Traditional values

Liberia, where homosexuality is already illegal, is currently trying to increase the prison sentences for it. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, last year's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is very much against decriminalizing homosexuality. "We've got certain traditional values in our society that we would like to preserve. We're going to keep to our traditional values," she says.

That's funny. I thought Liberia's traditional values were civil war, rape and cannibalism, as well as its traditional place in the last ten countries as listed by Human Development Index.

A former president of this highly traditional country, Charles Taylor, is currently in Hague on trial for murder, rape, torture, mutilation and cannibalism.

Of the other fine politicians of Liberia, Prince Johnson is known for torture and dismemberment, Roosevelt Johnson is known for sponsoring Joshua Milton Blahyi (also known as General Butt Naked), Joshua Milton Blahyi is known for human sacrifice, eating children's hearts and playing soccer with people's detached heads (yeah, and being butt naked).

I understand that next to all these dignitaries Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who has never committed a violent crime or at least been caught doing so, totally deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.

Seriously though, there is some point in her Nobel Peace Prize. She managed to criminalize one traditional Liberian pastime: raping everything that moves, and a lot of things that don't move fast enough (like babies, for example). Yep, they banned rape in 2006. Before that it was kinda traditional.

Americans got a little taste of traditional Liberian values a couple of years ago, when a 8-year-old Liberian girl was raped by four boys aged 14, 13, 10 and 9 and was thereafter disowned by her parents, Hemie and Wedeh Dio (currently on trial in Arizona for 7 unrelated counts of child abuse).

But it's a good thing the president is standing up for the traditional values. I mean, Liberia is so fucked already, imagine how it would be if homosexuals were allowed to have sex!

Näkemiin, Umayya Abu-Hanna

Umayya Abu-Hanna has left Finland and lives in Amsterdam now, and many people here are saying "good riddance".

I don't really understand why. I am sure she doesn't rape neighbors in the bushes, or beat people up in sausage kiosk lines, or piss on the stairs, or do anything similarly outrageous. As far as the neighbors go, she is probably no more objectionable than an average urban 50-year-old. I might disagree with her politics, but she is a Finnish citizen and entitled to vote here, no matter where she is. And the part about her that makes most of the ill-wishers say "good riddance" - the multiculturalism-related articles that she produces with the help of various Finnish grants - well, if you think you've seen the last of that, just fucking think again. She is writing some multiculturalism-related book on some Finnish foundation's money over there.

Anyway, may she live in a place she best enjoys, I don't think it really makes a difference to anyone else. I kind of fell sorry for the woman. I normally don't like to analyze strangers' motives, and correct me if I am wrong, but I am having trouble believing that she really dislikes Finland as much as she says. Every time I read any of her articles, (I haven't read the books - maybe I should) the words "sour grapes" come to mind.

When bright young girls like herself come to a country that they don't enjoy, they tend to move elsewhere. Considering the free university education and the citizenship easily available at the time to a partner of a Finnish citizen, she could've been a doctor or an engineer in the Netherlands or in UK for more than 20 years now. Instead... well, she chose a profession that is quite amazingly Finland-specific. Very few native-born Finns have professions that are quite as Finland-specific as hers. She is a journalist and a writer who writes for and about Finns, and a Finnish politician.

And she is or was quite integrated into the Finnish society, at least the part of it that writes articles on multiculturalism and runs as Green party candidates. (Those of you who think that being a Green multiculturalist makes one a lesser Finn - I think Finland has had a rather unpleasant discussion on the topic of whether one's political opponents are lesser citizens, some 93 years ago, let's not go into it again, OK?)

It appears she didn't achieve her objectives as a politician and as a cultural diversity coordinator. Maybe she simply wasn't good enough. Maybe she was too different. Maybe she was too much of a foreigner. I don't know. What I do know is that she picked one of the few professions where being an immigrant really does make a difference. Maybe she didn't know it at the time, she was quite young.

Whatever. May she enjoy the canals and the rijsttaffel and whatever. But I think other immigrants should take this as a lesson: if you want to be accepted as a Finn in your career, don't pick a career where part of your job description is being a foreigner.

Citizen of the World

I don't like it much when people ask me where I am from, because any response would of necessity be either longer than the asker expects, or less truthful than the asker expects, or both. "Born in Russia, moved to the US as a teenager, moved to Finland as an adult" doesn't sound like much, but you'd be surprised how many people's mental buffers it overflows.

A very common response to whatever I say is "ah, a citizen of the world..." I don't usually berate them for that, because they just don't know what to say and say whatever comes to mind, but my gut reaction is "no, I am not".

No, I am not a citizen of the world. I am a citizen of the United States and Finland, just like my passports say.

I don't think anyone can be a citizen of the world, really. Obviously I don't mean "citizen" to denote a legal citizenship here, although I doubt that there is any one person who'd managed to collect all the world's citizenships, but the kind of cultural connection that citizens mostly have to their countries.

I am a citizen of two countries, and have various amounts of cultural connections to a few more. If my life had turned out differently, there could have been just one country, or three. Not the world. The reasons are the same as the reasons why a polyamorous person can have a relationship with two partners, or three, but nobody can have a meaningful relationship with a large apartment building. Nobody has the time for a meaningful couple relationship with a hundred people, and an apartment building usually contains at least a few people that you wouldn't want to have a relationship with even if they were the last folks on earth. There are countries like that, too.

Yes, I also know people don't really mean a true connection to all the countries of the world when they speak about citizens of the world. In fact every person whom I have heard call him or herself a citizen of the world meant something quite the opposite of a connection. These are people who move from country to country every few years, speak only English (or English and their native language), have some professional jobs where English is enough, mostly hang out with each other and generally avoid developing any connection with whatever country they happen to live in. A perfectly valid lifestyle, to be sure, but definitely not me.

The common voice of every right-thinking immigrant

An immigrant parliament is being founded in Finland, by Alexis Kouros, Umayya Abu-Hanna and a bunch of other professional multiculturalists. The idea is to have all the immigrants vote for the parliament, and have the parliament give advice to the officials and the lawmakers and propose new laws.

(Wait a minute! Propose new laws? Only the government and the MPs can propose new laws. I hope they mean "lobby for the new laws" or something.)

