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A City of Helsinki deputy councillor
has come under fire after he publicly stated in a Facebook post that African
men who come to Finland as refugees should not be allowed to have more than
three children, and should be sterilized instead.
According
to Olli Sademies, 67, the problem with African immigrants is that they have too
many children. So forced sterilization is the way to tackle it, he suggested.
"Migrants
put to the test our social security," Sademies wrote. "Africa's
social security is based on a large number of children, which enables some
children to live longer and take care of their parents."
RT.com report continues:
In
order "to avoid total collapse" of a similar system in Finland,
African refugees should be restricted, Sademies said. "Three children
maximum. It would require the forced sterilization of African men, which will
effectively discourage them from trundling into our country," he wrapped
up.
The
Finns Party that Sademies is a member of has rushed to distance itself from the
controversial statement.
Party
Secretary Riikka Sjunga-Poutsalo said on Twitter that Sademies’s comments are
only his own views, not those of the party.
Seppo
Kanerva, who leads the group of Finns Party councillors on the Helsinki
council, slammed Sademies' remarks.
"What
he’s written is completely mad," Kanerva told Yle’s Swedish language news
service, according to Yle in English. "It’s fascism. Hitler thought in the
same way. I don’t understand why he wrote that."
The
politician told Helsingin Sanomat daily he stands behind his words.
"This
is a way to tackle the problem, and I wait for better suggestions. Tell us what
would be better!" he told the HS.
In
2012, a Finns Party parliamentary assistant Helena Eronen raised eyebrows when
she suggested on her blog on the Uusi Suomi website to make it compulsory for
immigrants to wear armbands.
"If
every foreigner was obliged to wear a mark on their sleeve stating their
country of origin, then the police could see at a glance that 'aha, there’s a
Muslim from Somalia', or 'aha, that’s a beggar from Romania,'" Eronen
wrote, as cited by the Helsinki Times.
Earlier
this month, over 300,000 people signed an online petition calling for the Sun
to sack columnist Katie Hopkins, who described African migrants as “cockroaches.”
The article, published just five days after 400 people died when a migrant boat
capsized in the Mediterranean Sea last month, provoked public outrage.
“NO,
I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water,
play violins and show me skinny people looking sad,” she wrote. “Make no
mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit ‘Bob
Geldof’s Ethiopia circa 1984,’ but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb.
They are survivors.”
The
UN’s human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, commented that UK tabloids like
the Murdoch-owned Sun that published Hopkins' comments, bring back the dark
days of the Nazi media.
“The Nazi media described
people their masters wanted to eliminate as rats and cockroaches,” the UN high
commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said in April.
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