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Ohio is investigating a Nazi homeschooling network that celebrates Hitler
(JTA) — Ohio’s department of education is investigating a homeschooling network that claims public schools are run by “Zionist scum,” teaches kids to say “Sieg Heil” in class and instructs fellow parents not to give their kids “Jewish media content.”
These are the more than 2,500 members of the “Dissident Homeschool Network,” a channel on the social network messaging app Telegram. The “dissidents” are a group of Nazi parents who share homeschooling lesson plans extolling the virtues of Hitler and white nationalism — while relying on a popular social media account run by a Jewish woman to provide ammunition for their hatred. The founders of the group were recently unmasked by a hate group monitor as a couple in rural Upper Sandusky, Ohio.
“There is absolutely no place for hate-filled, divisive and hurtful instruction in Ohio’s schools, including our state’s home-schooling community,” Stephanie Siddens, the interim superintendent of public instruction at Ohio’s education department, told Vice News. “I emphatically and categorically denounce the racist, antisemitic and fascist ideology and materials being circulated.”
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, along with Rep. Bob Latta, whose district encompasses Upper Sandusky, and Rep. Jim Jordan, all gave statements to Vice News condemning the group. But Ohio officials say that there is little to no homeschooling oversight from the state board of education. Although parents who homeschool are required to submit copies of their lesson plans to the state, a county official who oversees the area where the Lawrences live told HuffPost, “Parents who decide to home educate their child are responsible for choosing the curriculum and course of study.”
“We are so deeply invested into making sure that [our] child becomes a wonderful Nazi,” the founder of Dissident Homeschool Network, who goes by the pseudonym “Mrs. Saxon,” recently said on a neo-Nazi podcast to promote the group. She has been identified by the Anonymous Comrades Collective, an anti-Nazi group, as well as Vice News and HuffPost, as Katja Lawrence, a Dutch immigrant who currently lives in Upper Sandusky, Ohio.
Lawrence is a recently naturalized U.S. citizen who frequently rails against other groups of immigrants on social media; her husband Logan is an insurance agent. The Lawrences are so enamored of Nazidom that Katja uploaded audio of her own kids performing Nazi salutes to her Telegram channel, and baked a cake to celebrate Hitler’s birthday.
The journalists and researchers who reported on Dissident Homeschool Network were able to track the couple down after they revealed that they owned a German shepherd named Blondi — also the name of Hitler’s dog.
Launched in fall 2021, the Lawrences’ homeschooling project is explicitly labeled as a means for neo-Nazi parents to indoctrinate their kids by keeping them away from public school. Lesson plans include teaching cursive by having students write out famous quotes from Hitler and American neo-Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell; building “math” classes around racist manipulations of urban crime statistics; and praising Confederate general Robert E. Lee as “a grand role model for young, white men.” In idle chats, members of the group disparaged the Indiana Jones movies as “Jewish revenge porn.”
The group also facilitates in-person meetings between like-minded parents and children. Relatives of the Lawrences told HuffPost they found their activities “disgusting” and “heartbreaking for their children.”
Despite their near-constant stream of antisemitic invective, members of the Dissident Homeschool Network frequently share memes from the right-wing social media channel Libs of TikTok, which is run by an Orthodox Jew. The account has gained national notoriety for its demonization of LGBTQ people as “groomers,” as well as for its constant attacks on public education, a hot target for figures on the right who believe educators are indoctrinating children with “critical race theory” and “gender ideology.”
That account’s administrator Chaya Raichik, who has recently made her identity public, frequently advocates for parents to homeschool their children. Homeschooling has become a popular choice for conservatives, both for religious and ideological reasons, and lobbyists for the movement together with Republican lawmakers have made it easier for parents to homeschool their children with little to no oversight.
The “Dissident” group provides parents with instructions on how to teach Nazi material while avoiding scrutiny from the authorities. On the channel, Katja Lawrence frequently boasts about the size and strength of their Nazi parents’ movement: “There is a huge network of people like us.”