The new organ does not, thank God for small favors, have any financing yet. They are thinking of living off immigrants' own donations, and maybe asking the state and EU for money.

Judging from the reactions on the English-speaking and Russian-speaking immigrant forums, the immigrant donations will be just enough to buy them some coffee - if they already have a coffee machine.

As an immigrant and a Finnish citizen, my second thought was "why do I need their parliament when I can vote for the real one?". (The first thought was rather unprintable.) The immigrant parliament is supposed to represent non-citizens as well. I think that there is a very good reason why we don't let non-citizens vote on the matters of state. Surprisingly enough most non-citizens with whom I have ever discussed it understand those reasons pretty well.

The new parliament-to-be has a webpage already. There Kouros tries to explain the idea.

According to him the idea of the parliament is to give a common voice to all immigrants. The real parliament doesn't serve this purpose, because only a few immigrants can get elected and they are not necessarily the right-thinking kind of people.

Here is what he says: "Even if we had a few immigrant candidates in the parliament, that would not solve the problem of an absent, unified immigrant voice. MPs are elected by a general vote, which means that most probably the vote of the Finnish community determines who is elected."

Yeah, Mr. Kouros, the majority determines who gets elected. This is, like, the idea of democracy. And the absence of the unified voice of the immigrant community just might mean that the immigrant community does not have a fucking unified voice.

Seriously - what does the immigrant community have in common with each other? I don't even mean that some are Somalis, and some are Russians and some are Americans and some have come to work and some have come as refugees. I mean that I don't even have any voting issues in common even with my own group, the Americans who came here to work. What do we have in common to vote for? A right-wing American will vote for the right, a left-wing for the left, an environmentalist just might vote for the Greens, or maybe not, a person concerned about Islamism might vote for Perussuomalaiset or for Muutos 2011, and an American who has moved to rural Finland just might - gasp - vote for Keskusta.

Besides, the tone of Kouros's interview ("in a worst-case scenario, an anti-immigrant person, with an immigrant background may be elected") suggests that the common voice his is looking for specifically doesn't include the common voice of the immigrants who'd vote for Perussuomalaiset or for Muutos 2011.

Kouros and the other bullshit artists are not very specific as to who can vote. They say that they are trying to be as inclusive as possible, including the actual immigrants, the people at least one of whose parents was an immigrant, and people adopted from abroad. Kouros expresses hope that only the people who see themselves as immigrants will vote; Abu-Hanna says that the immigrant identity is the most important thing.

Yes, great idea: choose your voters based on how they feel about themselves and their place in the Finnish society. Then tell everyone else that they represent all the immigrants.

As an aside: how are they going to find out who has immigrant parents and who doesn't? If they can get that kind of information out of the population register, it's a bigger problem than their whole parliament.

Kouros feels that he has not been accepted as a Finn during the 20 years he's lived in Finland. If I were mean (and I obviously am) I'd say that getting a real job would be a step in the right direction.

When asked about how would the Finnish community react to this parliament, Kouros gets a bit aggressive:

"I am sure that there will be some sectors of society that will not like this project, but those are the people who don’t want immigrants to exist at all. In general, I am certain that it will be well received and appreciated."

Well, thanks for telling me how I feel about my own existence, and all those other folks on the immigrant forums as well. So far as I have seen the immigrants are in fact the sector of society who like this parliament idea the least.

My contribution to the Everyone Draw Muhammed Day

I totally suck at drawing, so I made a photo collage reflecting my view of the guy.

The best contribution I've seen so far was Iowahawk's (via the Fourth Checkraise).

What do you call a country where one can have and enforce Nuremberg laws?

Canada.

Imagine a place declaring that to be considered sufficiently racially pure to live there one has to have N great-grandparents of a certain ethnicity. Imagine them forbidding the marriages between the pure ones and outsiders, and evicting the impure ones, including the spouses and the partners of the racially pure, and their adopted children.

The Kahnawake Mohawk territory in Quebec has decided to do exactly that. The people adopted before the enactment of the law (2003) or married to a member before 1981 can apply to be a non-member resident. The people married into the community after 1981 get kicked out. People adopted after the enactment of the law get kicked out upon turning 18. The law of 2003 also suspends the membership of those who are married to non-Aryans, I mean non-Mohawks, but AFAIK they haven't actually enforced it.

From what I gather from the media, the law (or custom) of kicking out the spouses with insufficient "blood quantum" has existed for a long time, but the enforcement is sporadic, as in they kick out the spouses of their residents every few years and now seems to be the time. They are really liberal, too, giving the people a whole ten days to leave their homes.

"We don't consider ourselves Canadians," says the Grand Chief Mike Delisle. "Maybe this is the first step in terms of informing the community how we're going to move forward in that direction." I wonder what would be the second step - refuse any money coming from the Canadian taxpayers, I am sure.

The really funny thing is that Alvin Delisle, one of the previous chiefs, who used to enforce and support this law when he was a chief, has now become a traitor to the race and is living with a non-Mohawk woman. And guess what - he's had a change of heart now, and he is going to challenge the expulsion of his partner as a Canadian human-rights violation.

"Just because I'm a Mohawk doesn't exclude me from the Charter," he says. "I'm still Canadian. And I think this is an injustice. It's a racial slur."

Right. It's a racial slur and injustice when it is done to you. When you were doing it to others it was totally for the protection of Mohawk blood and Mohawk honor. Oh well, as far as seeing the light goes, I guess better late than never.

His girlfriend wishes to stay, saying that since they are both in their 60s they are not gonna have any children and thus pose a threat to Mohawk survival.

One thing I didn't find in the media: can Canada count the money spent on this community as development aid? Isn't that what you call the money that you send to places with human rights problems?

Change?

Lately I've been following a Russian forum - a forum for the Russians living in Finland. Some of it is nice social fun, some of it elicits morbid curiosity in the manner of a train wreck, and some of it is useful social info.

Anyway, lately they were talking, among other things, about children and schools. More specifically, about how many schools (but not all) automatically put native speakers of the foreign languages into Finnish for foreigners classes, even if they also happen to speak Finnish at a native level, or a sufficient level to attend a native class. In all the cases they mentioned the situation was fixed when the parents protested.

