Gabriel Sohier-Chaput walks the halls of the courthouse in Montreal on Monday, Feb.28, 2022. A Quebec court judge is scheduled to deliver his verdict in the trial of a Montreal man accused of promoting hatred against Jews. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson
MONTREAL – A Quebec court judge today found a 36-year-old man Montreal man guilty of wilfully promoting hatred against Jews.
Judge Manlio Del Negro says Gabriel Sohier Chaput intended to promote hate against Jewish people in a 2017 article for neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer.
The article – one of more than 800 hundred articles Sohier Chaput wrote for the site – called for “non-stop Nazism, everywhere,” and the judge says it sought to initiate violence.
Sohier Chaput had argued that the article was intended to be humorous and taken ironically, but the judge says those claims weren’t credible.
The trial was extended with hearings to debate what link the judge could draw between Nazi ideology and the Holocaust without testimony having been provided by an expert witness.
Del Negro ruled that the link between Nazi ideology and the murder of millions of Jews during the Second World War is so notorious and uncontestable that it is not subject to debate between reasonable people.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 23, 2023.
