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Neo-Nazis Receive Pushback, Lawsuits, Arrests Around Globe, From Ohio to Australia
A neo-Nazi group stages a protest in Cincinnati on Feb. 7, 2025. Photo: Ohio Department of Transportation
Neo-Nazi groups and individuals promoting the Third Reich experienced opposition last week as politicians, communities, and law enforcement in Ohio and Australia responded to the promotion of genocidal antisemitism.
On Friday near a majority-Black neighborhood in Cincinnati, a group of 13 demonstrators wearing sunglasses, red face masks, and black clothes held two banners over an overpass between Evendale and Lincoln Heights. One featured the phrase “America for the White Man” between a Nazi totenkopf skull symbol and a Nazi eagle. The second depicted a red swastika against a black background. Six individuals also waved similar red-and-black swastika flags matching their outfits. Some in the group carried rifles.
Residents confronted the neo-Nazis, who call themselves “the Hate Club.” The masked men hurled racist slurs at them before piling into a U-Haul to flee. Members of the community then flew their own banners on the overpass reading “love wins” and “all are welcome here.” The neo-Nazis had organized a previous demonstration in Columbus in November.
Lincoln Heights Village Council member Daronce Daniels told the Local 12 news station that “things of that nature don’t stand here, you know, that’s a symbol of hate,” and “we’re a community of pride and love.”
Daniels added, “I’m more proud [sic] than our residents for showing up and saying that, ‘Hey, we’re not going to allow anybody to come in and bully us in any type of way, especially in this moment.’”
Jamaal Howard, who lives in Lincoln Heights, said, “I’m fearing for my life, like I walk outside all the time, and now I have to be in fear just in case anything could happen.”
A video posted to social media showed that after the neo-Nazis fled the scene, residents proceeded to torch a swastika flag. “Burn that s—t up!” one man yelled. Others joined hands and formed a prayer circle.
“Messages of hate like this have no place in our region,” Cincinnati’s Mayor Aftab Pureval said. “It was shocking and disgusting to see swastikas displayed in Evendale today.”
On Sunday, a counter-demonstration took place with dozens of participants at the Lincoln Heights Missionary Baptist Church.
“Any time you have a white supremacist, neo-Nazis come to the gateway of the historic Black community. Time is up. There’s nothing left right there. There’s no ground that is sacred,” said Reverend Julian Cook, the church’s pastor. “And to do it at 2:30 in the afternoon, when you know that babies are being dismissed from school. That is an act of terror. Clear and front and center.”
Cook spoke to WCPO News and sent a message to the neo-Nazis: “You will not win. You may try, but we have a history of being able to push past these things, as difficult as they may be. You will not win.”
In a statement, the Jewish Federation of Cincinnati said, “Wwe will not be intimidated. Our response to hate is to reaffirm our commitment to strengthening community bonds, advancing education, and advocating for a society free of antisemitism and all forms of hate and bigotry.”
Elsewhere in Ohio, government officials targeted a different neo-Nazi group which had allegedly stirred up hate in Springfield.
On Thursday in Dayton, the city of Springfield, its Mayor Rob Rue and others sued the Blood Tribe, including its leaders Christopher Pohlhaus and Drake Berentz as well as unnamed members.
The suit aided by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) charges Blood Tribe with “engaging in, and inciting, a campaign of harassment and intimidation, motivated by ethnic and racial hatred, against those who supported Springfield’s Haitian community in the face of Defendants’ racist attacks.” The officials have requested a jury trial to stop the group from further threats.
The filing says that “Blood Tribe and its members and associates unleashed a torrent of hateful conduct, including acts of harassment, bomb threats, and death threats, against Springfield residents who spoke out in support of the Haitian community.” The hate group had appeared in Cincinnati during a jazz and blues festival in August where they waved swastika flags, gave speeches, and displayed guns.
The ADL describes Blood Tribe’s goals as “to normalize the swastika, usher in a resurgence of Nazi ideas, and ultimately build a white enthnostate occupied, controlled, and led by ‘Aryans.’ As a group, Blood Tribe subscribes to common white supremacist beliefs — white people are superior, stronger — with a heavy neo-Nazi emphasis, and a significant Odinist slant.”
Meanwhile, in Sydney, Australia on Thursday, law enforcement arrested and charged two men — Craig Elston, 51, and Charles Cameron, 44 — for displaying a Nazi flag, a crime in Australia. Elston allegedly removed the flag from a backpack and showed it in public before his friend Cameron took a photograph of it.