I had suspected as much. A few months ago there was an article featuring a 13-year old Somali boy born in Finland who was in a Finnish for foreigners class in school. At that point I figured that either the kid was dumb as a rock or the school system was dumb as a whole pile of rocks - and the kid didn't seem particularly dumb.

Anyway, some schools - apparently many - stick kids with fluent Finnish into classes for foreigners, and the parents learn about it when the kid complains at home about the school being superboring and consisting mostly of Finnish 101.

My reaction to that was "WTF?". My Finnish friends' reaction to that was "well, how is the school to know?" ("ask the kid" is the obvious answer) and "well, this whole immigration thing is so new to us, we are still figuring out what to do and how to do it right".

This is a disturbing thing in and of itself. When we came to the US we settled in a state with a proud 350-year-old tradition of multiculturalism (ok, in the beginning it was often about shooting Indians and hanging Quakers, but let's not go into that). I went to school in a town where 25-30% of residents were foreign-born. It was one of the most multiethnic schools around, and it was a nice school. As of a couple of years ago, about 27% of residents are still foreign-born and the schools are still good.

Stable 30% of foreign students in Brookline schools is not a problem, but do the people here in Finland realize how fast the change is happening here? 15 years ago there were very few foreigners in schools; now some schools have more than 50% of foreign-language students, in spite of the fact that there is still a rather small percentage of foreigners in Finland.

What can or should be done? Frankly, I don't know and I suspect neither does anyone else. What shouldn't be done, however, can be learned from the long sad history of the Boston school district.

Universal values

The Swiss have voted to ban construction of minarets. The Secretary General of the Organisation of The Islamic Conference, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, said that the ban was "an unfortunate development that would tarnish the image of Switzerland as a country upholding respect for diversity, freedom of religion and human rights and also as a recent example of growing anti-Islamic incitements in Europe by the extremist, anti-immigrant, xenophobic, racist, scare-mongering ultra-right politicians who reign over common sense, wisdom and universal values".

Universal values? Universal fucking values? This is the organisation that, twenty years ago, figured that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights wasn't good enough, or Islamic enough, and produced a competing document, whose first article starts "All human beings form one family whose members are united by submission to God and descent from Adam," ends "the Islamic Shari'ah is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification of any of the articles of this Declaration.", and has such pearls of wisdom as "everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the Shari'ah."

Guys, can you make up your mind as to whether we have any universal values or not?

Shit, this is really embarassing

Did Geert Wilders go nuts from all the stress?

He wants a 1000 euro yearly tax on wearing hijabs,

They used to have a beard tax in Russia, too, but at least they had two excuses: the year was 1705 and the czar who instituted the tax was, well, differently sane. What's Wilder's excuse?

Parents of the year, again (do they have them every month?)

Last year a couple was sentenced to a year and two months' suspended sentence for taking their 16-year-old daughter to the Democratic Republic of Kongo. Now a higher court reduced it to four months' suspended sentence.

Right. This will show them! Although, on the other hand, I should be, and indeed am, glad that those assholes were sentenced at all.

It never ceases to amaze me how some places are considered (sometimes quite rightly) too much of a shithole to return a refugee to, even too much of a shithole to return a convicted criminal to, but as soon as parents are trying to send their child there, it's their dear idyllic homeland where the wise relatives instruct the children in their quaint traditional ways.

Anyway, the fuckers had a 16-year-old girl, who had lived half of her life in Finland, they took her to Kinshasa by deceit (because otherwise she would have run away to the shelter, says the father) and they left her there up the shit creek without a paddle (I mean at some relatives' place without a passport). All of this because they wanted to keep her away from bad company and to teach her the African customs.

Let's see. The Democratic Republic of Congo is just as much of a festering shithole as anything else called a Democratic Republic. (Democratic Republic of Korea, anyone? Democratic Republic of Kampuchea, probably the most genocidal state ever?) The thing it is most known for is the Second Congo War, a partially-civil war that really lasted from 1998 to 2003 and has been sort of low-key since then. (The Parents of The Year sent their sprog there in 2006.) The war in question killed 5.4 million people, which was incidentally about 8.2% of the population.

Right now the war is primarily in the east. It's mostly characterized by raping everything that moves. Gang-raping, too, to the point where it causes rectovaginal fistulae. Which, I suspect, is what affects the brains of people who send their children there.

Kinshasa, where the girl was sent, boasts 112 homicides per 100000 people. Yep, that's 0.112% of population getting killed in a year.

In comparison there has been about 2.3 homicides per 100000 people per year in Helsinki in the 2000s.

What kind of local customs did they send the girl to learn? Homicide, group rape and genocide? I think these have been rather out of fashion in most of Europe for the last 60 years or so.

I know there are warm-hearted people somewhere in Africa, with great negotiation skills and all, but I think that when a country is recovering from a big-time genocide one really should go and learn the negotiation skills somewhere else. For example among the drunk teenagers in any mall in Helsinki. Not that they are the optimal teachers of manners, mind you, but at least everyone usually stays alive. In fact I can't really think of any demographic group in Finland that would even approach the 0.1% per year homicide statistic.

Luckily for everyone involved the girl was well-versed in the Finnish methods of negotiation, and contacted a classmate and a teacher by email. They and the police helped her to get home. I can only hope the police charged the parents for the ticket afterwards.

I am not even imagining that the punishment will deter the next parents of the year, but we can at least hope that the publicity will both warn the children and teach them how to get back when left by their parents in the midst crime and/or civil war.

Next year, a special program for Martians...

The Foreign Ministry says that more than half of the diplomas of the West African students who have applied for residence permits in June and July on order to study in Hamk are in fact fake.

The applicants are mostly from Ghana and Nigeria, and were selected in a test that was given in Ghana after 4 out of 5 Hamk's English-language technical programs turned out to be almost empty.

I am not asking why the students faked the papers. I'd probably do the same. I wanna know why the hell Hamk has 5 English-language programs, 4 of which are almost empty.

