The State Division on Friday designated the largest neo-Nazi group in Sweden and its leaders as terrorists, solely the second time it has utilized the label to a white supremacist group identified for a protracted historical past of violence.
The choice comes because the group, the Nordic Resistance Motion, foments violence on-line and forges connections with like-minded organizations and other people in america, officers mentioned. These actions have incited issues amongst federal legislation enforcement officers accountable for thwarting home terrorism.
“The group’s members and leaders have carried out violent assaults towards political opponents, protesters, journalists and different perceived adversaries,” the State Division mentioned in a press release.
The Biden administration mentioned the designations have been a part of a broader effort to crack down on white extremists. In June 2021, the administration unveiled its strategy for countering home terrorism, stating that addressing the risk demanded “a multifaceted response throughout the federal authorities and past.”
The designation offers the Treasury Division’s Workplace of Overseas Property Management the flexibility to dam any American property or property belonging to the group. It additionally bars Individuals from monetary dealings with the group and makes it simpler to ban its members from touring to america.
Nonetheless, Mary McCord, a former high Justice Division official, mentioned that though the designation was an essential transfer, america might have gone a step additional and recognized the group as what is named a international terrorist group.
“This is a vital and welcome measure to counter transnational white supremacy, however doesn’t set off the fabric help statute, one of many authorities’s most potent instruments towards international terrorist organizations,” she mentioned.
The Nordic Resistance Motion was based in 1997 and has branches in Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland, the place it has been banned since 2020, the State Division mentioned. The group’s purpose is to switch the Nordic democracies with a “united ethnic Nordic nation.”
The Anti-Defamation League mentioned the group stood aside from others within the area and in Europe partly due to its “fanatical Nazi ideology, coupled with a declared purpose of revolution by any means needed.”
The group’s violent ideology gave the impression to be on show hours earlier, when a neo-Nazi with suspected ties to the group stabbed a 12-year-old at a shopping mall in Finland, based on the local news media. The kid was mentioned to have a international background.
Finland banned the group in 2020 after a member assaulted a person throughout a 2016 demonstration. The person later died of his accidents.
This yr, masked members of the group attacked a migrant camp in northern Stockholm.
On Friday, the State Division singled out three members of the Nordic Resistance Motion: Tor Fredrik Vejdeland, the chief of the group; Par Oberg, a member of the group’s nationwide council who serves as head of its parliamentary department; and Leif Robert Eklund, a member of the group’s nationwide council and the coordinator of its numerous divisions in Sweden.
Whereas former President Donald J. Trump has been accused of ignoring the specter of home terrorism, his administration added that risk to its Nationwide Technique for Counterterrorism.
And in 2020, the Trump administration designated the Russian Imperial Motion, an ultranationalist group, as a terrorist group, the primary time america had carried out so towards a white supremacist group.
The group has helped help neo-Nazi organizations in Scandinavia, which aligns with the Russian authorities’s broader sample of stoking inner divisions, including along racial lines, and sowing chaos in Western democracies.
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