeth off the media.
We haven’t seen this recently but historically tbloids have been the first to strike at migrants and minorities.
A billboard by Ilta-Sanomat that claims “10,000 illegal refugees” will come to Finland this year. As everyone know, there is no such thing as an “illegal” refugee.
There are many stories that the tabloids have brought to public attention to make life more difficult for disadvantaged minorities. One of these reporters is Mika Koskinen, whose demonization of migrants and minorities has found fertile ground thanks to the government of Prime Minister Petteri Orpo.
Below, is an interview where he paints with a single brush all refugees during the hysteria of the Oulu sexual assault cases. He is quick to lambast refugees and turning a blind eye to pedophilia of white Finns.
He was recently responsible for getting Salam, a schoolbook for Muslim children taken off the shelf because it taught the wrong things about Islam.
Timo Haapala’s question during a presidential debate is a bad example of how tabloid journalists suck up to prejudiced expectations. Haapala asked the presidential candidate if they would do away with dual citizenship of Russians.
Only Jutta Urpilainen (Social Democratic Party) and Li Anderson (Left Alliance) were opposed to such a plan.
“When we see others as the enemy, we risk becoming what we hate.”
Desmond Tutu
Desmond Tutu, the anti-apartheid activist who won the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, warns that we risk becoming what we hate if we allow our hatred to get the best of us. If there is one party in Finland whose hatred has converted it to something toxic and pathological, that party is none other than the Perussuomalaiset (PS)*.
The PS and its politicians, like Riikka Purra, act like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. On the one hand, they may make reasonable statements and then go off the wall with their usual xenophobia.
At a recent party convention in Helsinki, Purra said: “I don’t want left-wing and Center Party-led ‘red-brown’ governments at the helm of our country; I don’t want massive tax hikes; and I don’t want the government’s top priority to be recognizing Palestine—as Vice Chair (Nasima) Razmyar just outlined.”
Apart from threatening to take away social welfare for people who have lived here for less than ten years, she made it a point with Interior Minister Mari Rantanen that white Finns will not have to change anything when more foreigners move to the country.
Blow is an example of the PS’ Mr Hyde mask.
Interior Minister Mari Rantanen (left) and Finance Minister Rikka Purra stated that Muslims should be kicked out of Finland. “Finland and Finnishness are based on Christian values,” said Rantanen. Purra considered Islam an “aggressive” culture that is preying on Finns’ tolerance, friendliness, and kindness. “But Finns must not give up their language, culture, values, nothing to such groups.”Facebook
Finland’s central figures in the Islamophobia network:
“PS continues to be one of the most important platforms of Finland’s Islamophobic network. All of the elected 46 MPs (out of a total of 216) of the Finns Party based their campaign on anti-Muslim and xenophobic themes. PS ministers like Riikka Purra (Finance), Mari Rantanen (Interior), Wille Rydman (former Economic Affairs), Leena Meri (Justice), Ville Tavio (Foreign Trade), and Jussi Halla-aho (Speaker of Parliament) have all spread the Great Replacement theory with little to no consequences. Tavio and the government have gone as far as to link development aid to accepting deportees. MEP Sebastian Tynkkynen, who has three ethnic agitation convictions, and MP Kaisa Garedew both want Islam to be banned in Finland. Halla-aho, who was convicted in 2012 of ethnic agitation and of breaching the sanctity of religion, pressed charges against a comedian and deputy Helsinki councilor for calling him “a fascist.”
If you listen to European policiticans like Kaja Kallas and Ursula von der Leyen, fingers are always pointing to Russia but hardly ever to Israel, which is a rogue state like the United States committing war crimes and genocide in region like Gaza.
The complacency of the European Union and its see-no-problem is leading to terrible matters. If the EU were more assertive against Israel, would it had been emboldened to attack Iran?
The European Union is a sad joke when it comes to human rights and upholding international law. It’s only defense is blaming Russia for war crimes while turning a blind eye on Israel and the US.
