It comes as no surprise to anyone who might read this blog that I tend to keep an eye on everything written about Finland + Israel/Jews in the local media here. More often than I would like to admit, the news are not good from my point of view.
The latest outburst is a Finnish politician Pertti Salolainen, whose comments on a morning TV show are the #1 most read headline on JPost right now. Referring to the recent UN vote on PLO's status, Salolainen was criticizing the United States not being able to take a neutral stand to the conflict because of the powerful, influential Jewish community in the USA that controls the country's money and media.
The Simon Wiesenthal center condemns this kind of comments, and has asked the State of Finland officially to declare that this is not an official stand to the matter, especially from a country that joined the International Task Force for Holocaust Education, Research and Remembrance. The comments are regarded as classic antisemitic ideas, whereas some hope the politician was more trying to criticize the US politics and not the Jewish people.
Whatever the case, the issue here is that these were words coming from a public figure with a recognized status in the Finnish political system. It also totally stirs up things again with Finland and its loss of direction in foreign policy. If things continue like this, Finland will be like the kid at the international sandbox that no one wants to play with. Reading the comments of the readers at JPost, seems we are not very popular indeed. And why would we be, this remote, cold & dark racist country with the lowest self-esteem ever?
With his comments, Salolainen joins a very nice league of past political figures I am sure anyone would be proud to be compared to. For example, Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu stopped the killings of Jews in Romania towards the end of the war, as Germany was losing. He thought saving the Jews that still were left, would make a wonderful bargaining chip with the West as, in a similar manner like Salolainen implied, he believed Jews control the world.
My blog was originally supposed to be with a positive tone and bring another, brighter viewpoint to Israel and Judaism alongside the common negative stuff you most of the time see written. But with the news articles being like this, I'm struggling to find the positive...
Read more in English: The JPost article
Read more in Finnish: Ilta-Sanomat
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