A British judge has sentenced a man to 28 weeks in prison for sending “hateful” emails intended to “disparage, insult, and offend” London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan, government minister Jess Phillips, and Matt Twist, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Jack Bennett, 38, was convicted of four counts of sending malicious communications and one of using a public communication network to send offensive emails.
District Judge Stuart Smith railed that Bennett’s emails were “Saturated in hate and intolerance and shamelessly racist and offensive,” revealing “the real disdain [Bennett] held for ethnic minorities, targeting especially Muslims and immigrants in your abusive tirades.” The judge seemed particularly upset by Bennett having “purposely sought to disparage, insult and offend [Sadiq Khan] based on his ethnicity and Asian heritage.”
Bennett was imprisoned for his non-violent speech crimes despite pleading guilty and acknowledging “he was wrong.” Meanwhile, around eight in ten pedophiles convicted for downloading and distributing images and videos of child sexual abuse in the United Kingdom receive non-custodial or suspended sentences.
Bennett had been motivated to send his emails by the “perceived” incompetence of the authorities in tackling Muslim rape gangs, which preyed on primarily white, working-class girls in Britain virtually unchecked for decades. Mayor Khan recently pretended not to know what “grooming gangs,” as the rape gangs are commonly known, even are, while Jess Phillips blocked a government-led inquiry into gangs in the town of Oldham.
Bennett’s imprisonment comes shortly after U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance publicly lamented the erosion of free speech in Europe at the Munich Security Conference, singling out the United Kingdom as a particularly bad example.
