We Are Not Obligated to Defend Our Defamers

There was a time—not long ago—when defending free speech, even that which was detestable, was considered a mark of philosophical courage. We imagined ourselves as stewards of a sacred Enlightenment tradition. We believed we were fortifying civilization itself by defending the rights of those who might gladly incinerate its foundations.

But that fantasy must be laid to rest. The project has collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. If the Jewish people are to preserve our dignity, sovereignty, and civilizational coherence, we must acknowledge that the rules have changed—because the game has been rewritten beneath our feet.

To my liberal, American Jewish kin—those who still carry the torch for pluralism, procedural justice, and tolerance—I speak with urgency and fraternal clarity: The Enlightenment you are defending has been emptied out and rebranded. You are safeguarding ruins.

The First Amendment was once a luminous architecture grounded in shared moral grammar. But in the hands of today’s ideological saboteurs—Marxists, Islamists, and neo-Nazis—it has become a Trojan horse, smuggled past the gates by those who speak in rights but traffic in erasure.

This is not about discourse. This is about memetic insurgency. Psychological destabilization. Mass manipulation via weaponized virality. Social media didn’t just turn up the volume—it rewired the entire sound system and handed the stage to those who call for our destruction with algorithmic amplification.

And what are we told? That to resist this—to call it what it is—is to betray our values. That our silence is the price of moral elegance.

Nonsense. We are not required to offer legal sanctuary to our own defamers.

Let Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi—figures exalted by a movement steeped in anti-Jewish dogma—seek counsel from CAIR or the ACLU. Let them enjoy the patronage of platforms, institutions, international NGOs—and foreign regimes that openly fund ideological subversion and antisemitic propaganda. But do not conscript Jews to defend the rights of those who chant for our erasure and call it resistance.

We are not morally obligated to dignify the rhetoric of annihilation. That isn’t liberalism. That’s moral self-immolation.

John Adams warned us:

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Adams understood: Without a moral substrate, legal protections become mechanisms of decay. Today, free speech is worshipped not as a means to truth, but as a shield for predatory ideologies masquerading as justice.

What we are defending is no longer “speech” in any classical sense. It is strategically corrosive noise, engineered to corrode Jewish resolve, sabotage moral clarity, and rewrite history in real time.

Even among our own, the collapse is palpable. I am not invoking the Yevsektsia as an accusation, but as a cautionary shadow—a historical footnote reminding us what happens when identity is surrendered to ideology. Today, respected figures in Jewish public life—under immense institutional pressure, as well as their own overconfidence in societal goodness—have mistaken paralysis for nuance. Their silence is interpreted not as restraint, but as permission.

We are watching a diaspora elite so concerned with remaining respectable in the eyes of hostile institutions that they can no longer say the word “evil,” even when it drips in blood.

Let us be absolutely clear: Legality is not morality. Neutrality is not virtue. And journalism is not absolution.

In our tradition, speech is not a freedom—it is a sacred trust. But when it is decoupled from truth, it becomes an instrument of violence. Not figuratively. Functionally.

And so, I say:

We are not obligated to defend our defamers.

We are not here to win moral beauty contests judged by those who dream of our absence.

We are here to endure. To build. To outlast.

Let them find their own lawyers—we have a civilization to defend.