This year, serious antisemitic scandals broke out in Finland. The Israeli Embassy in Helsinki was attacked several times, and the antisemitic Facebook posts of Social Democrat MP Hussein al-Taee also ruffled feathers in Finnish public opinion.

In July, the embassy was attacked by vandals: they broke the glass doors and put stickers depicting swastikas and Adolf Hitler on the building. It was the 15th attack in the past 18 months.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry called on Finnish authorities to do everything in their power to find the perpetrators of the series of attacks. As per the Israeli press, the vandals are probably neo-Nazis. They recall that Finnish politicians have denounced the attacks, but they have taken no actual steps to prevent them.

The other high-profile antisemitic incident is related to the Social Democrat MP Hussein al-Taee. The man of Iraqi origin arrived in Finland as an immigrant in 1993, when he was 10 years old.

As per a screenshot from 2012 that has surfaced, the politician insulted Jews in an unspeakably derogatory manner. In addition, al-Taee compared Israel to the Islamic State terrorist organisation, but he also talked about homosexuals, Sunnis and Somalis disparagingly.

This March, the politician admitted on his own blog that it was indeed him who wrote the antisemitic posts and apologised for them. Following the incident, Efraim Zuroff, the leader of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, specialising in Jewish rights, called on al-Taee to resign.

The politician s antisemitic scandal broke out just a few days after he became a member of the Finnish parliament. After that, he went on sick leave putting it to stress. But when he returned, another scandal broke out soon, as it became public knowledge that his LinkedIn page features fake data regarding his studies.

In Finland, the use of the swastika flag is not regulated by any law. This resulted in a huge uproar in the country in 2018, when several people flew swastika flags in a march organised by the far right on 6 December, the day of independence. This caused an enormous outcry. Several MPs of the opposition demanded the introduction of a ban, including Christian Democrat MP Peter Ostman and Social Democrat MP Joona Rasanen, as well as the Memorial Association of Holocaust Victims. After the incident, people started collecting signatures, but they did not manage to get enough of them to make it obligatory for the parliament to put the issue on its agenda. And thus nothing came of it.