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Ilhan Omar Poses for Photo With Swedish MP Wearing Garment Depicting Erasure of Israel
US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) speaks at a press conference with activists calling for a ceasefire in Gaza in front of the Capitol in Washington, DC, Dec. 14, 2023. Photo: Annabelle Gordon / CNP/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MI) has come under fire after being spotted posing for a photo with Malcolm Jallow, a virulently anti-Israel member of the Swedish parliament.
The picture, which was posted on Jallow’s Instagram page on Sunday, showed the controversial Swedish politician posing alongside Omar and anti-Israel political pundit Medhi Hasan. Jallow draped a stole around his shoulders depicting the complete erasure of the state of Israel and its replacement by a Palestinian state.
“Spending these days with so many inspiring leaders from around the world — including two of the most inspiring and courageous voices of our time, Congresswoman @ilhanmn Omar and international journalist @mehdirhasan — has been like reigniting an inner flame. I feel recharged with energy, hope, and determination,” Jallow wrote on Instagram.
Jallow has an extensive history of attacking Israel and promoting antisemitic conspiracy tropes. For example, he has “liked” a comment on social media that accused Jewish organizations of participating in freemasonry, fueling a false conspiracy theory that claims a secret coalition of Jews and Freemasons is working to control the world.
The Gambian-born lawmaker also lambasted Sweden for its supposed complicitly in a “genocide” in Gaza and stated in another social media post that Europe “betrayed” the Palestinian enclave by “financing the bombs” and “legitimizing the apartheid & the occupation.” He further appeared to threaten Swedish civilians who support Israel, writing, “To every ordinary citizen who waved the flag of the oppressor & laughed while Gaza burned, We will not forget you. We know your names. We save your statements. We screenshot your posts.”
He also seemed to threaten legal action against Swedish citizens who publicly demonstrate support for Israel’s defensive military operations against Hanas.
“And one day, whether in courtrooms of law or the court of history, In this life or the hereafter, you will be held to account,” Jallow posted. “That is not a threat. That is a promise to the people of Gaza.”
“Why is the Swedish government complicit in Israel’s acts of genocide against the Palestinian people?” he added on Instagram.
Jallow has also criticized Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson for taking certain measures to combat antisemitism, arguing that such actions endanger the country’s Muslim population.
“The Swedish Prime Minister’s statement that antisemitism holds a ‘special status’ and is worse than anti-Muslim propaganda is deeply problematic and dangerous. It not only diminishes the severity of hatred against Muslims but also normalizes the growing Islamophobia in Sweden,” Jallow wrote in an official statement last year.
“Ranking hate and prioritizing one group’s suffering over another is not only ignorant and offensive — it undermines our collective struggle against all forms of intolerance and discrimination,” he continued.
Sweden has reported a notable increase in antisemitic incidents since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, prompting alarm within both the Jewish community and governmental bodies.
According to a report released by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (BRA) last year, hate crimes motivated by antisemitism in the country surged in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 atrocities, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. The BRA found that police registered 110 complaints between the Hamas invasion and Dec. 31 in 2023, compared to just 24 incidents the prior year.
While Jews constitute a small fraction of Sweden’s population, they have represented a disproportionately high share of religious-hate-crime victims. In 2020, for example, antisemitic incidents made up about 27 percent of all religion-based hate crimes documented by police despite Jews making up only 0.1 percent of the population, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention.
Omar for years has been one of the most vocal critics of Israel in the US Congress, calling on Washington to impose an arms embargo on the Jewish state.
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Groundbreaking analysis of Hitler’s DNA shows no Jewish ancestry — but finds a genetic disorder
Adolf Hitler had a sexual disorder that made it more likely for him to have a micro-penis, according to the first-ever analysis of his DNA. He also did not have the Jewish ancestors that some have claimed he had.
The analysis is being revealed in detail in “Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator,” a new documentary premiering Saturday night in the United Kingdom. The documentary looks at the researchers who decided to tackle the genetic makeup of one of history’s greatest villains, as well as what they learned — and cannot learn — from his DNA.
They found that he had Kallman syndrome, a genetic disorder characterized by incomplete puberty, according to an exclusive report published Wednesday in the Times of London. They also found that he had genes making him more likely to have autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, though they cautioned that the DNA alone is not sufficient to deliver a diagnosis.
