EGN NEWS DESK
The State Department on Friday designated the biggest 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 Movement, foments violence on-line and forges connections with like-minded organizations and folks within the United States, officers mentioned. Those actions have incited issues amongst federal regulation enforcement officers answerable for thwarting home terrorism.
“The group’s members and leaders have carried out violent assaults in opposition to political opponents, protesters, journalists and different perceived adversaries,” the State Department 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 technique for countering home terrorism, stating that addressing the risk demanded “a multifaceted response throughout the federal authorities and past.”
The designation offers the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control the flexibility to dam any American property or belongings belonging to the group. It additionally bars Americans from monetary dealings with the group and makes it simpler to ban its members from touring to the United States.
Still, Mary McCord, a former prime Justice Department official, mentioned that though the designation was an vital transfer, the United States might have gone a step additional and recognized the group as what is named a overseas terrorist group.
“This is a vital and welcome measure to counter transnational white supremacy, however doesn’t set off the fabric assist statute, one of many authorities’s most potent instruments in opposition to overseas terrorist organizations,” she mentioned.
The Nordic Resistance Movement was based in 1997 and has branches in Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland, the place it has been banned since 2020, the State Department mentioned. The group’s aim 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 partially due to its “fanatical Nazi ideology, coupled with a declared aim of revolution by any means vital.”
The group’s violent ideology seemed 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 native information media. The youngster was mentioned to have a overseas background.
Finland banned the group in 2020 after a member assaulted a person throughout a 2016 demonstration. The man later died of his accidents.
This yr, masked members of the group attacked a migrant camp in northern Stockholm.
On Friday, the State Department singled out three members of the Nordic Resistance Movement: 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.
While former President Donald J. Trump has been accused of ignoring the specter of home terrorism, his administration added that risk to its National Strategy for Counterterrorism.
And in 2020, the Trump administration designated the Russian Imperial Movement, an ultranationalist group, as a terrorist group, the primary time the United States had achieved so in opposition to a white supremacist group.
The group has helped assist neo-Nazi organizations in Scandinavia, which aligns with the Russian authorities’s broader sample of stoking inside divisions, together with alongside racial strains, and sowing chaos in Western democracies.
