Anyone who has followed Perussuomalaiset (PS)* chairperson Jussi Halla-aho’s political career will easily conclude that it was done on the fuel of racism and bigotry, and generous chunks of it.
Racism had become such a normal matter for the PS that on the same day when Halla-aho claimed on Marja Sannikka’s talk show that he “resents people being treated differently” due to their skin color, the party’s vice president lashes out against people of color.
States Purra (who calls, like Halla-aho on Sannikka’s show, asylum seekers “harmful” migration) stated on the same day of Halla-aho’s interview: “Wouldn’t it be high time to think that the mixing of people, religions, and cultures in the West is such a good matter? The development of mass migration and violent cultures is A PROBLEM. Beheading a person is only one example.”
Sannikka asks Halla-aho in the interview if he resents racism.
His response: “Yes, I resent any thinking that treats people differently because of their skin color. I do resent this.”
One of the biggest challenges of Finnish journalism is follow-up. You throw a question to the person you are interviewing, and if he tries to wiggle his or her way out of it or speak in code to his followers, you hit the person with another question until you get the answer.
Halla-aho’s response if he resented racism was a half-ass job.
Diagree? Check out one of his tweets:
Halla-aho’s answer could mean anything. It could be seen as a statement against affirmative action, equality but not equity.
For years, Halla-aho’s solutions to Finland’s “migrant problem,” which is small (about 10% of all migrants in Finland were asylum seekers), is to attack people of color and reap benefits from racist voters.
The Muslim community in Finland is especially vulnerable because they are disenfranchised. They have little political, social, and economic power to challenge the onslaught of Halla-aho and his henchmen and women.
In Halla-aho’s world, and as it became crystal clear (again) in Sannikka’s talk show, seeking asylum is a crime. The state must incarcerate undocumented migrants as a warning to others.
These types of policies are copy-and-paste jobs from the Nordic region’s most Islamophobic country, Denmark. Its brainchild is the Danish People’s Party, which suffered a thrashing in the last election.
We don’t believe, but acknowledge, that Halla-aho is a fake exonerating Malcolm X’s famous quote: “Racism is like a Cadillac, they make a new model every year.”