Daniel Robson is an independent Canadian journalist specialising in extremism, organised crime and public-safety policyThe Québec Superior Court’s order of 24 July 2025 that sent Montréal YouTuber Hicham Jerando to jail for thirty days was triggered less by his on-screen attacks on Moroccan judge Abdelrahim Hanin than by his open defiance of a Québec injunction ordering him to take those videos down—contempt, not content, put him behind bars. Fewer than twenty-four hours later the same courthouse handed him a second thirty-day term, another $10,000 fine and one hundred hours of community service for ignoring a parallel takedown order in the case brought by Casablanca lawyer Adil Said Lamtiri.Nine days earlier, the same courthouse had already order ed him to pay $164,514 in damages for those very slurs. .In that ruling, Justice Horia Bundaru wrote that Jerando had “propagated unverified falsehoods harvested from isolated sources, without any independent check and without regard for the catastrophic impact on the plaintiff’s reputation.” The court noted that eight March 2023 videos accusing Lamtiri of corruption, money-laundering and mafia ties amassed nearly 930 000 views in forty days, and that Jerando’s contemptuous refusal to delete them — despite an interlocutory injunction in July 2023 and a January 2024 contempt finding — showed “flagrant disdain for judicial authority.”Bundaru concluded that only heavy punitive damages could deter a repeat offender who “acts alone yet amplifies lies to a mass audience.”Civil penalties failed.Judicial dignity bled.And only then did a cell door close.Really?.Canada’s measured response looks soft beside the fifteen-year prison term that Morocco’s terrorism chamber imposed in absentia on 8 May 2025 for the same digital campaign.Moroccan judges had heard Jerando exhort followers to “execute Najim Bensami, resurrect him and execute him again,” publish the prosecutor’s family photos and champion lone-wolf tactics. They drew a straight causal line between those broadcasts and a flood of death threats signed by self-styled jihadists.The gulf between a single month behind bars in Montréal and fifteen years for the same videos abroad raises an uneasy question: do Canadian institutions grasp the public-safety stakes of online incitement only once their own authority is mocked?.The answer, alas, is all too obvious.The twin Montréal jailings show that Canadian courts will act — but only after contempt forces their hand. A justice system that waits for ridicule before it protects citizens concedes far too much to the next savvy provocateur, whether his slogans bear the IRGC crest or white-supremacist runes.Canada does not lack laws; it lacks urgency.Until enforcement matches the velocity of modern propaganda, a thirty-day sentence and a modest fine will remain footnotes to the larger story — one in which a digital demagogue like Hicham Jerando trades outrage for revenue and danger for clicks while the rule of law struggles for breath.Daniel Robson is an independent Canadian journalist specialising in extremism, organised crime and public-safety policy.
