Smearing Jussi Halla-Aho

I reported last month on Jussi Halla-aho, a conservative Finnish author who was recently elected to the Helsinki city council. Tundra Tabloids reports that Helsingin Sanomat published an interview with Jussi Halla-aho last Sunday, and Mr. Halla-aho subsequently fisked treatment of him on his own blog.

KGS summarizes the whole affair for a non-Finnish audience:

Non-Finnish speakers, which pretty much sums up the majority of the TT’s readership, are not privy to the political debate raging within Finnish blogosphere, and within its media concerning immigration, Islam and multiculturalism. The TT tries from time to time to shed some light on the more interesting stories when they come up, and this happens to be one of them.

I have earlier blogged about Jussi Halla-aho, a recently elected city council official in Helsinki, Finland, who has a PhD in philosophy and is a very articulate critic of Finland’s current immigration laws and policies. To be frank, the powers that be — in both spheres of the political and the media who support the very same policies that Halla-aho criticizes — are extremely frustrated by the fact that they do not have any effective counter-argument to the logic offered by this lone city councilman.

What has happened instead, is a drive-by smear job of the politician, because he is the proverbial “thorn in the side” of their (socialist/Marxist) multicultural experimentation project, that is headed by Astrid “Auntie” Thors, Finland’s Minister of Immigration and of Europe.

Here are some excerpts from KGS’ translation of Jussi Halla-aho’s remarks:

Jussi Halla-Aho: Esa Mäkinen is a former journalist for Kansan Uutiset (TT: Finland’s largest Leftist paper) and former EIC of a university paper. […]

Taking into account Mäkinen’s background, today’s article is, as I said, mostly businesslike. The next point is a good example of how to create an image in the mind of a person using subtle techniques:

Helsingin Sanomat journalist Esa Mäkinen: Fewer and fewer online racists are talking about lazy negroes that are taking honest work from the Finns. Immigration critics have learned to speak of the problems of culture, religion and societal clashes.

Jussi Halla-aho: Mäkinen would like to say that concern for problems of culture, religion and societal clashes is a smoke screen for the loathing of lazy, work stealing negroes. Mäkinen does not take into account the possibility that someone, which is not at all interested in lazy, work stealing negroes, may be genuinely concerned about problems of culture, religion and societal clashes. Should this be interpreted a) that these problems do not exist (and therefore can not be really worried about), or b) that they can’t be of genuine concern (although they exist)?

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We have such a surreal situation that the problems of immigration, are yes, widely admitted to, but at the same time denying the possibility that speaking of the problems could be done in good faith.

Esa Mäkinen: His basic allegation is that immigration is a threat to Europe, the sinking of the West. Everyone that comes here according to Halla-aho does not respect freedom and the ideals of equality.

Halla-aho: Really? Does Mäkinen believe that all of those coming to Europe respect freedom and the ideals of equality?

Esa Mäkinen: He paints images of marginalized ghettos, rising crime and unemployment in the West’s economy weighed down by refugees.

Halla-aho: Paints images? Are marginalized ghettos, increased crime and the economy weighed down by refugees a product of the imagination?

Esa Mäkinen: Political populism is the traditional hallmark of the opposition instead of constructive proposals. Concrete proposals Halla-aho has, albeit very little.

Halla-aho: After all, I have a lot of concrete proposals. For an example, Danish-style reform, which includes the cessation of family reunification, repatriation of unjustified asylum-seekers, the end of such categories as “a residence permit for humanitarian reasons,” shutting down of the social benefits for humanitarian immigrants and marriages of convenience. I presented these to Mäkinen, the fact that he did not want to publish them, is not evidence that they weren’t said. He did not want to publish them because he wanted to say that I do not have concrete proposals.

Read the rest at Tundra Tabloids.