"We treat them in the same way. Those who kill our women and innocent, we kill their women and innocent, until they refrain"
About this Quote
The sentence is engineered to launder massacre into symmetry. “We treat them in the same way” opens with the language of policy, not rage, as if violence were an administrative response to a prior wrong. Then the real pivot: the deliberate narrowing of “those who kill” into a collective “we,” followed by the most strategically chosen noun in the arsenal of moral claims - “women and innocent.” Bin Laden isn’t describing targets; he’s drafting a permission slip. By invoking the most universally protected categories, he tries to flip the moral burden: if you care about innocents, you must accept his logic of retaliation, because he’s framing himself as the only actor willing to impose consequences.
The subtext is twofold. First, it’s a recruitment pitch: humiliation and grief are translated into a clean rule that promises agency. Second, it’s preemptive absolution. The phrase “until they refrain” casts terrorism as coercive diplomacy, a temporary method to force a stronger enemy to change behavior. It’s not just justification; it’s a bargaining theory with bodies as leverage.
Context matters: bin Laden’s public rhetoric repeatedly fused real civilian deaths from wars and sanctions with an absolutist collectivism that treats entire populations as interchangeable. The move is propagandistic judo: he cites Western harm to erase distinctions between combatant and civilian, then uses that erasure to normalize his own. The line’s power is its false clarity - a brutal, meme-ready equation that turns moral complexity into a kill switch.
The subtext is twofold. First, it’s a recruitment pitch: humiliation and grief are translated into a clean rule that promises agency. Second, it’s preemptive absolution. The phrase “until they refrain” casts terrorism as coercive diplomacy, a temporary method to force a stronger enemy to change behavior. It’s not just justification; it’s a bargaining theory with bodies as leverage.
Context matters: bin Laden’s public rhetoric repeatedly fused real civilian deaths from wars and sanctions with an absolutist collectivism that treats entire populations as interchangeable. The move is propagandistic judo: he cites Western harm to erase distinctions between combatant and civilian, then uses that erasure to normalize his own. The line’s power is its false clarity - a brutal, meme-ready equation that turns moral complexity into a kill switch.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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