Guilty, anti-Semitic blogger who racially abused Jewish MP
A FORMER public schoolboy was yesterday convicted of racially harassing a Jewish MP in a series of vile anti-Semitic blogs.
Far-Right activist Joshua Bonehill-Paine, 24, branded Luciana Berger a ‘rodent’ and a ‘money grabber’ in the offensive website posts.
An Old Bailey judge last night highlighted the ‘dark side’ of the internet after a jury took just two hours to find the blogger guilty of racially aggravated harassment.
Wearing prison-issue clothes, Bonehill-Paine appeared to smirk and raised his eyebrows as the verdict was delivered.
Following his conviction, it emerged that he is already in jail serving a 40-month sentence for inciting racial hatred at an anti-Jewish protest in Golders Green, north London, last year.
The court heard he has several previous convictions dating back to when he was 18, including battery, criminal damage and disorderly behaviour.
Mr Justice Spencer warned Bonehill-Paine he faced more jail time when he is sentenced today. He added: ‘The internet is a great blessing, but there is a dark side, as you can see from cases of this kind.’
The trial heard that the blog posts were part of a wider campaign in which Labour MP Miss Berger was bombarded with 2,500 daily tweets – including death threats – by extremists.
She told the court the online abuse left her feeling ‘sick’ and fearing for her personal safety. Tensions were high, the jury heard, because Bonehill-Paine was charged just days after Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered by neo-Nazi terrorist Thomas Mair, 53, in June last year. Miss Berger was so con- cerned she asked for police protection. Jurors were told that Bonehill-Paine wrote five posts attacking the MP for Liverpool Wavertree on various websites he ran between October 2014 and January last year.
He was inspired to write after the conviction of his ‘comrade’ Garron Helm, who tweeted ‘HitlerWasRight’ along with a picture of the MP with a yellow Star of David on her forehead.
Following Helm’s conviction an American far-Right publication, The Daily Stormer, started an online campaign against the MP called ‘Operation Filthy Jew B***h’ in which she was bombarded by 2,500 messages, which included death threats and pornographic images.
Bonehill-Paine then used his website, The Daily BALE, (Britain Against Left-wing Extremism), to compose vile posts in which he repeatedly referred to the MP as ‘evil’, a ‘rodent’, a ‘money grabber’ and a ‘dominatrix.’
Bonehill-Paine claimed the blogs were simply ‘satire’ and part of his right to free speech.
The court heard he was jailed in December last year for publishing material likely to incite racial hatred in relation to the anti-Jewish protest in Golders Green – one of Britain’s biggest Jewish communities.
One image showed weedkiller being sprayed on a concentration camp.
Bonehill-Paine chalked up his first conviction as a young Tory after using his Conservative membership card to break into Yeovil police station, in Somerset, and steal an inspector’s uniform.
In March 2014, he falsely claimed a Leicester pub had refused to serve soldiers for fear of offending the Muslim community.
Bonehill-Paine, originally from Yeovil, Somerset, was also convicted yesterday of six counts of making malicious communications and one count of harassment after wrongly claiming that a number of Left-wing activists were paedophiles.
‘There’s a dark side to web’