What are the consequences for a New York City public defender caught suppressing the First Amendment rights of New York’s citizens?
Nothing — at least when the speech being suppressed is pro-Israel.
Victoria Ruiz was caught on camera ripping down a poster of a kidnap victim from Hamas’ barbaric Oct. 7 attacks.
Despite this effort to interfere with legally protected speech, her employer, New York County Defender Services — which holds a rich contract with the city — decided she gets to keep her job after what’s clearly a total whitewash of an internal review.
The message could not be any clearer.
For whole swaths of the city’s public workers, from CUNY to the courts, it’s open season not only for supporters of Israel but the helpless victims of Hamas.
Ruiz’s actions are reprehensible and demand, at the very least, a full public apology to the families of Hamas’ victims as well as serious professional consequences.
But her vandalism does raise an interesting question.
Why don’t these brave fighters for the Palestinian cause simply put up their own posters instead of tearing down others?
They could run through the usual litany of false accusations of occupation and apartheid and recycled 19th-century blood libels.
In other words, why not fight speech they dislike with their own speech?
The answer, of course, is that Ruiz et al. don’t actually care about supporting the Palestinians.
They care about supporting Hamas.
It’s for Hamas that these posters — visible, tangible evidence of the Islamist terror cadre’s savage brutality — are deeply inconvenient.
Ruiz’s actions reveal the utter bankruptcy of her cause.
She has no way to defend what she believes except through silencing others.
That her salary and the salary of her ideological allies come at all from tax dollars only adds to the enormity.
She and her organization should face a blanket ban on any more city work until they get their moral — and legal — ideas straightened out.
