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Daily Inspiration Quote by Meir Kahane

"Above all, it is not decency or goodness of gentleness that impresses the Middle East, but strength"

About this Quote

Power, not virtue, is the currency Kahane insists the Middle East respects. The line is built as a rebuke: “decency or goodness or gentleness” get stacked into a trio of soft-sounding ideals, then dismissed with a blunt pivot to “strength.” It’s rhetoric designed to shame restraint as naive and to recode aggression as realism. The real punch is “Above all” - a preemptive closing of debate that frames moral hesitation as a luxury, even a danger.

The subtext is transactional and civilizational: Kahane isn’t merely arguing for a tougher posture; he’s sketching an entire region as governed by a single principle and, by implication, depicting accommodation or diplomacy as culturally unintelligible there. That generalization does political work. It flattens complex societies into a foil against which coercion looks prudent, and it turns any appeal to “gentleness” into weakness - a moral argument disguised as a strategic one.

Context matters because Kahane wasn’t a neutral analyst. As the founder of the Jewish Defense League and later the Kach party, he championed militant Jewish nationalism and advocated policies widely condemned as racist and extremist; Kach would be banned in Israel, and Kahane was later assassinated in New York. Read in that light, the quote functions less as description than as permission structure: it authorizes harsh measures by claiming the audience (the “Middle East”) only understands force. It’s an attempt to make strength feel like ethics, and ethics feel like self-sabotage.

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TopicWar
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Kahane, Meir. (2026, January 17). Above all, it is not decency or goodness of gentleness that impresses the Middle East, but strength. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/above-all-it-is-not-decency-or-goodness-of-73433/

Chicago Style
Kahane, Meir. "Above all, it is not decency or goodness of gentleness that impresses the Middle East, but strength." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/above-all-it-is-not-decency-or-goodness-of-73433/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Above all, it is not decency or goodness of gentleness that impresses the Middle East, but strength." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/above-all-it-is-not-decency-or-goodness-of-73433/. Accessed 3 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Meir Kahane (August 1, 1932 - November 5, 1990) was a Clergyman from USA.

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