Unlike its neighbor Sweden, Finland is not welcoming to Muslim migrant wannabes

In fact, in recent Finnish national Parliamentary elections in April, the Finns Party, an anti-Muslim immigrant, Eurosceptic party previously known as the ‘True Finns,’ surged in the final weeks and took 17.5% of the vote, just a whisker behind the winning Social Democrats at 17.7%. The Social Democrats will probably now form a centre-left government, but as in so much of Europe, the far right’s strength will make things complicated.

Finland’s strong warning to EU: Right wing populist party makes HUGE GAINS in SHOCK election result

Economist The Finns Party’s result was almost exactly the same as in 2015, but in 2017 the Finns’ frustrated hard-liners quit the government while the party’s more moderate MPs (including the then-leader) split off into a new faction called Blue Reform.

In April’s election, voters backed the party’s old stalwarts, while Blue Reform failed to win any seats. The Finns Party is now as strong as ever, and more extreme. Its new leader once wrote blog posts affirming racial differences in intelligence and hoping that left-wing female politicians would be raped by migrants. The party’s campaign video is a short horror film, in which the people’s fury congeals into a “pissed-off monster” who attacks the country’s masked and traitorous leaders.

POPULAR SUPPORT for the Finns Party has spiked in the wake of the parliamentary elections held in Finland on 14 April. The Finns Party has emerged as the most supported party in the country after the elections also according to a poll by Helsingin Sanomat.

Alma Media on Thursday reported that almost a fifth (19.2%) of respondents to its latest poll expressed their support for the opposition-bound, right-wing populist party, signalling a rise of 1.7 percentage points from the elections and 5.8 percentage points from its final poll before the elections.

Support for the Social Democratic Party has contrastively fallen from 17.7 to 16.4 per cent since the elections. The Centre, similarly, has seen its popularity dwindle in the first month after the elections and is polling at 13.4 per cent.

Perhaps the rising support for the Finns Party is because of Muslim migrant attitudes in Finland:

Medium The rise of the far-right Sweden Democrats, who are hostile to Muslim migrants, is mirrored in Finland, too, which has an authentically populist political party with a nasty message for immigrants of non-European, non-Christian heritage.

The Finns’ Party populists maintain a determined focus on Muslims. This might seem surprising considering Finland has a rather small number of Muslims, perhaps 70,000, the majority of whom are adolescents.

Not so. The Finns Party, which is part of the governing coalition, has a serious anti-Muslim, anti-migrant agenda, one that became more strident as the election drew closer. On September 11, 2018, a Finns Party politician was convicted of public incitement to violence against the Finnish Red Cross, which runs reception centres for asylum seekers.

A Finns Party campaign poster from April 2019 Finns Party Leader Jussi Halla-aho was fined by Finland’s Supreme Court six years ago for comments linking Islam to paedophilia and Somalis to theft. One of the party’s deputy leaders, Laura Huhtasaari, who ran for Finnish president this year, channelled US President Donald Trump with a “Finland First” message and rants about “Muslim backwardness.”

Earlier this year, Huhtasaari was fined for a Facebook post calling for a Muslim-free Finland, which a court said amounted to discrimination against an ethnic group.

The Finnish populists are unapologetic about wanting a Finland with no immigration from outside Europe, except for individuals who bring clear economic benefits. In any case, Finland’s Muslim community, which includes Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Iranians, Somalis, Bosnians and Kosovo Albanians, lives in a markedly Islamophobic culture.

The International Social Survey Programme of 2008 said that approximately one-half of the Finnish population had a negative attitude towards Islam and Muslims, more than any other country in the 42-country study.

That explains some of the context for the Finns Party’s rhetoric, which chimes with that of the Sweden Democrats next door. The Sweden Democrats are desirous of locking migrants in to overt displays of “Swedishness” – in other words wanting migrants to “become Swedish… to assimilate.”

A scholar, Teemu Pauha of Helsinki University, investigated young Finnish Muslims’ sense of belonging to the country in which they were born and made a surprising discovery. Many considered themselves Finns when abroad and foreigners in Finland,” Pauha said. “Finnish identity is not automatic” but something to be consciously built by Muslims.

