The leader of a Seattle neo-Nazi group was sentenced to seven years for his role in a plan to intimidate Jewish people, journalists and activists. Kaleb Cole, 25, along with his companions, belonging to the Atomwaffen Division organization, with branches throughout the United States, had sent posters to some people’s homes containing violent images and a disturbing warning: “You have just been visited by your local Nazi “.
In one, sent to the home of an NBC investigative reporter, a person was drawn, with skull figures dressed in black behind him. Below, two lines: “These people have names and addresses”. A poster was found attached to the window of the editor of a Jewish magazine in Arizona.
These messages were followed by other threats and anti-Semitic hate campaigns, with about a hundred phone calls of intimidation being made throughout the United States. Threats to churches, civil rights associations, universities. Many of these incidents were reconstructed in the courtroom, during a trial in which the victims told the judge the effect these threats had on their lives. Who has been forced to move house for a certain period of time, who has to install security systems. One has decided to buy a weapon for the first time. A reporter quit his job. “These threats motivated by religious intolerance – said the assistant attorney general Kristen Clarke – are the denial of American values, even more so when they aim to intimidate journalists who work to highlight the prejudice in our society”.
In August, another member of the organization, Cameron Shea, 26, was sentenced to three years in prison. Two other people have been found guilty in recent months. The four were arrested in 2020 during an operation that targeted white supremacist organizations in the United States. The investigation started in January 2019 when a person, speaking on the phone with a camouflaged voice and labored breathing, said he had killed his girlfriend, gagged her two children, and was ready to detonate a device. He had provided an address in Virginia, which turned out to be the home of a member of the government of former President Donald Trump, then Security Secretary Kristjen Nielsen.
The police did not intervene, because they immediately understood that it was a fake phone call, but the “sensitive” address had prompted the investigators to go to the bottom. From the documents presented at the trial it emerged that Cole had recorded an audio message in which he targeted journalists: “We must – he said – simply face them in one way: by attacking them”. At his home in Seattle, FBI agents had seized nine weapons. “Today – said federal prosecutor Nick Brown, at the end of the trial – the community and those targeted by people like Cole and his accomplices can stand up and say ‘there is no room for hatred'”. But there is still a lot to do.
According to a report by the American Jewish Committee, about 25 percent of American Jews, one in four, have experienced a form of anti-Semitism on their own skin. 17 percent said they had been insulted in person, 8 percent even more than once. 12 percent were threatened online or on social media, 7 percent multiple times. Three percent have suffered physical attacks and of these two percent more times. Jews between the ages of 18 and 49 are targeted. A figure that confirms that of the FBI, according to which in 2020 hate attacks reached the highest level in the last twenty years. Those against African Americans went from 1930 to 2,871, an increase of 43 percent, while attacks on Asians went from 158 to 279, an increase of 77. Overall, the increase in racist attacks was 13 percent. , with 8,263 episodes, more than twenty a day.
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