The phone rang the other day and it was the president of the Reform Party of Syria, Farid Ghadry. I’ve known him now for years. He has visited the offices of The New York Sun, he’s contributed to our oped page, and he has been a steady and significant, if sometimes lonely, voice in Washington calling for bringing freedom and democracy to Syria.

When I think of the sacrifices of Arab fighters for democracy, mainly I think of the threat of assassination. Other Arab democracy advocates I know carry guns, wear bulletproof vests, encrypt their communications, or travel with bodyguards. Beyond the threat of being killed, there is the ever-present likelihood of being vilified in the Arab press — or, for that matter, in the American press — as a stooge of neoconservatives or of Israel or of the Bush administration.

But when Mr. Ghadry spoke to me earlier this week, he told me of a sacrifice he has made that went beyond anything that I had ever imagined. He’s ruptured his own family.

“When we started talking about bringing democracy to Syria after 9/11, my father … he is a Baathist. … When he got wind of it … he filed a lawsuit. There is no truth to it. What he is trying to do is embroil me in the courts,” Mr. Ghadry told me. “It’s a combination of Saudis and Syrian Baathists behind it.”

The lawsuit, in Montgomery County court in Rockville, Md., seeks $12.7 million from Mr. Ghadry. The lawsuit says Mr. Ghadry was given the money by his father. Mr. Ghadry says that is nonsense.

Mr. Ghadry has to produce records of all his overseas phone calls since 1989 and his American Express records since the 1970s. He had to produce stacks of other records. “They invaded my life totally,” he said. He says they showed not a shred of evidence of the supposed trust from his father that the lawsuit purports to be an effort to recover. Yet conveniently, the Saudi embassy in Washington produced some so-called evidence.

Mr. Ghadry says the case has cost him a fortune in legal fees over the past five years. His father, who operates from Lebanon, where Syrian influence is still formidable, is seeking to seize properties held by Mr. Ghadry in the Washington area, properties that provide Mr. Ghadry with income that supports his activities as an activist for freedom.

Every penny of Mr. Ghadry’s that goes to the legal battle is a penny that doesn’t go to democracy.

A weaker-willed man might have settled long ago. Mr. Ghadry said he met with his father in Paris about eight months ago, and that his father told him, essentially, that if he stopped advocating for freedom in Syria, the lawsuit would go away.

A weaker-willed man would have said, okay, let someone else with a less litigious father worry about freeing Syria, I’ve done my best for a few years.

But Mr. Ghadry is soldiering on. On Rosh Hashana, Jews hear in synagogue of the story of Abraham’s binding of Isaac, a cautionary tale about father-son relations if ever there was one.

Mr. Ghadry is essentially sacrificing his relationship with his own father to the cause of freedom in Syria.

It’s happened before — during the American Revolution, John Lovell, the headmaster of Boston Latin School, was a Tory, while his son, James Lovell, was a patriot and eventually a member of the Continental Congress who was held captive by the British for months before being released in a prisoner swap.

And there are parallels, as well, to the law being used as a weapon to sideline some of the most effective soldiers in a world war. Think of Elliott Abrams being pursued by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor during the Cold War, or I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby being pursued by independent counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in the matter of Richard Armitage’s leak of Valerie Plame’s identity. The distinguishing characteristic in Mr. Ghadry’s case is that he is being pursued in court not by a prosecutor but by his own Baathist, anti-American, anti-Israel father.

The other distinguishing characteristic is that Mr. Abrams got a presidential pardon, and Mr. Libby has a high-powered group of friends fund-raising for his legal defense fund. As for Mr. Ghadry, would it be too much to ask that some of those high-powered, “pro bono” legal hours that are so often spent on appeals for death-row murderer-rapists be spent on assisting a man so devoted to his country and to the cause of freedom?