Judge jails MP’s troll for 2 years to ‘send a message af ter Jo Cox killing’
A FORMER public schoolboy who subjected a Jewish MP to vile online antiSemitic abuse was handed the maximum two-year jail term to send a message ‘loud and clear’ in the wake of the muder of Jo Cox.
A judge said the sentence given to Joshua Bonehill-Paine, 24, was needed to spell out that race hate crime would not be tolerated in Britain.
The far-Right extremist branded Labour MP Luciana Berger ‘a rodent’ and a ‘money grabber’ in the posts, which were made just months before the murder of colleague Jo Cox.
They were part of a wider campaign in which she was bombarded with 2,500 tweets a day, including death threats, the Old Bailey was told.
Jailing Bonehill-Paine, Mr Justice Spencer highlighted Miss Berger’s evidence, in which she told jurors that she feared for her safety because she ‘knew what happened online did not always stay online.’
The judge said: ‘Subsequent tragic events this year in rela- tion to her fellow Member of Parliament, Jo Cox, illustrate this truth.’ Mrs Cox was murdered by Neo-Nazi Thomas Mair, 53, in June.
After his conviction, it emerged that Bonehill-Paine is already in jail serving a 40-month sentence over an anti-Jewish protest in North London last year.
The court heard he also has several previous convictions dating back to when he was 18, including battery and disorderly behaviour. Unusually, Mr Justice Spencer ordered him to serve the two-year term on top of the one he is currently serving. He said: ‘This was gravely oppressive racially aggravated harassment of the worst kind, intended to cause [Miss Berger] alarm and distress.
‘The message needs to go out loud and clear that racial hate crime, where the intention is to harass the victim, will be dealt with very severely.’ The judge also imposed a criminal behaviour order, which carries a penalty of up to five years in jail, to curb his internet activities. Under it, Bonehill-Paine is barred from contacting Miss Berger and other named individuals.
The judge added: ‘It is abundantly clear… that he is tenacious in his use of the internet as a retaliatory weapon against anyone with whom he wishes to pick a dispute.’ Bonehill-Paine claimed the blogs were simply ‘satire’ and ‘political discourse’.
He wrote five posts attacking the MP for Liverpool Wavertree on various websites he ran between October 2014 and January last year. This followed the conviction of his ‘comrade’ Garron Helm, who tweeted ‘Hitler Was Right’ 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 Bitch’ in which she was bombarded by 2,500 messages, which included death threats.
Bonehill-Paine then used his website, to compose vile posts against the MP.
He was jailed in December last year for publishing material likely to incite racial hatred in relation to a protest in Golders Green – one of Britain’s biggest Jewish communities. He was also convicted of six counts of making malicious communications and one of harassment.
‘Retaliatory weapon’