A 19-year-old with a history of praising Nazis was sentenced to eight years in prison for planning a suicide attack on an Orthodox synagogue in Brighton, England.
The prosecutor told the court that Mason Reynolds, 19, “does not find himself here because he has political, racial or ideological views that some may find distasteful or indeed abhorrent,” The Jewish Chronicle reported. “He is here because he has not just held those political, racial and ideological views, he has acted on them.”
The prosecutor added that Reynolds “is a neo-Nazi who believed the white race was ‘destined to dominate the rest of mankind,’” the Chronicle continued.
The “violent antisemite,” as he was described in court, sought to carry out a suicide bombing attack at the Holland Road Shul, an Orthodox congregation in Brighton formally known as the Hove Hebrew Congregation.
Reynolds “had annotated diagrams of the synagogue on his phone with one entrance identified that would be ‘good for surprise attack’” and “wrote that he wished to ‘blow myself up inside a synagogue,’” the paper added.
“The Jewish holidays that tend to have the most people in synagogues are Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Passover,” he wrote, per the London-based paper.
The judge said during sentencing that Reynolds had a “‘startlingly extensive and very concerning collection’ of terrorism documents and she considered him dangerous,” The Guardian reported.
“One only has to look at the volume and extremity in views expressed in material shown to the court to understand the risk you pose,” she said.
The teen’s attorney said that Reynolds and his family believe that he would never have posed an actual threat.
“Reynolds showed no emotion as he was given an extended sentence made up of eight years in custody with a five-year period on license,” the Guardian reported.
