Part of the ‘Not Quite What You Meant’ series

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Not all violence is equal. Not all silence is virtuous. And not all protest is peace. When morality gets inverted and terror is rationalised, the greatest betrayal is staying silent in the name of civility.

By: Ezra Nadav

We’ve reached a point—especially in the West, and glaringly in the United States—where even the act of defending your own people, your own citizens, is branded immoral by some.

That should disturb us.

But maybe we shouldn’t be surprised.

After all, we’ve spent decades teaching children that standing up to the bully is as bad as being the bully. The “zero tolerance” policies that swept through schools in the ‘90s and 2000s didn’t just discourage violence—they discouraged discernment. They taught a warped sense of moral equivalence where punching back became just as wrong as the first blow.

So now, we have a generation—or two—of adults who instinctively tolerate abuse. Who believe that any response to aggression must be unjust. Who have been trained to misidentify justified defence as violence and actual violence as misunderstood “resistance.”

They have been conditioned not to think morally, but to perform morality.

Empathy Without Boundaries Is Enabling

When the abuser is always given the benefit of the doubt—because they had a hard life, because they’re “marginalised,” because violence is “the language of the unheard”—what we’re doing is stripping victims of their dignity and agency. We’re gaslighting them into silence.

This isn’t empathy.

It’s moral abandonment.

We’re living in an age of inverse morality, where the instinct to side with the aggressor is seen as virtue, and the impulse to protect the vulnerable is called extremism. This is the result of hollowed-out education, historical amnesia, and a social narrative that glorifies passive peace over just resistance.

Why Rational Thinking Doesn’t Work on Radical Minds

This leads us to the deeper truth no one wants to admit: you cannot reason with someone who has been radicalised by terror propaganda.

Why? Because radicalisation isn’t about facts—it’s about identity.

Once a person fuses their sense of self with a worldview that frames violence as justice and hatred as moral duty, logic has no leverage. They aren’t weighing truth—they’re performing loyalty. They aren’t listening to understand—they’re scanning for betrayal.

Propaganda of this kind works like a cult:

• It isolates.
• It flattens moral nuance.
• It creates a binary: good versus evil, oppressor versus oppressed, you’re either with us or you’re the enemy.

And the most dangerous propaganda doesn’t just lie—it inverts truth. It tells people that self-defence is oppression, and terror is resistance. It recasts murder as martyrdom and silence as complicity.

In that framework, no debate is ever honest. No statistic will ever matter. No olive branch will ever be enough.

You Can’t Appease the Fire

We’ve been gaslit into believing that we can “win people over” with reason, with kindness, with hashtags and panels and dialogues. That if we just listen harder, empathise more, understand deeper, we can convert extremism into understanding.

But that’s not how radicalisation works.

You can’t negotiate with someone who sees your existence as a threat.

You don’t win moral clarity by asking your abuser to explain why they hate you.

You win it by standing your ground—clearly, courageously, unapologetically.

That’s not cruelty.

That’s the foundation of justice.

We must rediscover the moral courage to say: Not all violence is equal. Not all silence is virtuous. And not all protest is peace.

The sooner we stop mistaking weakness for compassion, the sooner we might recover a moral compass strong enough to survive what’s coming next.