The White House has criticised a neo-Nazi march in Ohio which occurred over the weekend, after videos of masked men yelling racial slurs and carrying swastika flags were posted online.
“President Biden ‘abhors’ the hateful poison of Nazism, antisemitism, and racism – all of which are hostile to everything the United States stands for,” a spokesman from the White House said on Monday, adding that the march was a “sickening display”.
The videos revealed about a dozen people, dressed in black and wearing face masks, marching through the streets of Columbus carrying flags with red swastikas on them.
Police officials had briefly detained some of the group on Saturday but they were soon after released after it was found that no laws had been broken by them.
The Ohio state Governor, Mike DeWine released a statement saying;
“Neo-Nazis… roamed streets in Columbus today, carrying Nazi flags and spewing vile and racist speech.”
“There is no place in this state for hate, bigotry, antisemitism or violence, and we must denounce it wherever we see it.”
Public safety dispatchers informed the local CBS affiliate WBNS that police had received various calls at about 13:30 on Saturday about the march.
In some of the videos, members of the group were heard shouting racial slurs into a bullhorn at people nearby.
As no one was charged after the incident, the identities of those in the group were not released to teg general public.
This incident in Ohio’s capital city occurred one week after a similar incident happened in Michigan.
On 9th November, several masked men were seen waving Nazi flags and shouting slurs outside a theatre performance of The Diary of Anne Frank.
Oren Segal, the vice-president of the Anti Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, already informed the BBC that there are “more and more groups that are marching with swastika flags” and they are doing so increasingly in smaller “more focused” groups.
“These relatively small and quick protests are designed to signal back to their online community… for this to be an example of these groups bringing their hatred on the ground,” Segal had said.
The ADL, which monitors white supremacist events around the country, revealed that hundreds of such have taken place over the past two years.
