What exactly is free speech?

The Islam forum was set up so that followers of the religion had somewhere that they could discuss all aspects of it and explain things to non-Muslims who were curious about Islam. Instead what it turned into was a forum where the believers spent their whole time defending their faith against an persistent, and frequently abusive onslaught. In no other religious forum were the believers forced to defend their faith in that way, and eventually most of them gave up posting there. What was left was basically the same sort of battleground that we're now seeing whenever threads about immigration start to get out of hand, and eventually we got to the point where it was beyond saving. On top of that, the constant grief in the forum meant that nobody wanted to moderate it any more, it was simply too stressful. All this meant that the only option we had was to reluctantly close the forum. It's a shame really, if it had been used in the way it was originally intended it could have been a highly informative forum for those of us who aren't Muslim as well as being somewhere that believers could discuss their religion.