Man convicted of hate crime after training dog to give Nazi salute

(Image credit: iStock.)

published 20 March 2018

A Scottish man who was arrested after he trained a dog to give a Nazi salute was found guilty of a hate crime Tuesday.

In 2016, Mark Meechan posted a video that showed him teaching his girlfriend's pug to raise his paw upon hearing "sieg heil" or "gas the Jews." The video was viewed more than a million times. Meechan defended his behavior as a way to prank his girlfriend, and said after he was arrested that he doesn't "actually hate Jewish people."

In the video, Meechan says that his girlfriend often talked about "how cute" her dog was, "so I thought I would turn him into the least cute thing I could think of, which is a Nazi." But officials in the U.K. disagreed that it was a harmless joke. The judge involved in the case said that Meechan "knew that the material was offensive" and that he must have known it was "grossly offensive to many Jewish people," reports The Jewish Chronicle.

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Summer Meza has worked at The Week since 2018, serving as a staff writer, a news writer and currently the deputy editor. As a proud news generalist, she edits everything from political punditry and science news to personal finance advice and film reviews. Summer has previously written for Newsweek and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, covering national politics, transportation and the cannabis industry.

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