Elliot Rowe, Cameron’s lawyer, told the court that his client “is a person of outstanding character, is a retired 20-year Australian Defense Force (ADF) veteran who holds no antisemitic views and is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Elston pleaded guilty to the crime and now faces as much as a year’s imprisonment.
New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies president David Ossip said in response to the crime that “something has gone terribly wrong given that these incidents have become an almost daily occurrence. The antisemitism crisis did not start with the firebombing of childcare centers and cars — it started with words and symbols of hate.”
Australia has seen a wave of antisemitic incidents in recent months, with police suspecting that international actors have funded the hate crimes with cryptocurrency payments.
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Palestinian Authority Restructures ‘Pay-for-Slay’ System, but Questions Remain About Whether Move Is Genuine
PA President Mahmoud Abbas at the UN General Assembly in New York. Photo: Reuters/Caitlin Ochs
The Palestinian Authority has restructured its so-called “pay-for-slay” program, which rewards terrorists and their families for carrying out attacks against Israelis, in an effort to push the United States to repeal punitive legislation against the PA for its long-standing policy.
The Palestinian Authority Martyr’s Fund makes official payments to Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, the families of “martyrs” killed in attacks on Israelis, and injured Palestinian terrorists. Reports estimate that approximately 8 percent of the PA’s budget is allocated to paying stipends to convicted terrorists and their families.
On Monday, however, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree revoking the “laws and regulations related to the system of paying financial allowances to the families of prisoners, martyrs, and the wounded,” according to the official PA news agency WAFA.
“All families that benefited from previous laws, legislation, and regulations are subject to the same standards applied without discrimination to all families benefiting from protection and social welfare programs,” WAFA reported.
The decree means that the PA has changed its system such that payments to Palestinian prisoners convicted of terrorist attacks and their families will be based on their social economic status, not the acts they committed. Under the now-revoked program, Palestinians would receive more money for more severe terrorist acts — a policy that, according to critics, incentivized more terrorism.
However, Israeli journalist Lahav Harkov argued that the PA is “just restructuring the mechanism through which they pay terrorists so that they can claim it’s not them, it’s an ‘independent’ foundation doing it. An ‘independent’ foundation funded by the PA and whose board is appointed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Monday saying, “This is a new fraudulent trick by the Palestinian Authority, which intends to continue making payments to terrorists and their families through other payment channels.”
Palestinian officials told Axios they hope Abbas’s decision will improve relations with the Trump administration and with the US Congress in order for Washington to resume US financial aid to the PA.
Along with its policy change, the PA reportedly asked the US to repeal the Taylor Force Act, a 2018 law which prohibits US funding to the PA so long as it maintains its pay-for-slay program.
Critics therefore doubt the sincerity of the move. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a think tank, noted that the PA has deceptively used “pay-for-slay” reform as a beginning chip in the past.
“The PA president … promised ‘pay-to-slay’ reform in 2020 to try to convince then incoming President Joe Biden to revoke 1987 legislation designating the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) ‘and its affiliates’ as terror groups,” FDD wrote.
Aaron Goren, a research analyst and editor at FDD, wrote in response to Monday’s news that “pay-to-slay reform is certainly welcome at face value and demonstrative of the Trump administration’s power in negotiations. However, American officials should be wary of the PA’s steadfast tactic of leveraging pay-to-slay reform to get concessions from the United States and Israel. The PA is likely to make serious demands from both nations in exchange.”
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Super Bowl Halftime Show Dancer Gets NFL Lifetime Ban for Displaying Palestinian Flag During Performance
A protester holding a flag with the words “Gaza” and “Sudan” as rapper Kendrick Lamar performed during the Super Bowl halftime show at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans on Feb. 9, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
A dancer in Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show has been banned for life from all National Football League stadiums and events for waving a combined Palestinian-Sudanese flag with the words “Gaza” and “Sudan” during the rapper’s performance on Sunday night at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans.
The NFL said the African American protester, who has not been identified, concealed the flag and unveiled it without prior knowledge by the show’s production team.
“We commend security for quickly detaining the individual who displayed the flag,” the NFL said in a released statement. “He was a part of the 400-member field cast. The individual hid the item on his person and unveiled it late in the show. No one involved with the production was aware of the individual’s intent.” The league added that the individual “will banned for life from all NFL stadiums and events.”
