ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON FEBRUARY 15, 2020
Recently SAS Airline made a video about how everything Scandinavian is copied culturally. What the video forgot to tell us is that even if it copies everything, it is selective about what it copies.
Remember the story about a Muslim Swede called Aye Alhassani, who was told flat out that she would have to take off her hijab if she wanted to work as a flight attendant?
Certainly, the SAS ad did not mention this. It didn’t even mention how different Scandinavian and Nordic countries like Finland copied racism.
“Thank you, colonialism, for being one of the roots of our present-day racism,” the SAS ad should state.
But the ad is right: Everything in our culture, everyone’s culture, is copied.
All of the anti-immigration populist parties in the Nordic region have grown strongly and even been in government.
The Progress Party of Norway recently exited the government because a woman and her two sick al-Hol refugee camp children were brought for treatment to the country.
The Danish People’s Party suffered a big blow in the last election but has succeeded at turning Denmark into one of the most Islamophobic countries in Europe.
Finland and Sweden, both, supposedly, examples of Nordic social equality, have the far-right Sweden Democrats and Perussuomalaiset leading in opinion polls.
No, SAS, there are some things Scandinavia and Finland would have been better off not copying.
Originally published by Migrant Tales.