By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Private Policy and Terms of Use.
Andrew Dymock, charged with circulating terrorist propaganda, says he's bi but leans toward gay, "in direct conflict with Nazism."
A British man accused of calling for the extermination of gay people claims that he himself is gay or bisexual.
Andrew Dymock, 23, of Bath, is on trial in London, facing 15 charges related to inciting terrorism and interfering with public order, the BBC reports. Dymock says he is not guilty.
Among other things, prosecutors say Dymock was a member of the neo-Nazi groups System Resistance Network and Sonnenkrieg Division, both now banned. Some of the articles published on the System Resistance Network's website were part of "an agenda against the LGBT community," prosecutor Jocelyn Ledward said in court recently.
She showed jurors one article, published in 2017, in which the author, said to be Dymock, wrote that gay people are "simply degenerate and must be purged from society for the greater good." The article's headline was "Homosexuality: The Eternal Social Menace."
But police reported that when they interviewed Dymock, he said,"I am bisexual but lean towards being homosexual, in direct conflict with Nazism." He was arrested in 2018.
He also claimed a term in his email address, Blitz8814, did not convey support for Adolf Hitler. As H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, 88 is considered code for "Heil Hitler," and the two words have 14 letters combined.
Dymock told police, however, "I know 88 means Heil Hitler ... but basically to me it means Hulk Hogan or Hell Hoxha, you know, the Albanian Communist guy," a reference to former Albanian leader Enver Hoxha. And Dymock said his own birthday falls on the 14th.
The material Dymock is accused of circulating includes anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, racist and misogynist propaganda as well as anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, posted on the System Resistance Network's website and Twitter account, and sent through email. His father, university professor David Dymock, had told his son not to send him such material at work, because he did not want his colleagues to think he held views like that, prosecutors said in court Tuesday, according to the BBC. They said that in 2017, Andrew Dymock had emailed his parents a video about British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, who was friendly with Hitler.
Dymock is also accused of posting other articles or tweets with hateful views, including endorsement of the extermination of Jews; praise for Ratko Mladic, a convicted war criminal from Bosnia; a reference to Muslims as "Islamic scum"; and image of a rainbow flag, an Israeli flag, and a European Union flag on fire; and a call for "racial holy war." Prosecutors further said he had created and owned a poster encouraging the rape of women police officers.
The detailed charges against him, the BBC reports, are "five counts of encouraging terrorism, four of disseminating terrorist publications, two of terrorist fundraising, one of possessing material useful to a terrorist, one of possessing racially inflammatory material, one of stirring up racial hatred, and one of stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation."
He has denied them all, even though some of the images in question were found on a laptop computer at his home. He has said the material was either planted or that he was using it in his academic work. The trial is continuing.