Hamk or Hämeen korkeakoulu is a technical college of about 7000 students in the historical province of Häme, which is now three smaller provinces. It has five degree programs in English, out of the total of 25: Automation Engineering, Construction Engineering, International Business, Mechanical Engineering and Production Technology, and Supply Chain Management. They are starting the sixth this fall: Industrial Management.

There are 1301 English-speaking people living in Häme, out of 22192 foreign language speakers, and a total population of 854593. Does this maybe explain why they are having a bit of trouble finding folks willing to study Supply Chain Management in English? Maybe somebody in there should also study demand a little bit? Maybe having 20% of the study programs in English is not such a bright idea in an area where 97% of population are Finnish speakers?

Finland offers free education to foreigners, including non-EU foreigners. It's very nice of them to do, of course, and I have myself benefited from that in my own time. However, from Finland's point of view I can see only two purposes in such generosity: getting some new educated workforce, or spreading and promoting the Finnish culture around the world. I don't see how having foreigners in their own separate English-language programs can benefit either of these.

It's even worse if those programs are meant for the foreign-born young people who are already living in Finland. How do they expect them to integrate and find work if their college environment is all English-speaking and if they don't speak Finnish in the first place? Yes, high-tech fields do accept non-Finnish-speaking employees, but in general this is Finland, and people speak Finnish here. OK, they speak Swedish in some places, but Häme isn't one of them. Not speaking any Finnish is a serious disadvantage, and not speaking any Finnish after having graduated from a Finnish college is even more so.

I don't mind it if some Africans with a genuine interest in Finland come to study something useful in some normal Finnish study program and stay to work, or even go back. I do mind spending the taxpayer money for a number of absolutely useless programs that the school cannot even fill without a hunting trip abroad.

"Community, paging community!"

Lately there has been a problem in Rovaniemi. A group of young Kurdish asylum seekers has been harassing women. More specifically, a 22-year old Iranian-born woman, her sister, who was harassed in front of her small child, some other foreign-born women and some Finnish women. The harassment mostly targeted foreign-born women, has lasted for four months, and consisted of shouting obscenities, following women, spitting on them, and at least one death threat. The harassers were somewhat fewer than a dozen young Kurdish men. The asylum seeker center is not sure who they are.

Excuse me? The Rovaniemi asylum seeker center has 100 places. Is it really hard to find who those people are? How many of the residents exactly are young Kurdish men?

Now Astrid Thors, Finland's immigration minister, is hoping that Finland's Kurdish community will take responsibility for the actions of the young men.

She is aware that there is no Kurdish community in Rovaniemi.

WTF? More specifically, what the fuck does she expect them to do? It would be of course nice if Kurds in general disapproved of the aforementioned behavior, and some surely do, but what does she expect them to do about it, especially if they live elsewhere and don't know the guys in question?

She also says that those are isolated incidents. Let's see. There are 86 Kurdish-speaking people resident in Lapland (not including the asylum applicants). I am not sure what exactly is meant by "young Kurdish men", but 19 of them are men aged 15-29. If there are, say, 10 harassers, and if they are the only young Kurdish men in the asylum seeker center, they constitute about a third of Lapland's young Kurdish men. To me this sure looks like a significant part of the community is in fact trying to teach values to immigrant women, and rather actively - the are just not the values that I, or Astrid Thors, would like to be taught.

On a more general note, every time the official authorities say they are "working with the community" it gives me cold shivers. Yeah, I understand that sometimes the police, for example, needs to know something about some community, and then they ask somebody they know. But every time there is talk about negotiation with a community, or a community taking responsibility, or a community demanding this or that, some kind of "community leaders" tend to arise.

Who are my community leaders? I have no idea, but I know that I have not elected them, have not empowered them to speak for me, and have no means of making them answer to me. If they tell me that they have agreed on something on my behalf, I will answer with a one-finger salute.

Yes, if the authorities wish that Russians/Jews/Americans stop doing some illegal thing (for example, mooning the immigration minister), and I know some Russians/Jews/Americans who are doing it, I'll tell them it's not nice. On the other hand, I would say the same thing to the Finns I know, and I certainly wouldn't approach strangers of any ethnicity or national origin to tell them not to do it.

We have police here in Finland, and other Powers That Be, including the employees of the asylum seeker center. They should be capable of a) explaining to people what is allowed and what is not and b) punishing them if the need arises. Without calling on an ethnic community, especially one that is not even present in the city in question.

If I am doing something the state doesn't like, I want to hear it from the state itself, in whatever form is appropriate.

And if the state really needs the community to explain to its members how to behave, it means that the state is already in pretty serious trouble.

Open your mind...

On 2.3.2009 HS has published an opinion by Jeremy Gould, an associate professor of development studies on the University of Helsinki, about how Finns have to change and open themselves to the difference.

The article is not available online, but the main points are as follows:

1. The immigration to Finland will grow in the near future, and it won't be possible to stop it. (Because of, you know, international agreements. He doesn't say which agreements. Different EU countries have very different immigration and integration policies. Now who is screaming "but with the same results" from the back row? Shame on you!)

2. Finnish people are by their nature deeply suspicious of strangers, but of course there are many different Finns and the whole idea of a monolithic Finnsh culture is an illusion.

3. It is not realistic to imagine that a) immigration would stop, b) we could send all the suspicious immigrants somewhere and c) the immigrants will magically integrate and become like Finns.

Damn, and here I thought we were doing so well with The Great Five-Year Integration Plan...

Of course, none of these statements can be really discussed, because a) total stopping of all immigration is not under discussion in anti-immigration circles, except maybe the tinfoil hat brigade, b) depends on how suspisious they are, we just sent two guys back to Somalia on a suspision that they might commit their 22d (or whatever was the count) violent crime, and c) depends on who is trying to integrate and what counts as integration.

Gould himself seems to have integrated perfectly well: he is a fine upstanding working citizen, writes good Finnish, and makes about as much sense as some Finnish social studies professors I could mention. He doesn't seem to believe that some people and groups are capable of the same, and I must say we do have quite a bit of empirical evidence that supports him.

But anyway, his conclusion: Finns must change, let go of their suspicions, open themselves to the differences and let new and pluralistics Finnishness grow and develop. Or else somebody will punch them in the nose. (OK, he puts it as "the probability of violent conflicts will grow".)

