A far-right activist has been jailed for two years by a judge who said antisemitism “has been used before to tear at the heart of Western democracy” and “it must not be allowed to do so again”.

Samuel Melia, of Pudsey, was found guilty earlier this year of stirring up racial hatred by running an online library of downloadable white supremacist stickers.

Melia was the head of the Hundred Handers, an anonymous group responsible for a spate of anti-immigration “stickering” incidents between 2019 and 2021, Leeds Crown Court heard.

On Friday, Judge Tom Bayliss KC said to the 34-year-old: “I am quite sure that your mindset is that of a racist and a white supremacist.

“You hold Nazi sympathies and you are an antisemite.”

He told Melia: “Whilst your activity ceased in 2021, recent events in the United Kingdom demonstrate that there is, for the first time since the 1930s, a real risk of gross, potentially violent, antisemitism becoming normalised on our streets.

“The publication of this kind of material is corrosive to our society and highly damaging.

“Antisemitism, in particular, is a destructive force.

“It has been used before to tear at the heart of Western democracy. It must not be allowed to do so again.”

Judge Bayliss outlined some of the ethnic slurs about a range of groups Melia used on Telegram channels, telling him: “You clearly demonstrate a deep-seated antipathy to those groups, and you do so by your uninhibited use of language that no right-thinking person would ever consider appropriate.”

When police searched his house in Pudsey, they found a label printer and stickers with slogans such as “It’s ok to be white” and “Natives losing jobs; migrants pouring in”.

Officers also found “key signs of the defendant’s ideology” including a book by Oswald Mosley, who founded the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, as well as posters of Mosley and Adolf Hitler.

Judge Bayliss said: “The fact that you have Nazi sympathies couldn’t be clearer.

“In your garage you had on display a poster of Hitler, sporting the legend ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer’ and a Nazi Eagle, a symbol developed originally by the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1920s and which became a symbol of the German government after the Nazis took power.

“You even posted a picture of Hitler to a Telegram account, describing him as ‘our uncle’.”

Judge Bayliss pointed to Melia’s deliberate referencing of so-called grooming gang court cases and his “obsessive interest” in Sir Oswald Mosley.

He told the defendant: “You were engaged in a campaign of hatred against minority communities and you were, I am sure, quite deliberately trying to stir up racial hatred.”

The judge said: “In his speeches, Sir Oswald Mosley accused the Jews of aiming at world domination, of controlling the City of London and the press.

“Almost a century later, and after the Holocaust, you were peddling the same antisemitism.”

After the case, Detective Chief Superintendent James Dunkerley is Head of Counter Terrorism Policing North East. He said: “Evidence shows that large numbers of these stickers appeared both here in the UK and a number abroad.

“These expressions of hate were an attempt to bring upset and stir up racial hatred. It is important to highlight however that our communities are strong and will not allow those who seek to disrupt them succeed.

“Those that seek to bring hatred to our communities through actions such as stickering will be identified and brought to justice.”