The U.S. State Department on Friday designated Sweden’s largest neo-Nazi group and its leader as terrorists, the second time it has applied the label to a white supremacist group known for its long history of violence.
Officials said the decision comes as Nordic resistance groups incite violence online and connect with like-minded organizations and people in the United States. The actions have raised concerns among federal law enforcement officials tasked with thwarting domestic terrorism.
“Members and leaders of the group have carried out violent attacks against political opponents, protesters, journalists and others perceived as adversaries,” the U.S. State Department said in a statement.
The Biden administration says the designations are part of a broader effort to combat white extremists. In June 2021, the government unveiled its strategy to combat domestic terrorism, saying that dealing with the threat would require a “multifaceted response from the federal government and beyond.”
The designation gives the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control the authority to freeze any U.S. property or assets belonging to the group. It also bans Americans from conducting financial transactions with the group and makes it easier to ban its members from traveling to the United States.
Still, Mary McCord, a former senior Justice Department official, said that while the designation was an important step, the United States could have gone further and designated it a so-called foreign terrorist organization.
“This is an important and welcome measure to counter transnational white supremacy, but it will not trigger material support regulations, one of the government’s most powerful tools against foreign terrorist groups,” she said.
The U.S. State Department said the Nordic Resistance Movement was founded in 1997 and has branches in Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland, but the movement has been banned in these countries since 2020. The organization’s goal is to replace the Nordic democracies with “a unified Nordic nation-state”.
The Anti-Defamation League said the group stood out from other groups in the region and Europe in part because of its “fanatic Nazi ideology, coupled with stated revolutionary goals by any means necessary.”
The group’s violent ideology appeared to be on display just hours after a suspected neo-Nazi with ties to the group stabbed a 12-year-old child in a shopping mall in Finland, according to local news media . The child is said to have a foreign background.
Finland banned the group in 2020 after a member attacked a man during a demonstration in 2016. The man later died from his injuries.
This year, masked members of the group attacked a migrant camp in northern Stockholm.
On Friday, the U.S. State Department named three members of the Nordic Resistance Movement: Tor Fredrik Vejdeland, the group’s leader; Par Oberg, a member of the group’s national council who heads the parliamentary branch People; Leif Robert Eklund is a member of the organization’s National Council and coordinator of the organization’s Swedish section.
While former President Donald J. Trump was accused of ignoring the threat of domestic terrorism, his administration incorporated the threat into the national counterterrorism strategy.
In 2020, the Trump administration listed the ultra-nationalist organization “Russian Imperial Movement” as a terrorist organization. This was the first time the United States targeted a white supremacist organization.
The group helps support neo-Nazi groups in Scandinavia, consistent with a broader pattern of the Russian government fomenting internal divisions, including racial divisions, and sowing chaos in Western democracies.
