Linking federal immigration enforcement efforts in Minneapolis to fascism, a yarn store has popularized a red cap based on a Norwegian hat used to protest the Nazi occupation of Norway in the 1940s.
A group of knitters at the Needle & Skein yarn store came up with the pattern, now known as the “Melt the ICE” hat, which is a red beanie-shaped cap topped with a braided tassel.
“What’s been happening in Minneapolis has been so egregious and awful and so destructive to our community,” shop owner Gilah Mashaal said of federal agents’ “use of aggressive tactics,” as they were described by NPR in a Saturday story.
According to NPR:
Since making the pattern available for $5, the shop has raised nearly $400,000, Mashaal said Friday. So far, she said, they have donated a total of $250,000 to two local nonprofits focused on housing support for immigrants in the community — STEP (St. Louis Park Emergency Program) and the Immigrant Rapid Response Fund.
The red hat has become a movement in the crafting community, popping up on social media and reaching other countries. Mashaal and her daughter have received messages from people around the world, from Israel to South Africa to Norway, expressing their support for the movement, Mashaal said.
Shop employee and history buff Paul Neary chose the pattern based on a Norwegian hat used to protest the Nazi occupation of Norway during World War II.
Mats Tangestuen, the director of the country’s Resistance Museum in Oslo, Norway commented after receiving an email with a link to the hat pattern. Minnesota reportedly has the largest Norwegian population in the U.S.
Tangestuen told NPR that for Norwegians, the hat was meant to be “distinctively non-violent” and “not a threatening symbol.”
“It was used in the period of the war where everything looked very dark,” Tangestuen said. “The main purpose of it was just to keep up morale, keep up hope and not descend into hopelessness and apathy.”
He said it was eventually outlawed by the Germans.
NPR also quoted Peter Fritzsche, a history professor at the University of Illinois, who said the Nazis were operating on “obviously a very, very different scale,” but with the presence of federal agents in Minnesota, people can still feel “occupied.”
The feel-good feature story made no mention of the “worst of the worst” — a host of convicted killers, rapists and pedophiles — whom immigration agents have removed from the Twin Cities during their “occupation” of Minnesota.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