Toward the end of Lamar’s performance — after his track “Not Like Us” and right before his final song “TV Off” — the dancer waved the flag while standing on top of a car used as a prop in the performance. The car, a Buick Grand National GNX, inspired the name of Lamar’s latest album, “GNX,” and it was a key prop in the rapper’s halftime show performance.
“Sudan” and “Gaza” were written on the white sections of the flag held by the protester. A heart was drawn next to “Sudan” and a solidarity fist was depicted next to the word “Gaza.” The dancer, who wore a black ensemble matching the other dancers on stage, also jumped off the car and fled the stage while still displaying the flag. He waved it while standing on the ground near other dancers before security personnel tackled and detained him. He was then removed from the field and escorted from the stadium. New Orleans police told USA Today that as of Monday, the performer has not been formally arrested or charged.
The incident took place a day after three more Israeli hostages were freed from Hamas captivity in Gaza, as part of a ceasefire agreement in the war between the terrorist organization and Israel, and while a civil war rages on in Sudan.
The New Orleans Police Department said it “continues to work with NFL and the halftime production team to ascertain any affiliation the individual may have had with the halftime show.”
The entertainment company behind the halftime show, Roc Nation, said in a statement that “the act by the individual was neither planned nor part of the production and was never in any rehearsal.”
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CAIR Accuses Israel of Moving ‘Genocide’ Into West Bank
CAIR officials give press conference on the Israel-Hamas war. Photo: Kyle Mazza / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization that purports to advocate for Muslim Americans, has accused Israel of “moving the genocide from Gaza to the occupied West Bank,” lambasting the Jewish state for committing a litany of alleged human rights abuses in recent days.
In a Monday statement, CAIR accused Israel of displacing thousands of Palestinian civilians, destroying Palestinian neighborhoods, murdering a pregnant woman and her baby, and unjustly raiding a Palestinian bookstore.
“The radical Israeli government is clearly trying to move its genocidal campaign of slaughter and destruction from Gaza to the West Bank, where Israeli occupation forces are driving thousands of Palestinians from their homes, destroying entire neighborhoods, kidnapping hundreds, and randomly shooting others, including an eight-months pregnant woman and her baby,” CAIR said in its statement. “Indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu is a sociopath leading an army of war criminals, and our government must stop spending American taxpayer dollars on his latest campaign of murder, ethnic cleansing and destruction in the West Bank.”
In the 16 months following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s cross-border invasion of and massacre across southern Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, the Jewish state has ramped up operations to uproot terrorists in the West Bank.
These efforts intensified last month, when Israel launched a counterterrorism effort in the West Bank coined “Operation Iron Wall”” Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops, gunships, and drones operated in Jenin to extract Palestinian terrorists from the town and its adjacent refugee camps. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the operation was greenlit “on the directive of the security cabinet” with the aim of “bolstering security in Judea and Samaria [Israel’s preferred terminoloy for the West Bank].”
Jenin Mayor Mohammad Jarrar claimed that 150 buildings had been destroyed in the town as a result of the operation, suggesting that Israeli officials approved the operation with the intent of driving out the Palestinian population from the West Bank and annexing the territory.
Israel has long accused Iran of supplying armed factions in Jenin, particularly its refugee camp, with weapons. Palestinian terrorists have long been active in the city. Israel has been especially alarmed by the rise of the Jenin Brigades, a new armed group.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN body responsible for Palestinian refugees, alleged that Israel inflicted “forced displacement” on some 40,000 Palestinians. The Israeli government and research organizations have publicized findings in recent months showing numerous UNRWA-employed staff, including teachers and school principals, are active Hamas members, some of whom were directly involved in Hamas’s Oc t. 7 atrocities, while many others openly celebrated it.
CAIR’s latest accusation against Israel was not its first time stepping into controversy. In the 2000s, the organization was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Politico noted in 2010 that “US District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government presented ‘ample evidence to establish the association’” of CAIR with Hamas.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.” CAIR has disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim and asserted that it “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.’”
CAIR leaders have also found themselves embroiled in further controversy since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7.
The head of CAIR, for example, said he was “happy” to witness Hamas’s rampage of rape, murder, and kidnapping of Israelis in what was the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on Oct. 7,” CAIR co-founder and executive director Nihad Awad said in a speech during the American Muslims for Palestine convention in Chicago last November. “And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in.”
CAIR has accused Israel of committing atrocities beyond Gaza and the West Bank. In December, the Islamic group said the Jewish state was guilty of “ethnic cleansing” in Syria following the recent collapse of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s regime, despite the limited nature of Israel’s military operations in the neighboring country.
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