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Ohio leaders condemn Columbus march with Nazi flags and racist slogans

Online Niel November 18, 2024

The White House joined city, state and Ohio Jewish community leaders Monday in condemning a small group that marched through Columbus on Saturday chanting racial slurs and white nationalist slogans while carrying Nazi flags.

NBC affiliate WCMH in Columbus reported receiving eyewitness reports of the march around 1:45 p.m. Saturday in the state capital’s Short North Arts District.

Videos uploaded to social media and geolocated by NBC News in the same neighborhood showed at least 11 people carrying black flags with red swastikas and wearing black outfits with red masks, chanting slogans like “Bow down, (n-word)!” in a meg.

“President Biden abhors the vile poison of Nazism, anti-Semitism and racism — which are inimical to everything the United States stands for, including protecting the dignity of all our citizens and the freedom to worship,” a House spokesman said Monday White, Andrew Bates. morning.

The news comes a week later the protesters waved Nazi flags outside a community production of “The Diary of Anne Frank” in Michigan, to the shock of performers and theatergoers.

“We will not tolerate hate in Ohio. Neo-Nazis – their faces hidden behind red masks – roamed the streets of Columbus today, carrying Nazi flags and spewing racist and racist slurs against black people and Jews,” the Ohio governor said. Mike DeWine said in a statement posted on X.

“There is no place in this state for hatred, bigotry, anti-Semitism or violence, and therefore we must denounce it wherever we see it,” he said.

Columbus City Council President Shannon Hardin, said on X that the community “rejects their pathetic efforts to promote fear and hatred,” adding that it has been in contact with law enforcement. He also claimed the march was linked to Donald Trump’s electoral success earlier this month. “I’m sorry the president-elect encouraged these scumbags,” he wrote.

Trump said there were “very good people on both sides” after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 where a counter-protester was killed. Trump has dismissed accusations that he encouraged extremism or that his supporters include Nazis.

“President Trump is supported by Latinos, black voters, union workers, angel mothers, law enforcement officers, border patrol agents and Americans of all faiths,” his campaign press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement. a statement last month.

Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein told X that he was also in contact with police during the march and said his office would monitor the group involved. “Take your flags and the masks you’re hiding behind and go home and never come back,” he said.

Lee Shapiro, regional director of the American Jewish Committee, said Columbus police were “acting to quell this unauthorized march” in a statement Saturday.

“The vile display of hatred by a small band of masked neo-Nazis from the Short North is another sad example of the bigotry we’ve witnessed across the country,” Shapiro said.

Far-right groups have recently made headlines for fueling division elsewhere in the state.

A white nationalist activist in Springfield, Ohio, took credit for the false story that Haitian immigrants in the city were stealing and eating pets, repeated by Trump at a rally in September.

Christopher Pohlhaus, leader of the national neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe, said after that debate that his group had “propelled Springfield into the public consciousness.” Police said there was no evidence for the pet claim, despite it wide spread.

Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told the New York Times that a new group in St. Louis, called the Hate Club, took credit for Columbus’ march and that it might have been at least in part. inspired by a rivalry with another Ohio group.

“At the end of the day, they want to create fear and anxiety in communities and do a photo shoot,” he said.