What is the man smoking? If it's not a banned substance, it damn well should be.

Now, I am not much of a strategic thinker, violent-conflict-wise. More along the lines of "hit them over the head with the backpack, kick them in the nuts and scream for the police". But what would Sun Tzu and von Clausewitz say on the subject of expecting a violent conflict and in the meanwhile letting more of the other party in? And would it even be printable?

And is the threat of violent conflict the best way of getting people to let go of their suspicions? I, for one, am generally rather suspicious of people with whom I have or expect to have a violent conflict. Most folks are, I think. Probably because those who weren't didn't live long enough to become anyone's ancestors.

And could anyone tell me what are those differences that I am supposed to open my mind to? Different skin colors? Different food? Different languages spoken in the streets? Different prayers, e.g. "O Allah, destroy the Jews..."? Different views of witchcraft, as in "witches are real and they make people's dicks disappear and let's kill them"? Honor killings? Neighborhoods that the police is afraid to visit? Burning suburbs? Bombs on the subway?

Yeah, I know, sort of concentrating on the negative by the end of the previous passage. That's because I got a feeling that when people are saying "open your mind to the differences or else" they are not meaning that I should open my mind to foreign food, foreign languages, a British coworker, an Estonian food store, a Russian book store or even an American associate professor.

"Eek, the evil-doers are taking our voters!"

Lately I've heard several people observe, mostly with regret, that immigration critics have managed to attract the people whose opinions on immigration are not very different from many multiculturalists' opinions. That's quite true. I haven't actually made scientific polls so maybe I shouldn't make strong statements based on what I see around me, but it certainly seems like most folks, both in pro-multiculturalism and anti-multuculturalism camps, are quite OK with immigrants as long as they don't commit crimes, don't make trouble, and don't overload the welfare system unduly.

Some of them, however, consider themselves multiculturalist, and some consider themselves anti-multiculturalist. And during the last 7 years or so, I've seen lots of people, myself included, move from the multiculturalist camp to the anti-multiculturalist camp, and none move the other way. (Yeah, I am sure at least one exists somewhere, I just haven't seen him/her.) This process is happening all over the Western world, the multiculturalist politicians and worried by the rise of xenophobia, and wondering what's wrong with the people.

Just a thought: if your constituents are starting to vote for your opponents, even though their views on the actual issue haven't changed all that much, maybe it's because you and yours have failed to deliver?

We wanted the world where people of different colors, religions and cultures could come to the West more or less easily and live and work here like everyone else. I am not speaking for all the anti-multiculturalists here, but I know I did, and I've known a lot of other people who did.

What we got instead is a staggering amount of integration problems all over Europe. We've got riots in Paris suburbs, bombs in London and Madrid, Danish cartoon riots, immigrants strongly overrepresented in crime statistics in Finland and in Sweden, a murdered filmmaker and some politicians in need of bodyguards in the Netherlands, death threats towards critics of Islam and towards young women who don't want to marry men of their parents' choosing, areas abandoned by indigenous populations and chefs suing their employers for asking them to handle sausages.

Yeah, we know that the people who vote for multiculturalist politicians are pretty much like us. But "you will know them by their fruits" applies here, just like everywhere else, and the fruits are sadly obvious to quite a lot of voters.

The fact is, some immigrant groups commit more crime - especially violent crime - than others. Even in Finland the people are starting to notice it, even though the immigrant population is quite small and the groups in question are a fairly small percentage of all immigrants. Some groups are disproportionally on public assistance. Some groups are more likely to engage in terrorism than others. People are concerned about all of the above, and all they get from multiculturalist politicians is "everything is gonna be ok", "we are not gonna repeat France's (Germany's, UK's, etc.) mistakes", "we need more immigrants" and "we need to spend more money on integration" (which, when said by people professionally involved with integration, also means "we need to pay me more salary").

There is such a thing as undesirable immigrants: robbers, rapists, terrorists, young people who spend years on welfare without bothering to find a job, etc. The way I see it, there are only two ways of reducing their numbers: either reducing the admissions of the groups to which they belong, or getting rid of individuals or punishing them once they turn out to be undesirable.

I don't see the politicians doing either. You can't stop taking refugees from a particular country, because it would be discrimination. You can't limit the immigration from at-risk countries to admit only the people with higher education, because it would be depriving a needy country from its property...I mean people. You can't kick refugees off welfare after a couple of years because "it's just Not Done" and "they will become criminals anyway after that", and you can's send the criminal ones back home or back to the refugee camp because it's not safe for them, and we are deeply committed to the occupational safety of armed robbers.

There are good and bad people everywhere, of course, and even with the best policies some immigrant may turn out to be a bad person, and shit happens, but there has been just too much of the shit happening. When you have one immigrant killing his daughter for failing to marry whoever he told her to, it's just one murdering asshole who should be treated like any other murdering asshole. When we have whole communities in the UK where taxi drivers and police officers help those families catch those daughters, it's a massive failure of policy. Which, in turn, makes people think that the guilty parties, along with their counterparts in other countries, should be voted out of office.

How did most European countries come to have rules against deporting criminal refugees, even though the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees states very clearly that it is not intended to protect criminals? Whose bright idea was it to write - or sign - international treaties that prohibit returning people to a place where they can be executed, making in effect every criminal condemned or potentially condemned to death entitled to stay in, say, Norway? Whatever one's opinion on death penalty is, the refugee laws were written for the sake persecuted minorities, not for the sake of the founders of terrorist organizations. Whose fault is it that Omar Bakri Muhammed was allowed to preach terrorism in UK on taxpayers' money for 19 years? Whose idea was it to accommodate the aspects of immigrant cultures that go against our own, and who taught them to demand such accommodations?

It is a surprise that people are not very excited about humanitarian immigration when they realize that once you give a person asylum you can't kick them out even if they have been robbing people in the streets, founded terrorist organizations, or preached the destruction of the country that took them in?

Multiculturalists say "we are gonna learn from other countries' mistakes". Yes, we are, and we have, and we have started voting for the anti-multiculturalism candidates. Before the problems get out of hand, and not after.