Right-wing demonstrators protest against immigration at the Helsinki Railway Square in March 2017 | Antti Aimo-Koivisto/AFP via Getty Images A goal that seems impossible considering that “Finnishness is associated with things that are haram, especially smoking and drinking, and, as a result, becoming more like the Finns is portrayed as a cause of losing one’s Muslimness,” says Pauha.

BBC Jussi Halla-aho, a Finns Party MEP, said some members of society were not integrating well enough, adding there was a risk “the society begins to play by the rules of the Muslim minority rather than expecting the minority to play by the rules of the society”.

In July, Olli Immonen, one of the party’s MPs, wrote of what he called “this nightmare called multiculturalism” on his Facebook page, adding: “We will fight until the end for our homeland and one true Finnish nation.”

The Pew Research Center, a non-partisan fact tank based in Washington DC, the United States, published a 168-page report on the results of its survey on public views and attitudes in 15 countries across Western Europe on Tuesday, 29 May.

Finns, the survey found, have one of the most harshest attitudes towards Islam and Muslims. Finland and Italy are the only two countries where over a half of respondents – 62 per cent in the former and 53 per cent in the latter – view that there is a fundamental contradiction between Islam and the national culture and values.

Almost two-thirds (62%) of Finns revealed they believe Islam is fundamentally incompatible with the culture and values in Finland. Over a quarter (28%), meanwhile, indicated that they would not accept a Muslim as a family member and 14 per cent that they would not accept a Muslim as a neighbour.

Helsinki Times Donald Trump-style populism has spread to Finland, where the world’s happiest people are set to show their displeasure at immigration and the mainstream’s obsession with climate change in Sunday’s general election.

The Finns Party, a nationalist movement that has adopted slogans which echo the U.S. president’s “Make America Great Again.”

International news outlets began to take notice of the recent surge in support for the far-right Finns Party, which has seen them go from sixth to second place in the polls, closely trailing the Social Democrats by just a few percentage points. One American broadsheet described the development as evidence that ‘Trumpism’ has finally gained a foothold in Finland.

V-Dare In December 2018, opinion polls (via Wikipedia) put the Finns Party on just 8% of the vote, in fifth place behind even the quasi-Communist Left Alliance . People were forgetting about immigration and its consequences, as other issues dominated the news.

But then something happened. An independent nationalist councillor and YouTube personality in Oulu in northern Finland, Junes Lokka, revealed that there was an Islamic gang in Oulu grooming and raping under-age Finnish girls, that one of the victims had killed herself, and that the Finnish authorities and lugenpresse were covering it all up. (See my Katie Hopkins And Local Patriots Expose Muslim Grooming Gangs In Finland). This became a huge national scandal, more and more cases were unearthed and much of the country were in stunned disbelief that “Rotherham” had arrived in “quiet” Finland.

Voice of Europe A recent study has found that 93 per cent of sex crimes in Finland committed by migrants are committed by migrants from Islamic countries.

An investigation by the country’s police academy revealed that 1052 asylum seekers were suspected of crimes in 2016, with two thirds of them being Iraqis. The figures also show that out of 116 suspects of sexual offenses, 108 came from Islamic countries like Iraq (83), Afghanistan (14) and Morocco (6).

32 per cent of the crimes were rapes, while 16 per cent were gang rapes and 16 per cent were sexual harassment. Nearly half of the crimes were committed against Finnish girls under the age of 18.

Anyhow, Islam is a challenge tailor made, as it were, for being faced down with gospel power. But it can’t be a wimpy echo of gospel power. Maybe the Crusades came the closest to the ideal in recent memory, but they had the baggage of institutional religion to deal with once the victories had been achieved. Imagine sending the Green Berets to win a victory and then handing control over to Jimmy Carter. Something is lost in that picture. Christianity has to carry on as a whole if it is to carry the most effective blessings of God in this world.

... and we don’t have a church-government structure to launch something like the Crusades in its power anyhow. If we want to see such gospel powered boldness, we must look to the private realm of missionaries today.

Frankly, I believe a whole lot could be done in that wise. I believe in it. We sometimes enclose the Lion of Judah in a cage that he never had to be forced to live in.

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