Chelsea Fan Jailed For Anti-Semitic Tweets
A Chelsea supporter has been sentenced to eight weeks in jail by the Westminster Magistrates’ Court for posting racist and anti-Semitic tweets.
Nathan Blagg, 21, pleaded guilty to seven counts of sending offensive messages.
“Blagg thought hiding behind a screen could shield him from the consequences of posting hateful and abusive content. That is absolutely not the case,” said Kalsoom Shah of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
“Hate crime has a corrosive effect on our society and working with the police, the CPS is committed to rooting it out.”
At the sentencing hearing, the CPS applied for an increase in Blagg’s sentence to reflect the racial hate crime element and the punishment was extended from five weeks to eight weeks.
The lifelong Chelsea supporter, from Retford, Nottinghamshire, sent the tweets between September 2020 and February this year.
During the court case last month, prosecutor David Roberts said the messages were alleged to be “racially aggravated… given the context of Tottenham Hotspur’s fans coming from a Jewish area”.
He posted a picture of the train tracks to Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz on Twitter, along with the message:”Spurs are on their way to Auschwitz.”
Another post featured a fake image of former health secretary Matt Hancock holding a microphone saying the same words.
Other tweets sent by Blagg included a photograph and a video of Nazi salutes being performed, while one message read: “Yids tomorrow, which means for the next 48 hours I can tweet as much anti-Semitism as I want without being told off.”
The following day, Blagg wrote: “Gas a Jew, Jew, Jew.”
Blagg was arrested in February after a West Brom fan reported his messages, which were investigated by Chelsea’s security team.
Maeve Thornton, defending, said Blagg had been suffering from “low moods” at the time because of the pandemic.
“He has got drawn into this in terms of a lack of awareness and understanding of the impact this was going to have,” she said, adding that “with hindsight, he now understands how wrong this is”.
Too late for him!
