Yasser Arafat Quotes

History teaches us that nobody can prevent a resistance group from arming when it has the support of the people.

Guerrilla troops, especially when supported by much of the population, [can] hold a colonial army at bay.

We are very well-trained soldiers and we are armed. We will start ambushes, bombings, and even suicide bombings. We will not let the Americans rule us in such a humiliating way.

Very unusual in an insurgency to have absolutely no political agenda other than to return to power. Most insurgents have a political side to them.

It is important to emphasize that guerrilla warfare is a war of the masses, a war of the people. The guerrilla band is an armed nucleus, the fighting vanguard of the people. It draws its great force from the mass of the people themselves.

I didn't really know that much about the Maoists, but I just knew that they seemed to be so few and yet they painted themselves green and stood in front of the police waiting to get picked off.

Internal security means something. It means war against your own population.

We don't kill Iraqis - our hands do not kill Iraqis. But we target only the occupier with all the means of resistance.

Look at the Intifadah in Jerusalem. One cannot understand that phenomenon, a phenomenon where people, often very young boys, are successfully harassing one of the best armies in the world, without appreciating their freedom to move!

Freedom can be gained only at the point of an IRA rifle, and I apologize to no one for saying that we support the freedom fighters of the IRA.

"Terrorism" is what we call the violence of the weak, and we condemn it; "war" is what we call the violence of the strong, and we glorify it.

There is no clear or meaningful difference between insurgency and civil war, or between national terrorism and civil war for that matter.

During a single week of July 1967, 164 Americans were killed and 2100 were wounded in city riots in the United States. We are truly fighting a two-front war and doing badly in both. Each war feeds on the other and, although the President assures us that we have the resources to win both wars, in fact we are not winning either.

At the meeting I argued that the state had given us no alternative to violence. I said it was wrong and immoral to subject our people to armed attacks by the state without offering them some kind of alternative. I mentioned again that people on their own had taken up arms. Violence would begin whether we initiated it or not. Would it not be better to guide this violence ourselves, according to principles where we saved lives by attacking symbols of oppression, and not people? If we did not take the lead now, I said, we would soon be latecomers and followers to a movement we did not control.

[Francisco Franco] said they should resort to guerrilla war. Which has a history in Spain.

A colonial war is a very dirty kind of war. You're not fighting armed forces. You're fighting mostly unarmed people. And to fight that kind of war requires professional killers, which means mercenaries.

This is a movement. This is not Trump. This is not anything. This is a movement. Remember, it is a movement. We used to say silent majority. It's not a silent majority, it's really a noisy majority.

If you call it a riot, it sounds like it was just a bunch of crazy people who went out and did bad things for no reason. I maintain it was somewhat understandable, if not acceptable. So I call it a rebellion.

I think people would be up in arms. I think we would most likely have a similar situation to what happened in the 60s. I don't know if it would be as violent, I think it would be difficult to say that. But I think that, from what I can understand, our nation as a whole is largely against the war as it stands.

On the Vietnam War: I've lived under situations where every decent man declared war first and I've lived under situations where you don't declare war. We've been flexible enough to kill people without declaring war.

There isn't a war on terror, there is a war of terror.

I was in a community where we were out demonstrating. We were holding vigils against the Vietnam War, in - like, starting in around '67, I think, before it really exploded as a big movement.

"This is now the twelfth day of rioting in France. They have been rioting for almost two weeks. And France has still not surrendered. That's like a record.

There are very interesting books about these events, for instance one by a very well-known American historian named William R. Polk called Violent Politics. It's a record of what are basically guerrilla wars from the American Revolution right up through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Unity and resistance is a strong American trait.