Count Dankula Freed - Fined £800

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Count Dankula - real name Mark Meechan - was in a Scottish court today as mentioned in this post by @someguy123 yesterday. He was charged with a 'hate crime' for uploading a video on Youtube of him teaching his girlfriend's pug Buddha to do a Nazi salute in response to verbal commands such as 'Seig Heil' and 'gas the Jews'.

Citing the Communications Act Sherriff Derek O'Carroll decreed that the video was 'grossly offensive' and called it 'anti-Semetic and racist in nature' and was fueled by 'religious prejudice', despite nobody from the Jewish community lodging a complaint.

Meechan apologised to the Jewish community for any offence caused and he was fined £800 - roughly $1,115 - after his defence lawyer stated:

His difficulty, it seems, was that he was someone who enjoyed shock humour, both giving and receiving it, and went about his life under the impression that he lived in a jurisdiction which permitted its citizens the right to freely express themselves.
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Vowing to appeal the sentence, Dankula said the following outside court:

... it does set a precedent, a really, really dangerous precedent has been set for people to say things, their context to be completely ignored and then they can be convicted for it. You don’t get to decide the context of what you said, other people don’t get to, the court gets to, that’s dangerous.
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He had many supporters outside Airdrie Sherriff Court, including the infamous Tony Robinson. A free speech protest march also took place in London today.

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Naturally the usual suspects in the British media see this as a 'far-right' issue, typified in this charming paragraph courtesy of The Independent. I suppose anybody who stands for free speech is now far-right. Right?

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Was the video tasteless? Of course, nobody is disputing that. But as Dankula stated, the entire point of it was the juxtaposition of a cute fluffy animal doing something so shocking. I am only shocked that poor Buddha the pug - notice how THAT'S not deemed offensive to Buddhists? - was not also dragged in front of a judge. When seeing a joke such as this, the subject of the joke - the extermination of the Jews in WWII - is not what is deemed funny. Nobody with any sense would claim it was. History is filled with atrocities, disasters and other terrible events. Are these ALL off limits? As comedian Ricky Gervais once said 'If you can't joke about the most horrendous things in the world, what's the point of jokes? What's the point in having humor? Humor is to get us over terrible things.'

Let me reiterate: I do not find the terrible events of WWII funny. Seeing a pug do a Nazi salute? That's another story.

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