Patrick Dai had threatened to “shoot all you pig Jews” and “behead” their children three weeks after the Israel-Hamas war began.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
A former Cornell University junior was sentenced to nearly two years in prison Monday for posting gruesome threats against fellow Jewish students and their families in an online forum.
The U.S. Justice Department announced that 22-year-old Patrick Dai had been convicted of a hate crime using interstate communications.
“The defendant’s threats terrorized the Cornell campus community for days and shattered the community’s sense of safety,” said U.S. Attorney Carla B. Freedman for the Northern District of New York in a statement following the court’s judgment.
Dai pled guilty to writing several violent posts in a university message board on October 28 and 29, right after the IDF invaded the Gaza Strip to begin its dismantling of the Hamas terror organization that three weeks earlier had headed an invasion of Israel in which its forces led a massacre of 1,200 people and abducted over 250 to Gaza.
In one post he wrote, “Watch out pig jews. jihad is coming. nowhere is safe. your synagogue will become graveyards. your women will be raped and your children will be beheaded. glory to Allah.”
In addition, he threatened to “shoot up” a campus dining room that served mainly kosher food, “slit the throat” and “stab” any Jewish man he met on university grounds, “bomb jewish house [sic]” in reference to the Cornell Jewish Center for students, and to “shoot all you pig Jews,” whom he also described as “rats” who should be eradicated.
The former engineering student made the threats anonymously, under such usernames as “hamas soldier,” “kill jews,” and “sieg heil.”
“Every student has the right to pursue their education without fear of violence based on who they are, how they look, where they are from or how they worship,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said. “Antisemitic threats of violence, like the defendant’s vicious and graphic threats here, violate that right.
“Today’s sentencing reaffirms that we will hold accountable those who violently threaten and intimidate others based on their religious practice or background,” she added.
After serving his jail time, Dai will be put under “supervised release” for three years, the Department stated.
Although he also faced the possibility of paying up to $250,000 in fines, the judge ultimately gave him a symbolic $100 penalty.
Dai had tried to claim that he had posted what he did in an attempt to “garner sympathy” for the Jewish people.
His lawyer, Lisa Peebles, said her client had been diagnosed with autism after his arrest, which explained this thought pattern behind his posts.
“He believed, wrongly, that the posts would prompt a ‘blowback’ against what he perceived as anti-Israel media coverage and pro-Hamas sentiment on campus,” Peebles told the court in her arguments for leniency.
Based on the severity of the threats, members of the Jewish community are concerned that 21 months in jail is not enough. Defendants often don’t serve their full sentence, which makes it even more worrying.