Kosher, halal, and circumcision

The Muslim immigration to Europe brought with it quite a lot of concern of locals about both Jewish and Muslim traditions that have been around here for a very long time, but are now coming to the public attention again with a new force.

Many Muslims and Jews say that at least some of the people who raise these issues just don't like Muslims, Jews or both. This is undoubtedly so, but it doesn't mean that these are not real issues. It's just that the debate on them sounds rather strange nowadays.

First of all, I find it really strange that people on all sides of the debate often claim that ritual slaughter is barbaric. Or that it is humane. Ritual slaughter, just like regular slaughter, can be as barbaric or as humane as you make it.

At best, the ritual slaughter is cutting the animal's throat very fast with a sharp knife, with the result that the animal loses consciousness immediately. At worst, the animal does not lose consciousness immediately and is hoisted up by its hind legs to bleed out while conscious.

In spite of the popular misconceptions to the contrary kosher and halal slaughter are permitted in Finland, as long as it's done in a proper slaughterhouse and the animal is stunned right after the cut. There is nothing particularly barbaric about this method, unless you disapprove of eating meat in general.

There are some disagreements among both Jews and Muslims as to whether it's kosher/halal to stun the animal after the cut. And yes, some think that it's not, Jews more often than Muslims. Do we have to cater to them? The demand for any kind of kosher meat is so low in Finland that it is AFAIK not slaughtered in Finland anyway, and as for halal - well, stunning is permitted in Saudi Arabia, so wouldn't that be kosher (sorry) enough for the vast majority of Muslims? And IME Jews and Muslims are people like everyone else, in that in the absence of superkosher and superhalal they make do with what they have.

Has anyone besides Abdullah Tammi ever demanded unstunned kosher or halal meat in Finland? (That's not a rhetorical question.)

One point that is rarely raised: people who wish to follow very strict kosher and halal guidelines and don't believe in stunning don't need to become vegetarians or compromise their beliefs, of they are not so inclined. Fish does not require ritual slaughter in Judaism or Islam, and stunning birds after cutting their necks is not required by law in Finland.

In short, I think that Finland already has the right laws, as in Eläinsuojeluasetus 7.6.1996/396.

As to circumcision, the situation is complicated. There is no proper law, and treating it as battery is difficult since authorities have in effect permitted it ever since Jews and Muslims lived here, which is a fairly long time. It has become an issue only after the Muslim immigration of the 90s, which made it more common, raised demand for having it taxpayer-funded, and brought the issue of the female circumcision. A few thoughts on banning circumcision:

1. The people who discuss circumcision as is it were a medieval custom long forgotten in Europe and only brought here by recent Muslim immigration are of course very wrong. Circumcision has been around and permitted for a long, long time. I think that a child's right to bodily integrity is more important than freedom of religion, and that banning non-medical circumcision would be a great step forward, but that's exactly what it would be: a huge step forward. It should be treated as such. As in "we realize that is has been permitted pretty much all over the Western world all the time, but times change and we think it's time to ban it, and this is why...".

2. The people who think that it should be funded by taxpayers are making a step backward. It used to be funded by NHS in UK; when it stopped being so, the rates fell dramatically.

3. The problem of people not obeying the law and doing it anyway is real, and something needs to be done about it. OTOH, if it were illegal it would be a lot less common. My rather obvious suggestion would be to make it mildly punishable if done illegally but in proper medical conditions, and make the punishment a lot more severe for people who do it in a way that endangers the child's health. OTOH, the punishments for grievous bodily harm are ridiculously small in Finland in any case.

Anyway: I see how it is a matter of principle for many people, but IMO even laws that would make at least some people give up on this custom would be good.

Refugees and diversity

A number of blogs have been talking about immigration and refugees lately, especially on Uusi Suomi's list of election blogs.

In such discussions feelings run high, both sides sometimes use the kind of arguments that makes one feel ashamed for them, and most people seem to be a bit unclear on the concept of refugee.

Yesterday, however, I ran into one that made me inhale my tea. I don't remember which one of those conversation threads it was, but it went along the line of "how does taking refugees help the countries that they are coming from?"

I did a double-take. Say what? Why on Earth would you want to help them? Unless, of course, you are either the kind of person who defines "help" as "carpet bombing", or the kind of person who thinks that all the violent criminals just need help.

The current concept of refugee was created by 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and defines a refugee as a person who "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him/herself of the protection of that country". Why a country generating such people should get any help, as opposed to a very hard kick in the nuts, is beyond my understanding.

I know that every time Holocaust or Nazis are mentioned in any political discourse, God (or is it Godwin) kills a kitten somewhere. Considering the date of the convention, however, a prototypical refugee they were thinking of was most probably a Jew trying to escape from Nazi Germany. Can you really imagine Americans, Russians, Swiss, Swedes, or any kind of furry little creatures from Alpha Centauri say "how does helping Jewish refugees help Germany?" No? Didn't think so.

Anyway, the whole idea was to take some minority groups or persons from where they are being persecuted by the majority or the powers that be, and move them to the places where they would fit in better.

Tens of millions of refugees were successfully resettled during the last century. Usually the successful resettlement involved people moving from a place where people were less like themselves to a place where people were more like themselves, either in ethnicity, religion, way of life or political opinions, or at least to a place where the locals were more accustomed to people like themselves. Jews and political dissidents from German-occupied Europe fled to pretty much anywhere that would take them, Germans who disagreed with Communism fled from East Germany to West Germany, Poles fled from the Ukraine to Poland, Finns fled from the Carelian Isthmus to the rest of Finland, Hindus and Sikhs fled from Pakistan to India and Muslims fled from India to Pakistan, Hindus fled from Bangladesh to India, Jews fled from Muslim and Communist countries to Israel and the US, people who disagreed with Communists fled from Communist counties to the West, people who disagreed with radical Shia Islam fled from Iran to the West, and pretty much everyone who could fled from the Khmer Rouge Cambodia to anywhere.

The whole idea of refugee resettlement is to reduce diversity in the world. If it's increasing the diversity, you are doing something wrong. And when I say "diversity", I don't mean the skin color, but the way of life.

