Videos and photos shared on social media show far-right demonstrators gather in a Florida suburb, chanting antisemitic slogans, waving Nazi flags and assaulting a driver capturing them on video.
The neo-Nazi event took place near the University of Central Florida, in the Orlando metro area on Saturday. Videos and photos started to appear on Twitter, including one made of the racist protesters from a car.
“A horrific antisemitic, anti-black rally is happening right now in Orlando, FL orchestrated by white supremacist Eddie McBride and his group NSM [National Socialist Movement],” tweeted the StopAntisemitism.org. “Why are local PD allowing this?” According to the organisation, the demonstrators were chanting “the Jew is the devil,” “Jews rape children and drink their blood” and “Jews brought slaves here”.
Videos appeared on Twitter and Instagram about a driver getting assaulted by the neo-Nazis while capturing them on video.
Another StopAntisemitism.org post reported that the demonstrators also chanted anti-Black slogans, while yet another Twitter user wrote that the group made “monkey noises” at a Black woman passing by.
According to the spokesperson for Orange County Sheriff’s Office, they received calls that a group of twenty are holding a neo-Nazi demonstration. “The group, assembled on public property, was reported by witnesses to be wearing clothing with ‘Nazi’ insignia and yelling profanities and antisemitic slurs at vehicles passing by,” the spokesperson said.
On Sunday, a similar neo-Nazi demonstration took place on a bridge over Interstate 4 between downtown Orlando and the Walt Disney World Resort. It was unclear if those Nazi banners and demonstrators were connected to the rally on Saturday.
According to the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) report, “Openly worshipful of Hitler, the National Socialist Movement (NSM) is one of the more explicitly neo-Nazi groups in the United States. An Americanized and modernized neo-Nazi group, its platform calls for an all-white ‘greater America’ that would deny citizenship and virtually all legal protection to non-whites, Jews and the LGBTQ population. The NSM reserves the brunt of its vitriol for Jews and immigrants, espousing crudely racist and antisemitic ideology.”
While the ADL reports that the group has been in decline in recent years, an October 2021 report conducted by the American Jewish Committee found that about one in four American Jews said they had been targets of antisemitism in the past year. It also found that about four in 10 of all Americans have personally witnessed antisemitic incidents.
Photo credit: StopAntisemitism.org Twitter page
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