Politics & Power Quote by Hassan Nasrallah

Nasrallah’s line reads like a defensive shrug, but it’s really a small act of narrative judo. On the surface he’s doing something banal: normalizing contact with American journalists, insisting it’s routine, frictionless, unremarkable. The repetition is the point. By saying “not the first time” and then immediately doubling down with “many different newspapers and stations,” he’s building a paper trail in public, turning access into evidence.

The subtext is aimed at multiple audiences at once. To Western media, he’s signaling: I’m not afraid of your questions, and I’m legible enough to play on your field. That’s a bid for legitimacy - not necessarily moral approval, but the kind of credibility that comes from being treated as an interview subject rather than a caricature. To his own base and regional rivals, he’s preempting the charge of secret dealings or ideological contamination. “Never had a problem” is less about the journalists than about policing the insinuation that speaking to Americans equals softening, capitulating, or bargaining.

Context matters because media contact is never neutral for a figure branded by the U.S. as a terrorist leader. Every interview is also a contest over framing: who gets to define “resistance,” “terror,” “occupation,” “security.” Nasrallah’s careful insistence on precedent tries to strip the meeting of scandal and turn it into something he controls: a demonstration of steadiness, not a concession. Even the slight stumble (“I’ve ha -”) inadvertently underlines the tension: he’s improvising in a space where one misphrased sentence can be weaponized by enemies on all sides.