This is not to say that countries should never take refugees that are different from the locals - the Bahai, for example, don't have a Bahai country to go to, and have successfully integrated, well, everywhere where they are not considered to be Islamic apostates.

In 1967 people fleeing wars were added to the definition of a refugee. This did have a point: after all bombs don't care whether you are a member of a majority or a minority and whether you have a good government or a bad one. But it also did create quite a lot of refugees, and, more problematically, quite a lot of refugees who are not looking forward to settling down in a country that's more appropriate for them, but want to stay somewhere until the war ends, without any wish to properly integrate in the new country. Some of the countries who accept them also sort of expect them to go home after the war, and support them for years without making any integration demands on them. Of course many of those wars turn out to be forever, and people who have lived for years on welfare usually have no intention to go back or to find a job. To complicate matters further, sometimes those wars really do end fast and the war refugees really do go home.

The problem, of course, is that while with the persecuted minorities you usually do know that they need a permanent new home, the war might last 2 months or 20 years. I don't think there is an easy solution to that.

I do however think that refugees should only be taken to places where they will more or less fit in. By that I mean people who prefer to live under the Western system to the West, people who prefer living under Sharia to the countries that have Sharia, people who prefer to live under Communism to Cuba and North Korea, etc.

Unfortunately there are always more refugees than resettlement places for them, and somebody always has to be left behind. For example, the people who would like to live under Sharia and simultaneously receive European-style social benefits can stay where they are and wait for such a country to appear. With Britain permitting Sharia courts nowadays they might even have a chance.

Separate but equal

Helsinki has its own segregated swimming now, for Muslim women only. It's in Jakomäki swimming pool, swimming lessons for Muslim girls only Saturday 9-10:45, free swimming for Muslim women 11-14:30. Infidels need not apply.

Sometime last fall they had swimming hours for immigrant women. Now city of Helsinki Sports Department has it listed as Muslim-women hours.

Different Muslim cultures has different interpretation of Islamic modesty rules, but I'd appreciate pointers at what particular interpretation says that Muslim men can swim with infidels of both sexes, whereas Muslim women can swim in the company of each other, but not in the company of infidel women.

This, however, is not the point. There might be Muslim women who truly and deeply feel that they need their separate swimming time. Damn, I used to like having separate swimming time for myself and my fellow computer science students. We rented the pool for a evening from the student union now and then. The city sports facilities are also available for rent by private groups. This, however, is not Muslim Women's Swimming Club ry renting the place and inviting their members, or some Aisha and Fatima renting it and inviting their friends. This is the city of Helsinki practicing discrimination on the basis of religion.

The issue of sex-separated swimming facilities is pretty similar in my opinion, but for all it's worth, Yrjönkatu pool has separate hours for both men and women, and Muslim women can use it just like anyone else. The fact that some of them seem to resent sharing the pool with infidel women makes one wonder whether the issue is really Islam as such (I've been to a shower with a bunch of religious-looking Bedouin women in Negev, they didn't run away or go blind), or possibly the fact the the parents of some particular African cultures don't want to have to explain to their daughters why everybody else's pussy is different from their own. After all, if vulva and clitoris are unclean, no wonder they don't want to swim in a pool full of them.

A few people in the HS forum defended the policy on the basis of "it isn't hurting anyone" (except for everyone else who might like to use the place on Saturday?) and that it would be wrong to begrudge the Muslim women their separate swimming time, and what's the big deal as long as everyone gets to swim at some point.

Now where have I heard that before? Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), a US Supreme Court decision upholding the doctrine of "separate but equal". I suppose a lot of people would say that a decision the US Supreme Court has made in 1896 should not be relevant in Finland in 2008. I agree. It hasn't even been relevant in the US since 1954.

Muslims have lived in Finland for more than a 100 years now, and somehow managed to survive without their own pool hours until now. A lot of them managed to swim with the opposite sex, or at least with the infidels of the same sex. The native-born Finnish Muslims seem to have no trouble whatsoever. The immigrants, or the native-born Finns who convert into the more restrictive forms of Islam, should understand that this society is not designed for them, and it's up to them to adapt to it.

Yes, having to always reserve the pool privately is quite inconvenient for the kind of Muslims who can't swim in the same pool with infidels. Right. It's supposed to be inconvenient for them. In case somebody did not get the memo, this society has not been designed for the convenience of the fundamentalist Muslims, but of mostly-secular mostly-Lutherans. Live with it.

And no, I don't even think that accommodating requests of immigrant groups is always a bad thing. I just don't think that "we don't want our women to swim with unclean infidels" is a request worthy of being accommodated.

"We can't expect them to learn Finnish, now can we?"

The minister of Labor and the fearless leader of the Greens, Tarja Cronberg, took part in a press conference on security policy in Helsinki on Tuesday.

Quite predictably she thinks that the war in Georgia has no bearing on Finland's security situation, there are no reasons to join NATO or to raise defense spending, etc.

She also demanded that the status on the Russian minority should be secured in the Baltic countries and in Finland, and suggested that Yle should have more Russian-language programming for this purpose.

"Regardless of what happens in Russia and what Russia does, Finland should take care of its growing Russian minority," she said.

However, she said, securing the status of the Russian-speaking minority is not about the security policy. She just happened to mention it during the press conference on security policy for no reason at all.

Why, I am touched. Cronberg wishes to take care of my poor little Russian-speaking self. Medvedev and Putin also just want to protect and take care of my poor little Russian-speaking self, in their own way.

When I was very young and roamed the street of St. Petersburg with less regard for personal safety than is strictly advisable, I found one and only one 100% indicator of an impending rape attempt: if a strange man suddenly volunteered to protect me from bad guys, it always meant that he was about to attack me physically, and the unsolicited words "I'll walk you home, there are a lot of hooligans around, it's not safe on your own" coming from a strange man always made me look for whatever could be used as a weapon.

By a strange coincidence, I feel the same way about politicians.

Seriously, though: what does Cronberg think to achieve by increasing the amount of Russian programming on Yle? Apart from licking Putin's ass, that is.

