Politics & Power Quote by Meir Kahane

A line like this isn’t trying to persuade so much as to harden its audience against hesitation. Kahane’s most aggressive move is the metaphor: “political AIDS.” In the era when AIDS carried panic, stigma, and a sense of inexorable contagion, he borrows that dread to recast terrorism as a terminal, spreading disease. That framing smuggles in the cure: if the problem is infection, then negotiation becomes not just naive but immoral, a kind of societal self-harm. The policy conclusion is preloaded into the imagery.

The triple anaphora - “one does not... one does not... one kills...” - reads like scripture turned into a checklist. It strips the issue of messy particulars (motives, grievances, hostages, civilians, collateral effects) and replaces them with a single imperative: kill. Even the clinical, impersonal “one” matters. It launders anger into “rule,” giving vengeance the sheen of principle and making dissent feel like weakness or complicity.

Context sharpens the intent. Kahane, a rabbi and the founder of the Jewish Defense League and Kach movement, built a politics of maximalist security, ethnic separation, and militant retaliation amid recurring cycles of Israeli-Palestinian violence and global hijackings in the 1970s-80s. This sentence is less counterterror doctrine than a recruitment slogan for a worldview: the state (and citizen) as executioner, moral ambiguity as luxury, and negotiation as surrender. Subtext: if you accept his diagnosis, you accept the entire authoritarian toolkit that follows.