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Haroun Bouazzi, co-president of the Association des Musulmans et des Arabes pour la laïcité au Québec, slammed the idea of using a municipal bylaw to gag Chaoui.

Bouazzi said it’s up to authorities to determine whether Chaoui has incited hatred or encouraged acts of terrorism and, if so, to take appropriate action. If Chaoui has done no more than express unpopular views, that is not illegal, he said.

“There are many people in our society who promote extremely negative views,” he said.

They include people who support sharia law, people who support the return of the death penalty and those who want to ban abortion even for rape victims, he said.

“Democracy should permit these kinds of statements. You can’t do much to prevent them, since they are part of democratic debate, as long as they do not promote hatred,” Bouazzi said.

“If our response to this kind of statement is to reduce freedom of speech, and thus reduce democracy, in the end, it is the preacher who wins and all of us lose,” he said.

Bouazzi said he supports a proposal by the Quebec Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission to facilitate prosecutions for hate speech by allowing the commission to investigate such cases even if no one has laid a complaint.

Human-rights lawyers have compared the use of a municipal bylaw to block Chaoui to Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis’s infamous Padlock Law, which allowed police to padlock any building used to propagate communism. The Supreme Court overturned the law in 1957.