UK court fines man for hate crime after filming pug's 'Nazi salutes'

A 30-year-old man has been fined 800 pounds by a court in the UK for putting a "grossly offensive" footage of a pet dog giving Nazi salutes on YouTube in 2016, according to a media report today.

Mark Meechan recorded his girlfriend's pug, Buddha, responding to statements such as "Sieg Heil" by raising its paw, the BBC reported.

The clip was viewed more than three million times on YouTube, it said.

Meechan was sentenced at Airdrie Sheriff Court after being found guilty of committing a hate crime last month, the report said.

He had denied any wrong-doing and insisted he made the video, which was posted in April 2016, to annoy his girlfriend.

But Sheriff Derek O'Carroll found him guilty of a charge under the Communications Act that he posted a video on social media and YouTube which was grossly offensive because it was "anti-Semitic and racist in nature" and was aggravated by religious prejudice.

Fining Meechan 800 pounds, the sheriff told him: "The centrepiece of your video consists of you repeating the phrase 'Gas the Jews' over and over again as a command to a dog which then reacts.

"You use the command Sieg Heil, having trained the dog to raise its paw in response and the video shows a clip of a Nuremberg rally and a flashing image of Hitler with strident music. You say the video was only intended as a joke to upset your girlfriend, whose dog you used, and nothing more.

"On the whole evidence..I found it proved that the video you posted, using a public communications network, was grossly offensive and contained menacing, anti-Semitic and racist material," the sheriff said.

A racist joke or a grossly offensive video does not lose its racist or grossly offensive quality merely because the maker asserts he only wanted to get a laugh, the sheriff added.

Meechan was supported in court by by Tommy Robinson, former leader of far-right group the English Defence League.

Speaking after being fined, Meechan - who posts under the name Count Dankula - said he would be appealing the sentence.

He defended the video, saying the whole point of the "joke" was "the juxtaposition of having an adorable animal reacting to something vulgar".

Meechan said: "This is a really dangerous precedent to set - for people to say things and their context to be completely ignored and then they can be convicted for it.

"You don't get to decide the context, other people don't get to decide the context, the court decides. That's dangerous."