A British man has been sentenced to two years in prison on charges of inciting racial hatred for creating an online library of downloadable anti-immigration stickers. One of the stickers read "We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066." Others say "It's okay to be white."
Samuel Melia, 34, of Pudsey in West Yorkshire, has been found guilty of encouraging racially aggravated criminal damage. He was sentenced to two years in prison on Friday at the Leeds Crown Court, according to BBC News.
Melia, who is the Yorkshire organizer for the British Nationalist Group Patriotic Alternative, has been accused of being the head of the Telegram Messenger group Hundred Handers, which generated printable anti-immigration stickers that were then displayed in public places, court documents show. Some of the stickers are labeled with the logo of the leftwing Extinction Rebellion group, and read "Sink the boats, save the world," "Save the environment, end mass immigration," "Only white people care about the environment," and "House the world, destroy the environment."
Judge Tom Bayliss KC said the stickers contained "ethnic slurs" which were "corrosive to our society" and he branded Melia in court as an "anti-semite" who has "Nazi sympathies."
Court documents state that Melia had an "obsessive interest" in Sir Oswald Mosley and was attempting to "peddle the same antisemitism." Mosley was the founder of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s. Melia also reportedly had a poster of Hitler in his garage.
The majority of the material that Hundred Handers published was "xenophobic, nationalistic and vitriolic," according to the court.
Melia claimed to the court that the stickers were intended to "start a conversation."
(Credit: The Hull/Twitter)
(Credit: The Hull/Twitter)
Judge Bayliss told Melia: "I am quite sure that your mindset is that of a racist and a white supremacist. You hold Nazi sympathies and you are an antisemite."
"For the first time since the 1930s, a real risk of gross, potentially violent, antisemitism is becoming normalised on our streets," the judge continued. "It has been used before to tear at the heart of Western democracy. It must not be allowed to do so again."
Melia was first arrested in April 2021. Authorities found a label printer and stickers with anti-immigration messaging during a home search. Melia has been ordered to serve half of his sentence in custody before being released on license, the outlet reports. The Patriot Alternative group specifies that "The British people are made up of the English, Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh. These are the indigenous peoples of the United Kingdom and only they have an ancestral claim to it. The United Kingdom is the only place where the British people, and they alone, can realise their natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination."
