Jari Mäkäräinen criticized Timo R. Stewart's column, stating that Stewart had already decided in advance that those who disagree are stupid and racist. According to Mäkäräinen, Stewart defined racism as evaluating individuals based on their ethnic or religious background and concluded that such individuals had nothing useful to say about international politics. Mäkäräinen mentioned that the column likened the observation of group differences to climate denialism, young Earth creationism, vaccine resistance, and reptilians. He also claimed that it had asserted that the Finnish media, researchers, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had adopted their Middle Eastern stance from Hamas. Mäkäräinen argued that the claim about the absence of pure races did not refute the phenomena indicated by statistics, attitude surveys, and street views. He highlighted religion, cousin marriages, concepts of honor, fertility, and renouncement of religion, adding that the common goals of Muslims could be examined from their own polls. According to Mäkäräinen, explaining unpleasant phenomena solely with prejudices and labeling dissenters as racists was essentialism. He criticized a sense of moral superiority and argued that it led to a lack of fact-checking, distinguishing between immigrant groups, or noticing that one's own media repeated Hamas's casualty figures. He believed that placing morality above observations weakened empathy. https://t.co/dglVfEEw2o #rasismi #media #ilmasto (translated)
