B'nai Brith says judges need better understanding of the Holocaust

The group states "every Canadian should be appalled” by the proceedings at Gabriel Sohier Chaput's hate speech trial in Montreal.

Jul 11, 2022

A prominent Jewish human rights organization is calling on Canada to ensure its judges understand anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in light of a hate speech trial underway in Montreal.

During closing arguments at the Montreal courthouse last week, the trial of Gabriel Sohier Chaput devolved into a debate over whether the Nazis were responsible for the Holocaust.

While the Crown contended that the court could take for granted that Sohier Chaput’s call for “non-stop Nazism” referred to the persecution and violence against Jews, the presiding judge said the prosecution should have called an expert witness to establish the connection.

“Every Canadian should be appalled,” B’nai Brith Canada’s director of legal services, Sam Goldstein, wrote in a statement released Monday.

“We don’t expect Holocaust denial and distortion from our courts,” Goldstein added. “The prosecutor does not need to establish that the Holocaust happened. No expert witness is needed. The Jewish community is outraged.”

Sohier Chaput is on trial for one charge of wilfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group. The charge stems from an article he wrote for the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer that warned that 2017 “will be the year of action.”

The blog post included racist images and comments about Jews throughout, and the website displayed photos of Hitler and other images associated with Nazism.

In court on Friday, Sohier Chaput’s lawyer, Hélène Poussard, argued she didn’t believe that Nazis, the political party of Adolf Hitler, were behind the Holocaust. She also argued the Holocaust was strictly an “economical solution.”

At one point, Judge Manlio Del Negro told Poussard she should stop talking, adding: “You are saying things that go against what is reasonable.”

But, later, Del Negro told Crown prosecutor Patrick Lafrenière he failed to establish that the Holocaust was the consequence of Nazi ideology.

“You see, (Mr.) Lafrenière, it’s your fault,” Del Negro said. “It would have been easy to bring a historian to prove that Nazism was behind the extermination of the Jews.”

B’nai Brith, which is behind the initial complaint that led to Sohier Chaput being charged, believes the trial shows there’s a need for judges to better understand anti-Semitism and the context of the Holocaust.

“The murder of 6 million Jews is a historical fact,” the organization’s chief executive officer, Michael Mostyn, said in a statement. “It does not have to be proven again and again in a courtroom.”

The case is scheduled to return to court on Aug. 29, when the two sides will fix a date for a debate on some of the historical aspects of the trial.

https://montrealgazette.com/news/loc...-the-holocaust