Leo Pearlman is a London based producer and a loud and proud Zionist. His most recent film about the Oct 7 Nova Music Festival massacre, ‘We Will Dance Again’ has won the 2025 Emmy of the 46th Annual News & Documentary Awards for most ‘Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary’.
Silence has many disguises. Sometimes it is fear, the fear of saying the wrong thing, being labelled, losing status, invitations, platforms. Sometimes it is complicity, the quiet that comes from knowing the truth but choosing comfort over consequence. While sometimes it is ideological self-preservation, the silence that descends when reality threatens to collapse a carefully constructed worldview.
But however it arrives, silence always ends in the same place. It protects power, abandons victims and it guarantees that the problem grows. We are watching this play out, in real time, across Britain.
Recently, the United Arab Emirates stopped funding students to study in the United Kingdom, citing fears of Islamist radicalisation on UK campuses.
A foreign state looked at our UK universities, our institutions, our refusal to draw lines and concluded that we are no longer capable of safeguarding young people.
That should have triggered a national reckoning, instead, it barely registered.
At the very moment the Muslim Brotherhood expands its influence here, openly, confidently, often under the banner of “community work", Britain remains paralysed. Not because we do not understand the danger, but because we are afraid to articulate it. Afraid to separate faith from ideology, to name Islamism as a political project rather than hiding behind euphemism.
This is silence through fear and it leaves us defenceless.
The same silence, louder, more revealing, surrounds Iran.
For months, Iranians have been risking their lives against forty-seven years of Islamist rule. Women beaten for showing their hair, protesters imprisoned, tortured, executed. A society openly rebelling against clerical domination. Yet, the Western media murmurs and the activist class averts its eyes. The people who haven’t stopped shouting about injustice since Oct 7th 2023 suddenly cannot find their voices.
To tell the Iranian story honestly requires answering a very simple question: Why are these brave people willing to die? The undeniable answer destroys the silence.
They are not rising up against a foreign occupier or a misunderstood policy tweak. They are rising up against an Islamist regime that has crushed speech, culture, women, art, family life and economic survival under religious rule. There is no way to explain that without confronting Islamism as an ideology of power and that is where the silence becomes strategic.
In much of Western progressive discourse, Islam has been transformed from a belief system into a racial identity. Criticism is treated not as political disagreement, but as bigotry. Once that framing is accepted, the idea that millions of non-Western people might actively reject Islamist governance becomes unthinkable.
Iranian protesters are inconvenient, they do not fit the script, so they are erased.
But the most damning silence of all comes not from editors in newsrooms or idealogically complicit journalists, but from the celebrity activists and political loudmouths who have spent the past two years fixated on Israel.
These figures found endless energy to amplify terrorist propaganda, to romanticise barbarism as “resistance," to flirt openly with the destruction of the only Jewish state. Every march urgent, every slogan mandatory, every boycott essential, every social media post demanded. Every silence, back then, a moral crime.
Now, as Iranians are beaten and executed by their own state, there is nothing. This is not forgetfulness, it is self-protection.
Iran leaves no Israel to blame, no Zionism to scapegoat, no colonial myth to retreat into. It is a non-Western people risking everything to overthrow an Islamist regime and that shatters the ideological performance these figures depend upon.
To speak would require admitting that Islamism can be tyrannical, that “resistance" movements can become executioners and that the people they defended were not liberators but jailers. It would force a question they cannot answer. Why was there endless compassion for terrorists, but none for women, students, dissidents, innocents being murdered by the state?
So they remain silent and silence, again, does the work.
Which brings us to the lesson often misunderstood as uniquely Jewish, but which is anything but:
Jewish tradition contrasts the fates of Moses and Joseph. Moses, when first asked who he is, answers that he is Egyptian. In that moment, he suppresses his identity. He survives, he leads, he achieves, recognised as Judaisms greatest prophet, but he never enters the Promised Land. His bones remain in the wilderness.
Joseph’s story is the opposite. Betrayed, enslaved, imprisoned, yet he never stops declaring who he is, a Hebrew, an Israelite. That refusal to erase himself ensures that his bones are ultimately brought home.
This is not just a warning to Jews, it is a warning to everyone.
Silence does not save you. Adaptation does not protect you. Erasing truth for comfort does not end well.
Whether silence is born of fear, complicity, or ideological self-defence, it always produces the same outcome, injustice hardens, power consolidates and those most at risk are left alone.
The lesson we must all take from what is currently happening here in the UK, in Iran and from the bible, is one that is truly universal.
Silence is the final lie we tell ourselves, the hope that by saying nothing, we can pass safely through history without consequence. But generations are not judged by what they know, only by what they are willing to name. Those who mute themselves may still lead, may still survive, may even reach the edge of something better, yet it is the ones who refuse to erase who they are, who speak despite the cost, that ultimately find their way home. The wilderness is not where evil wins, it is where truth is withheld long enough to be lost.
Speak while it still matters, stand with those who refuse to hide, for silence has never saved anyone.