Antifa: What is it and what does the movement want? – USA TODAY

Petition calls on White House to label this far-left group terrorists

"Antifa" is commonly considered to be part of the far-left, a group Trump said was partially responsible for violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.Video provided by Newsy

Newslook

Since the killing of George Floyd sparked protests acrossthe U.S., the term "antifa" has been thrust back into the national conversation after multiple officials, including President Donald Trump, have blamed the groups for rioting and looting.

Antifa shortfor"anti-fascist" is the name for loosely affiliated, left-leaning, anti-racist groups that monitor and track the activities of local neo-Nazis. The movement has no unified structureor national leadershipbut has emerged in the form of local bodiesnationwide, particularly on theWest Coast.

Some of the groups, such as the 13-year-old Rose City Antifa in Portland, Oregon, the oldest in the U.S.,are particularly well-organized andactive online and onFacebook,while its members are individually anonymous.

On Sunday, Trump posted a message on Twitter, saying: "The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization." That came one day after he said "theviolence and vandalism is being led by antifa and other radical left-wing groups."

Attorney General William Barr on Sunday also blamed antifa and other similar groups over violent protests which eruptedafter Floyd, 46,died on Memorial Day when a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for several minutes calling the acts "domestic terrorism."

The American Civil Liberties Union, however,saysTrump did not have the power to label domestic terror groups.

"Terrorism is an inherently political label, easily abused and misused," the organization said in a tweet. "Lets be clear: There is no legal authority for designating a domestic group. Any such designation would raise significant due process and First Amendment concerns."

Twitter suspended the account @ANTIFA_US after it said the accountviolated the company's platform manipulation and spam policy for a tweet posted Sunday that tried to incite violence, according to NBC.Twitter later said the account hadbeen linked to the white nationalist group Identity Evropa.

Donald Trump Jr. posted a screenshot of the tweet to his verified Instagram page to share it with his 2.9 million followers. Trump Jr. has since deleted the post after Twitter suspended the account.

This isn't the first time Trump has set his focus on antifa. In August2017, after violence blew upat protests in Charlottesville, Virginia,the president singled out the groups as part of what he calledthe alt-left in his initial claim that "many sides" were to blame for the violence, not justneo-Nazis, KKK and white nationalists.

"AN-tifa" with the emphasis on the first syllable, which sounds more like "on" in English than "an."

Anti-fascist groups, particularly in Europe, have been around for many decades, notably in Italy, against Mussolini, and in Germany, against Hitler. In the postwar period, antifa groups resurgedto fightneo-Nazi groups, particularly in Germany. In the U.S., the anti-fascist movements grew out ofleftist politics of the late '80s,primarily under theumbrellaof Anti-Racist Action.

Theprimary goal is to stopneo-Nazis and white supremacists fromgaining a platform rather than to promotea specific antifa agenda. The antifa groups aredecidedly anti-racist, anti-sexistand anti-homophobia, but also by and large socially leftistand anti-capitalist.

Mark Bray, a lecturer atDartmouth andauthor of the new book "Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook,"says the groups "organize educational campaigns, build community coalitions, monitor fascists, pressure venues to cancel their events, organize self-defense trainingsand physically confront the far right when necessary."

A main goal is to try to deny fascists a public forum, which is why they turn out in numbers to physically confrontneo-Nazis, the KKKand white supremacists atpublic demonstrations. They also step in to protect counterprotesters at such events.

In addition, antifa is particularly active in"doxxing," oridentifying neo-Nazis and like-minded individuals and disseminatingthat private information to the public and employers to discourage people from joining their ranks.

Memberspointedly do not eschew violencebut rather see themselves as engaging in "self-defense," protecting other protesters and primarily confronting neo-Nazis and white supremacists to deny them a platform to publicly spread their views.

"We are unapologetic about the reality that fighting fascism at points requires physical militancy, Rose City Antifas Facebook page reads. Anti-fascism is, by nature, a form of self-defense: the goal of fascism is to exterminate the vast majority of human beings.

Political activist and author Cornel West, speaking to Amy Goodman on the program "Democracy Now"about the clashes in Charlottesville, saidantifa intervened when the "neofascists" move against his group of protesters."We would havebeen crushed like cockroaches if it were not for the anarchistsand the anti-fascists," he said.

Bray says the riseof fascism in the 1930s demonstrates that it wasa mistake to allow such groups to air their views in hopes that public opinion would blunt their growth."We should be wary of those who are more distressed about alleged violations of the speech of fascists than the actual violence they perpetrate," he says.

Antifa forces, whose members often dress inblack and wearmasks, have confronted or clashed with far-right groups in such places as the University of California at Berkeley. Protests by West Coast antifa forces, some of whomsmashedwindows and setfires,forced the cancellation of aspeech by alt-right activistMilo Yiannopoulos and another by conservative commentator Ann Coulter in 2017.

In June of that year, antifa forces turned out to protest a pro-Trump free-speech in Portland. Some antifa counterprotestersbegan throwing objects at police, who responded with flash grenades and pepper balls, according toThe Oregonian.

Read more from the original source:

Antifa: What is it and what does the movement want? - USA TODAY