Neo Nazi who targeted Jewish journalists and activists sentenced to 16 months in prison.
Image by Getty Images
By David Ian Klein December 10, 2020
A member of the Neo-Nazi group known as Atomwaffen who conspired with other white supremacists to threaten Jewish journalists was sentenced to 16 months in prison and three years of supervised release after pleading guilty to interference with federally-protected activities because of religion, mailing threatening communications and cyberstalking.
In January, Johnny Roman Garza, a resident of Phoenix, Arizona, put a threatening poster on the bedroom window of an Arizona-based Anti-Defamation League employee who worked to expose local antisemitism.
“You have been visited by your local Nazis,” the poster, which featured a picture of a burning Molotov cocktail, said. “Your actions have consequences.”
According to a Wednesday Department of Justice statement, Garza placed the poster as part of a broader plan to threaten and intimidate Jewish and Black journalists, as well as others working to expose racism and antisemitism in the United States. The DOJ noted that Garza conspired with other white supremacists via online forums and encrypted chat rooms to catalog and identify a list of targets.
In response to the sentencing in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, the FBI said that protecting minority groups from terrorism, both domestic and international, was a top priority.
“The United States and other nations fought a global war to rid the world of murderous threats and violence by Nazis,” said Assistant US Attorney General Eric Dreiband. “The nation and its allies defeated Nazi Germany, but Nazi-inspired threats and violence continue to plague this nation and others 75 years after the end of World War II.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
