Politics & Power Quote by Ahmed Yassin

The line is engineered to do three things at once: narrow the target, broaden the appeal, and launder a movement into the language of grievance rather than ideology. By declaring, "We did not fight the Americans or the Europeans", Yassin isn’t offering a neutral fact check so much as issuing a recruitment pitch to the wider world: stand down, or at least look away. It’s a classic separation move, designed to keep Western audiences from experiencing the conflict as personally implicated. The unspoken message is: your governments may have opinions, money, weapons, and vetoes in the room, but you, the public, need not feel threatened by us.

Then comes the pivot: "We fight only the Israeli enemy". The word "only" performs moral triage. It frames violence as bounded, reactive, and therefore more defensible. "Enemy" is doing heavy work too: it collapses civilians, soldiers, state, and society into a single legitimate target, the kind of rhetorical compression that makes escalation easier to justify.

The final clause, "that took our homes and homeland", shifts the register from strategy to dispossession. "Homes" is intimate, domestic, almost cinematic; "homeland" scales up to nationhood. Together they create an emotional staircase from personal loss to collective cause. Spoken by Hamas’s founder in a period marked by occupation, settlement expansion, and cycles of attacks and reprisals, the quote aims to reposition Hamas as a national resistance movement rather than a transnational jihadist threat - while quietly preserving the ideological absolutism that makes compromise structurally difficult.