Leadership Quote by Al Sharpton

Power here comes from the deliberate instability of the label. Sharpton’s line isn’t a policy memo; it’s a rhetorical wrench tossed into the gears of certainty. “Who defines terrorists?” turns the listener away from the act and toward the authority doing the naming. It’s a challenge to the idea that “terrorist” is a neutral description, rather than a political tool used by states and media to sort violence into acceptable and unacceptable categories.

The second sentence sharpens the provocation by compressing a century of realpolitik into a one-liner: alliances mutate, enemies get rebranded, yesterday’s “extremist” becomes tomorrow’s negotiating partner when it’s convenient. The subtext is not “terror is fine,” but “power decides what counts as terror.” It’s an accusation that moral language often arrives after strategic interests, not before them. By pairing “terrorist” with “friend,” Sharpton forces an uncomfortable juxtaposition: if friendship is possible later, then the original label may have been contingent, inflated, or selectively applied.

Context matters. Sharpton speaks as a political operator shaped by civil-rights-era memory, when dissidents were surveilled and delegitimized through loaded terminology. Post-9/11 America intensified that dynamic, making “terrorist” a near-absolute category that can short-circuit debate. His intent is to reopen debate by questioning the gatekeepers of legitimacy: governments, security agencies, headlines. It works because it’s compact, confrontational, and ethically irritating in exactly the way a political soundbite is supposed to be.