LOS ANGELES, Nov. 28 (JTA) A U.S. judge has sentenced a man who spray-painted an Egyptian immigrant’s house with swastikas and white supremacist symbols to 10 months in prison.
The judge also ordered Joshua Hass, 20, to participate in a tolerance counseling program affiliated with the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Hass was also ordered to perform 100 hours of public service, some of it in programs benefiting the Arab American and Jewish American communities.
Hass pleaded guilty to the January 1998 attack on the immigrant’s home in Granada Hills, a Los Angeles suburb.
He admitted covering the entire front of the one-story building with six large swastikas, a pair of lightning bolts, initials of a skinhead gang, and the words “white power.”
Matz told Hass that his crime, though only a misdemeanor, was vile and contemptible.
In assigning Hass to therapy and a remedial program after his prison term, the judge said he wanted to give Hass a chance to change.