Among those quoted in the documentary is the prominent British Jewish psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen (father of actor Sacha). “Behavior is never 100% genetic,” he said in the Times report. “Associating Hitler’s extreme cruelty with people with these diagnoses risks stigmatizing them, especially when the vast majority of people with these diagnoses are neither violent nor cruel, and many are the opposite.”
The analysis, conducted by a team led by a prominent British geneticist, is more definitive on the subject of Hitler’s possible Jewish ancestry. Rumors about such a background were prevalent during Hitler’s rise: In one notable example, a newspaper aligned with the Austrian chancellor who the following year would be assassinated by Nazis in 1933 challenged German authorities to disprove his Jewish ties.
And the rumors have endured: In 2022, Russia’s foreign minister repeated the claim that Hitler had Jewish ancestry to rebuff criticism that Russia’s justification for invading Ukraine, that it needed to be “denazified,” was undermined by the fact that Ukraine’s president is Jewish.
But while previous analyses of the DNA of Hitler’s relatives suggested that he may have had some genetic links to groups that he sought to destroy, including Jews, the new analysis, on Hitler’s own DNA, shows only Austrian German ancestry.
The analysis is based on a swatch of fabric stained with blood that a U.S. soldier cut from the couch upon which Hitler shot himself. The researchers were able to confirm without a doubt that the blood came from Hitler by comparing the DNA found in it to DNA previously confirmed to have come from one of his relatives.
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German Authorities Arrest Another Suspected Hamas Operative Amid Growing Terror Threat to Jews in Europe
Supporters of Hamas gather in Berlin. Photo: Reuters/M. Golejewski
As concern mounts over a potential surge in Hamas-linked attacks in Europe, German authorities have arrested another suspected member of the Palestinian terrorist group accused of acquiring firearms and ammunition to target Jewish communities.
On Tuesday, local police arrested Lebanese-born Borhan El-K, a suspected Hamas operative, after he crossed into Germany from the Czech Republic — part of an ongoing probe into the Islamist group’s network and operations across the continent.
The German federal prosecutor’s office confirmed the suspect obtained an automatic rifle, eight Glock pistols, and more than 600 rounds of ammunition in the country before handing the weapons to Wael FM, another suspected member of the terrorist group, in Berlin.
Local law enforcement arrested Lebanese-born Wael FM last month, along with two other German citizens, Adeb Al G and Ahmad I.
Prosecutors believe the three men acted as foreign operatives for Hamas and procured firearms and ammunition intended for attacks on Israeli and Jewish institutions in Germany.
Hamas, long supported by the Iranian regime as well as Qatar and Turkey, is designated as a terrorist organization by the European Union and several other Western countries, including the United States.
Earlier this month, Mohammed A, another alleged member of the Palestinian terrorist group, was arrested in London at the request of German police. He is accused of taking five handguns and ammunition from Abed Al G before moving them to Vienna for storage.
Last week, Vienna authorities uncovered a hidden arsenal linked to Hamas, reportedly intended for “potential terrorist attacks in Europe” targeting Jewish communities.
The Austrian government confirmed that the Directorate for State Security and Intelligence Service (DSN) has been conducting an internationally coordinated investigation into a global terrorist network with ties to the Islamist group.
During the investigation, Austrian authorities uncovered evidence suggesting that this group had brought weapons into the country for potential terrorist attacks in Europe.
For its part, Hamas issued a statement denying any connection to the criminal network, calling the allegations of its involvement “baseless.”
However, experts have warned that Hamas has expanded its terrorist operations beyond the Middle East, exploiting a well-established network of weapons caches, criminal alliances, and covert infrastructure quietly built across Europe over the years.
Last month, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center released a study detailing how Hamas leaders in Lebanon have been directing operatives to establish “foreign operator” cells across Europe, collaborating with organized crime networks to acquire weapons and target Jewish communities abroad.
In February, four Hamas members suspected of plotting attacks on Jewish institutions in Europe went on trial in Berlin, in what prosecutors described as the first court case against terrorists of the Islamist group in Germany.