Racist white supremacist ‘with Nazi tendencies’ jailed after sticker campaign
Antisemitic Samuel Melia was found guilty earlier this year of stirring up racial hatred by running an online library of downloadable white supremacist stickers.
A far-right activist has been jailed for two years by a judge who said antisemitism “has been used before to tear at the heart of Western democracy” and “it must not be allowed to do so again”.
Samuel Melia was found guilty earlier this year of stirring up racial hatred by running an online library of downloadable white supremacist stickers.
Melia was the head of the Hundred Handers, an anonymous group responsible for a spate of anti-immigration “stickering” incidents between 2019 and 2021, Leeds Crown Court heard.
On Friday, Judge Tom Bayliss KC said to the 34-year-old: “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.”
He told Melia: “Whilst your activity ceased in 2021, recent events in the United Kingdom demonstrate that there is, for the first time since the 1930s, a real risk of gross, potentially violent, antisemitism becoming normalised on our streets.
“The publication of this kind of material is corrosive to our society and highly damaging. Antisemitism, in particular, is a destructive force. It has been used before to tear at the heart of Western democracy. It must not be allowed to do so again.”
Judge Bayliss outlined some of the ethnic slurs about a range of groups Melia used on Telegram channels, telling him: “You clearly demonstrate a deep-seated antipathy to those groups, and you do so by your uninhibited use of language that no right-thinking person would ever consider appropriate.”
He said: “The fact that you have Nazi sympathies couldn’t be clearer.
“In your garage you had on display a poster of Hitler, sporting the legend ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer’ and a Nazi Eagle, a symbol developed originally by the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1920s and which became a symbol of the German government after the Nazis took power.
“You even posted a picture of Hitler to a Telegram account, describing him as ‘our uncle’.”
Judge Bayliss pointed to Melia’s deliberate referencing of so-called grooming gang court cases and his “obsessive interest” in Sir Oswald Mosley.
He told the defendant: “You were engaged in a campaign of hatred against minority communities and you were, I am sure, quite deliberately trying to stir up racial hatred.”
The judge said: “In his speeches, Sir Oswald Mosley accused the Jews of aiming at world domination, of controlling the City of London and the press.
“Almost a century later, and after the Holocaust, you were peddling the same antisemitism.”
Married father-of-one Melia, who is the Yorkshire organiser for far-right group Patriotic Alternative, stood in the dock to be sentenced wearing a navy blue, three-piece suit, white shirt and orange tie.
The public gallery was packed with his family and supporters.
Judge Bayliss said examples of the slogans found on the stickers created by Melia were “Mass immigration is white genocide”, “Second-generation? Third Fourth? You have to go back”, “Labour Loves Muslim Rape Gangs” and “Stop Anti-White Rape Gangs”.
He singled out one sticker which featured the slogan, “They seek conquest not asylum”, accompanied by a graphic featuring a woman being chased by several people, brandishing weapons.
And the judge referenced another sticker which said “Britain Is Under Occupation” printed over a Star of David.
He told Melia: “The tenor of your messages, taken as a whole, is clear. That Jewish people represent a problem that needs to be solved and that non-white ethnic minorities, by their presence, represent an existential threat to the white population of the United Kingdom and other western societies.
“How you could have thought that to distribute them and have them plastered on public infrastructure without committing a criminal offence is impossible to believe.”
Melia, of Pudsey, West Yorkshire, runs his own business designing and installing signs for shops and vehicles as well as a mail order tea and coffee business with his wife, the court heard.
He was found guilty in January of publishing/distributing material with the intention to stir up racial hatred and encouraging others to commit racially aggravated criminal damage.
Melia told jurors the stickers were simply intended to “start a conversation” and that he tried to avoid making them “intimidatory”.
He said that the practice of “stickering” was widespread and that it “never occurred” to him that it would be criminal damage.
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