Russian-speaking people in Finland either speak Finnish, in which case they can watch and listen to the Finnish programming, or should be learning Finnish, in which case they'd do better to learn Finnish than to listen to the Russian programming. Does anyone, even the fearless leader of the Greens, really think that integration of the new immigrants is helped by providing them with entertainment in their native language as opposed to, say, providing them with more Finnish-language classes?

In the time since my arrival to the US we went from one Russian-language newspaper to five TV channels. From all I've seen it really did not improve integration, although at least part of the cause-and-effect went the other way (the less-integrable people came later and created demand for the Russian channels).

Russian-speaking people in Finland already have Russian bookstores, lots of Russian books in the public libraries, and three Russian-language channels that can be ordered on cable TV. What many of them don't have is a good working knowledge of Finnish. A new Russian channel would hardly serve that purpose.

Bikinis at the swimming pool, what is the world coming to?

A woman was lying in the sun near a swimming pool in Tapuli park in Helsinki in her bikinis while her children were playing in the pool, when some park employee showed up and told her to put her clothes on.

The chief of the play parks, Leena Timonen, said that bikinis are not forbidden as such, but every employee gets to decide what is appropriate.

Oh, dear... A swimsuit is inappropriate in a park near a pool.

For those who don't know: it's not unusual in Helsinki to lie in a park in a swimsuit. I am sure there are people who disapprove of that, but then there are people who'd disapprove of anything. This culture is in general quite relaxed about nudity, let alone swimsuits. Sauna culture and so on.

Moreover, since we are talking not just about a person lying in the sun by the pool, but a person whose own 5- and 7-year-old kids happen to be in the same pool, I can't really think of any other appropriate clothes, since the parent in such a situation should be ready to go into the pool and get the kids out of there should the need arise.

Timonen says: "We have a lot of people of immigrant origin, who might be offended by revealing clothing. But these rules are not made just for them."

Excuse me? "Immigrant origin"? "Might be offended"? Might be just an unfortunate choice of words, but a) if we talking about people of immigrant origin (which for me implies that they are either children of immigrants or at least have been here long enough to become Finnish citizens), as opposed to people who just got off the plane last week, shouldn't they have already learned what is considered appropriate in Finland? And b), have any of them actually expressed offense, or are we banning things on the basis of what we think they might be offended by?

Moreover, what if they are offended? Even leaving aside the Religion of Permanently Offended, and assuming that all the offended ones are native-born ethnic Finnish Lutherans: since most of the population doesn't seem to mind swimsuits, why should we always go with the ones that demand more clothes? I can understand to some extent going with the demands of people who demand less noise and less smell, since those are rather penetrating and hard to turn away from, but why should we automatically consider it a right not to see anything one might not like?

More to the point, would those park employees like to ban clothing that they think might offend me (take a wild guess what)? No? Didn't think so.

For the record: I, as a representative of the immigrant (and not "of immigrant origin") community, hereby declare that bikini or even full nudity in the park do not offend me. I could list here what articles of clothing do offend me, but I am afraid that state prosecutor Illman is lurking around the corner. In any case I don't want those banned, either. Because - novel as this idea might be - I think that their right to wear whatever they like in a public place is more important than avoiding offending me.

The first rule: don't ask

This is just so wrong:

A salon owner, Sarah Desrosiers, was looking for a junior stylist. She received dozens of applications, including one from Bushra Noah, a Muslim woman who wears a hijab. She did not want to hire a woman who wouldn't show her own hair at work, because she believes that a stylist's hair needs to be shown to "provide clients with a showcase of different looks", and she asked Bushra whether she would be willing to take her hijab off while at work. Bushra said no, and didn't get the job. Bushra sued.

In the end Sarah did not hire anyone for the position.

Bushra sued for £15,000, later increased to £34,000 to compensate for all the hate mail she received, although I am pretty sure Sarah didn't write it all. The court ruled that Bushra's claim of direct discrimination failed, but her claim for indirect discrimination had succeeded, and ordered Sarah to pay £4,000 for "injury to feelings".

Mind you, I think Bushra definitely has a point. Except in very specific cases (models, for example), I am very wary of businesses using employees as decoration, to the point where I at least might actively boycott a business for that. The idea of stylists' own hair serving as a necessary inspiration for a customer seems quite silly to me, and opens a rather nasty can of worms, such as the question of whether a bald person can and should be legitimately discriminated against while applying for hairdressing positions, or fired from a hairdressing job. IMO people do not specifically seek out hairdressers wearing hairstyles they themselves would like, and people seem to visit hairdressers of the opposite sex without complaining much about the lack of inspiration provided by their hairstyles.

Of course it might also be that after 15 years in the field Sarah knows something about it that I don't. Nevertheless, if there were a real discrimination case - if Bushra's resume were the best, and Sarah hired a less-qualified person because of the hijab issue, I would be all for Bushra.

The disturbing thing about the case is not that a hijab-wearing woman wants to work as a hairdresser, it's that people get convicted for discrimination on such flimsy evidence, and that Sarah, basically, got convicted only for trying to negotiate the issue.

Bushra was not the best applicant, the hijab was not her only problem, and nobody actually got hired for the position. She only knew that hijab was an issue at all because Sarah asked.

I don't know enough about British law to figure out whether the court or the lawmakers were to blame, but if you are a society trying to protect a minority group from discrimination, punishing prospective employers for trying negotiate potential minority-related issues with them is a somewhat counterproductive idea.

What Sarah and other salon owners learned from this experience is that either you don't invite Muslims to the interviews at all, which might be a fairly easy thing to do if you get dozens of resumes for one position, or you do invite them, but weed out everyone who remotely looks like they might want to wear a hijab, without ever actually asking about it. Yep, a great step for equality. Backwards.

Bushra "has given up her ambitions to become a hairdresser and is studying travel and tourism at Hammersmith and West London College while working part-time in a shop". No shit, after becoming Britain's hairdressing industry's most famous least desirable job applicant whose hurt feelings cost £4000. Muslims might be a protected group, but people who sue everything in sight sure aren't.

I wonder how much of the hate mail that Bushra got was from Muslims working or aspiring to work in the hairdressing industry in UK. "Way to go, sister! Now we can't get any interviews at all!"