The United States on Friday designated a Scandinavian neo-Nazi group and three of its leaders as terrorists, saying the Nordic Resistance Movement poses a threat to Americans.
NMR, known by its Swedish acronym, is the largest neo-Nazi group in Sweden and has branches in Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland, where it has been banned since 2020.
The state department added the movement and the leaders to its Specially Designated Global Terrorist list, meaning that any US-based assets will be frozen and they will be blocked from using the US financial system.
The department said it made its finding based on the group’s history of violence rooted in “its openly racist, anti-immigrant, antisemitic, anti-LGBTQI+ platform”.
“The United States remains deeply concerned about the racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist threat worldwide and is committed to countering the transnational components of violent white supremacy,” a department statement said.
The group has carried out or attempted to carry out “acts of terrorism that threaten the security of United States nationals or the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States”, it added.
The leaders being blacklisted, all Swedes, were the group’s chief, Fredrik Vejdeland, and two other senior figures, Pär Öberg and Leif Robert Eklund.
Founded in 1997 in Sweden as the Swedish Resistance Movement, the group saw sister organizations spring up in other Nordic countries until they were united under NMR in 2016. The group professes nazism and seeks a united “ethnic Nordic” nation. It stages protests and produces media arguing against immigration, but has also been linked to violence.
In 2016, a 28-year-old man died after being assaulted by NMR members in Helsinki, Finland, and, according to watchdog organization Expo, several members have been convicted of a series of bombings in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2016 and 2017.
Finland’s supreme court banned the group in 2020.
After taking office in 2021, Joe Biden’s administration laid out a strategy to counter domestic terrorism that included identifying foreign groups that provide support.
The state department first designated a white-supremacist group – the Russian Imperial Movement – as terrorists in 2020 after years of largely targeting Islamist and far-left movements overseas.
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