The Watchman On The Wall

The Watchman On The Wall
Eph 6:12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Verse 13 Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

Friday, March 4, 2022

Watchman Report March 4, 2022 "Russian Group Aims to Lead Global White Supremacist Terror Movement"

 

Above, US Specially Designated Global Terrorists Denis Valliullovich Gariev and Stanislav Anatolyevich Vorobyev in YouTube video, June 11, 2020.

St. Petersburg’s Russian Imperial Movement has trained foreign saboteurs

Last May, Attorney General Merrick Garland told a Senate hearing that “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” posed the most dangerous domestic threat to the United States.”  And to make sure the lawmakers knew exactly who he was talking about, Garland added: “Specifically those who advocate for the superiority of the white race.”


A month later, the Biden administration unveiled a national strategy to fight the nation’s white supremacist and nationalist militia groups, requesting Congress provide the Justice Department more than $100 million to hire more investigators, intelligence analysts and prosecutors. The administration also sought more resources for the State Department to investigate ties between American white supremacist groups and the growing number of neo-Nazi organizations in Europe and Russia. 

But nearly a year later, the administration’s legal offensive against white supremacists at home and abroad is moving at a snail’s pace, due to a lack of staff and a thicket  of bureaucratic red tape stemming from privacy and free-speech concerns, according to Verified, a sobering investigative podcast produced by the Scripps news organization.

In a recently released six-part series, Mark Greenblatt, the Scripps Washington Bureau’s senior national investigative correspondent, dives deep into an evolving global network of violent white supremacist groups. 

He introduces listeners to the Russian Imperial Movement, a virulently anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant organization that is actively working with neo-Nazi groups and individuals around the world in a push for global white Christian power. 

Greenblatt says that while the group is not sponsored by the Russian state, it has allegedly recruited and trained Russians to fight on the side of pro-Russian militias in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. The group seeks a purely white Christian Russia, ruled once again by an authoritarian monarchy, preferably one headed by a descendant of the Romanovs, who held the throne until their overthrow and murder during the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

In 2020, the State Department designated the Russian Imperial Movement as a foreign terrorist organization, the first and only time that a white supremacist group has earned the label.

The designation, which has been most frequently used for Islamist extremists, requires the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign assets Control to seize any American property or assets belonging to the group. It also prohibits Americans from having any financial dealings with the organization and bans its members from traveling to the United States.

In one of the podcast’s highlights, Greenblatt interviews Stanislav Vorobyev, the leader of the Russian Imperial Movement. Vorobyev, a lawyer, military veteran and devout follower of the Russian Orthodox Church, was labeled an individual terrorist when the State Department designated his organization as a terrorist group.

Despite his terrorist designation, Vorobyev tells Greenblatt his organization is still in contact with American white supremacists, though he declined to name them, and is making inroads across Europe and Australia. His goal, he tells Greenblatt, is to unite white Christian all over the world for what he calls “the Last Crusade,” named after the European Christian military expeditions to the Holy Land during the Middle Ages to drive out the Muslims. 

While such plans sound delusional, Greenblatt notes this comes as Avril Haines, the director of National Intelligence, takes seriously the influence that such groups have on American white supremacists. Last year, she warned that the nation’s white supremacists are the domestic extremists “with the most persistent and concerning transnational connections” and hence “most likely to conduct mass-casualty attacks against civilians.” 

Terrorism Training Camp

In his interview with Greenblatt, Vorobyev, speaking through a translator, confirms the group runs two training camps outside St. Petersburg where, for just $500, white supremacist militants and neo-Nazis from Russia, Europe and the United States—in fact, anyone, including would-be Islamist terrorists—can come for a week-long course to learn rural and urban assault techniques, tactical weapons, and hand-to-hand combat.

Two Swedish members of the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement who trained at the camps later went on to bomb several refugee centers in Sweden in 2017. They were convicted and sent to prison. The State Department cited their training in its terrorist designation of Vorobyev and his group. 

Greenblatt also points listeners to an earlier U.S. government counter-terrorism strategy from 2018 that describes what it calls “a broad range of revolutionary nationalist and separatist movements overseas whose use of violence and intent to destabilize societies often puts American lives at risk.”

The document cites the Nordic Resistance Movement, which it describes as “a prominent transnational, self-described nationalist socialist organization with anti-Western views that has conducted violent attacks against Muslims, left wing groups and others.” It adds, “The group has demonstrated against the United States government actions it perceives are supportive of Israel and has the potential to extend its targeting to United States interests.”

The Verified podcast, produced by PBS veteran Sean Powers, edited by former NPR stalwarts Susanne Reber and Ellen Weiss, and hosted by Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Del Toro, adds some of its own reporting about the group, describing how its podcast, with more than 200 episodes targeting English-speaking audiences, acts as an effective global amplifier of white supremacist ideology by spreading its anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and anti-American ideas to its listeners. The Verified team reports that U.S. intelligence agencies are worried that such ideas threaten to inspire white supremacist groups and individials in the United States to attack immigrants and minority targets at home.

The American Connection

The Verified podcast plays a portion of one of those episodes featuring Matthew Heimbach, a prominent American white nationalist and neo-Nazi. He lauds the Swedish group for “the inspiration you provide that you are on the front lines fighting the struggle. And we're fighting the same enemy on the same barricades, and it inspires us.”

In the last episode of the Verified podcast, Greenblatt asks Hillary Johnson, a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official, why the Nordic Resistance Movement still hasn’t been designated a foreign terrorist organization, despite the fact that it was named in both the 2018 and Biden’s administration’s strategies. At first, Johnson describes the high legal bar on constitutional protections of free speech and privacy that the State Department must clear before such a designation can be made. But she finally tells Greenblatt the biggest obstacle.  

“It's hard to do designations,” she tells him. “I've got a great designations team. . .  they would love to be able to deploy this tool everywhere,” she says. But “we just don't have the resources and staff and the information.” 

Left unsaid is the fact that Senate Republicans blocked Garland’s funding request for Biden’s strategy against domestic extremist violence. They accused Democrats of politicizing the issue by describing the violent white supremacist groups that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 last year as coming from the far right.

But the Verified podcast provides compelling evidence for Republicans to recognize the foreign white supremacist extremism that threatens to incite further racist violence here at home, and to put the country’s security ahead of their concerns for the party’s political image.  

For Greenblatt, the son of a Holocaust survivor and grandson of a Jewish man who fled from Russia to the United States at the end of the 19th century to escape czarist pogroms, his encounters with Vorobyev and neo-Nazis who praise Hilter’s slaughter of six million Jews, including members of his own family, was a profoundly disturbing experience.

“People need to be talking about what's going on in the world of white supremacy,” Greenblatt says. “We have met someone who is labeled as a terrorist in today's modern day society who wants to bring about the same kind of society that my great granddad ran away from.” 

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