The United States Designates a British Protest Group and an Italian Web-Hosting Collective as Global Terrorists — the First Sanctions Under Rubio’s "Far-Left Terrorism" Doctrine
On Wednesday, August 26, 2026, the State and Treasury Departments designated three organizations as Specially Designated Global Terrorists under Executive Order 13224, the first sanctions imposed under the administration's push to reorient counterterrorism policy toward what it calls violent far-left terrorism. The three are Palestine Action, a United Kingdom protest group proscribed by the British government in July 2025 after activists broke into RAF Brize Norton and damaged military aircraft; Autistici/Inventati, an Italy-based collective that provides encrypted email, web hosting and anonymity services and that the State Department describes as supplying "the digital infrastructure for Antifa cells"; and Masar Badil, a transnational pro-Palestinian movement the Treasury says operates as a front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, along with two of its leaders. The designations block the groups' US assets and bar Americans from transacting with them. The action follows Secretary of State Marco Rubio's July 2026 summit in which delegations from more than 60 countries were pressed to treat far-left political violence as terrorism, and the administration's 2026 National Counterterrorism Strategy, which names violent far-left groups as one of three top threats — a reversal of the Biden-era emphasis on far-right and white supremacist violence. Civil liberties groups and Palestine Action itself say the designation criminalizes protest and civil disobedience. House Foreign Affairs Committee Democrats had already written to Rubio in July warning that the Department was politicizing counterterrorism work, hosting a conference focused exclusively on left-wing extremism while cutting the offices that assessed extremist violence of all kinds. No member of Congress had issued an on-record response to the designations themselves in the first 24 hours.
“Far-left terrorism poses a profound threat to the United States and the broader West.”