Politics & Power Quote by Moustapha Akkad

Akkad’s line reads like a moral emergency flare from someone who knew, in the most personal way, how quickly “terrorism” gets drafted into other people’s culture wars. As a director best known for The Message and Lion of the Desert, he spent his career staging the dignity of Arab and Muslim histories for Western audiences that too often met those stories with suspicion. After 9/11, and amid the media reflex to staple violence to Islam, the quote functions as both shield and scalpel: it blocks the lazy conflation of faith with atrocity, then cuts deeper by denying terrorists even the baseline category of “humanity.”

That last move is doing heavy rhetorical work. Calling terrorism “no humanity” isn’t philosophical; it’s strategic. It refuses terrorists the legitimacy that comes with being treated as political actors with coherent identities. The phrasing also anticipates the way publics look for a single culprit group to blame. “No religion, no nationality” is a pre-emptive strike against scapegoating - a plea to widen the frame from “their problem” to a shared security and ethical crisis.

The second sentence turns that frame into a demand: collective action. Not vengeance, not retaliation, but coordination - civic, international, communal. Coming from Akkad, it’s also a director’s instinct: he understood narratives. If terrorism thrives on spectacle and polarization, the counter-narrative has to be solidarity disciplined enough to resist the simplifying thrill of assigning collective guilt.