A 13-year-old who admitted to planning an attack on a synagogue was sentenced to probation – and a book report.
The boy was arrested in September after he created a plan to carry out a shooting at Temple Israel in Canton, Ohio. He was told to write a book report about Carl Lutz, a Swiss diplomat who saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis.
The teenager was also sentenced to a year of probation, US media reports said. The boy previously pleaded “true”, which is the equivalent of guilty in family court, to misdemeanour charges of inducing panic and disorderly conduct according to local media reports.
He was not named because of his age. Judge Jim James ruled that the boy is prohibited from having unsupervised use of the internet and ordered him to undergo counselling, local media reports said.
According to a sheriff's incident report, the boy came to the attention of the authorities in early September – before the 7 October attack by Hamas on Israel, which has brought heightened security concerns for the Jewish community.
Employees for Discord, a social platform popular with gamers, tipped the FBI off to “threats and plans to burn down and shoot up the Temple Israel”. The posts “included plans and maps of the synagogue made possibly by the suspect” along with an unknown individual from Washington state, the report said.
The FBI and local sheriffs interviewed the boy on 7 September. The boy told them he was part of “multiple antisemitic and political groups on Discord”, the sheriffs said.
In a statement, Stark County Sheriff George Maier said: “We stand by a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to threats made against our community.” Discord confirmed that it detected the boy's online activities and reported him to the FBI's National Threat Operations Center.
John Redgrave, Discord's vice president of trust and safety, said the platform did not allow hate and violent extremism “and when we see it, we take immediate action”.
“It is a top priority for Discord to ensure a safe experience for our users,” he added. The local branch of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish advocacy and anti-extremism group, said it was “horrified” by the allegations and that it hoped the incident would be a “teachable moment”.
“Hate and threats on social media, as in real life, cannot and will not be tolerated,” the ADL said. There was no indication of how far the attack plan had progressed or if the teen had access to guns.
He will now have to write a report on Mr Lutz, a Swiss diplomat who in 1944 issued credentials to thousands of Jewish families living under Nazi occupation in Budapest.
Historians estimate he saved up to 62,000 people, but he was reprimanded for overstepping his authority when he returned to Switzerland after the war, and for years remained largely forgotten.
— CutC by bbc.com
