ארה"ב הגדירה 4 ארגוני שמאל קיצוני באירופה כארגוני טרור

In a significant development today, the U.S. State Department has designated four Antifa-linked groups as foreign terrorist organizations. The department says the groups have, quote, waged terror campaigns in the United States and Europe, conspiring to undermine the foundations of Western civilization through their brutal attacks. Here are the four groups. Germany's Antifa Ost, known for hammer attacks on civilians, Italy's International Revolutionary Front, who sent bombs to politicians, embassies and civilians causing injuries, Greece's Armed Proletarian Justice, which pledges war on cops and state, and another group in Greece called Revolutionary Class Self-Defense. Let's get some deeper insight into the workings of Antifa and the impact of this designation from Bart Markois, a foreign policy analyst and former career diplomat. Bart, thanks for your time this evening. This move means the administration can target any financial support in the U.S. for these Antifa groups. So what practical steps to tamp down on this violence can come from these designations? Yeah, it targets not just financial support, but also material support, which means labor and activities in furtherance of the goals of these groups. It means that some 20-something-year-old who just has been caught up in a socialist craze and is swept along by this could be charged with giving aid and comfort to a foreign terrorist organization and face prison terms of 20 years or more. It means that if you're out there organizing riots and protests in cooperation with these organizations, you can be charged with that. It opens the door for charging with federal crimes, charging people who are fomenting riots in the United States, or helping these groups foment riots overseas, means you could be deported, you could be imprisoned. It really hits at people that support these groups, including the domestic Antifa protesters. Very good to understand that stiff punishment to fit the crime. Now, these two Antifa networks are in Greece. They're allegedly planting bombs outside riot police, labor department buildings. How do these groups form? You know, they come in, most of them have come in from overseas. They're not native Greeks that are doing this. There are some native Greeks that are involved, but many of them are being influenced by a lot of the Palestinian refugees that are coming into the country. They will set off their bombs and say, this is done in solidarity with a Palestinian organization. Greece is the soft underbelly of illegal immigration into the EU, into the rest of Europe. It's an island nation with islands everywhere, and people will come in boats and they'll land on the shores. Anybody you know who has vacationed in Greece in the last five years will tell stories of sitting on the beach at some tourist resort and suddenly seeing a boat come up, and twenty or thirty young military-aged men jump out of the boat and run off out of the sea and up onto the beach and disappear into the towns. There are probably close to a million so-called refugees in Greece, and once they establish themselves there, they move northward to try to get jobs and generous social benefits from Germany, from France, and then crossing the Channel into Britain. Greece is where they come in, and the EU is really, really upset with Greece for not stemming this tide.