Yasser Arafat Quotes


Only the tortured can understand those who have been tortured.


Context

This is a particularly ironic quote. Although Arafat verbally and officially opposed torture, but used it frequently within the PLO and its “law enforcement” efforts amongst the Palestinians.


Citations

Yasser Arafat, 1929–2004, Chairman, Palestine Liberation Council [PLO], Nobel Peace Laureate, Nobel Acceptance Address, 1994

Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations

Related Quotes

At that time in American History, the George W. Bush Justice Department had a small team of lawyers who wrote a legal brief that defined torture in such a way that many of the most common forms of torture were no longer legal torture, even though they had been torture in American law and were again torture after this embarrassing episode of American history. The renamed techniques were called “enhanced interrogation” and a few terrorist suspects were subjected to it before the rules and laws were changed and the “legal opinions” nullified. The FBI and military intelligence did not use the so called enhanced interrogation techniques as they felt that torture produced unreliable intelligence as the victim will say anything the questioner wants to hear to end the torture. They also thought the Justice department memo was sloppy and defective legal work. Senator McCain was a particular expert on torture in that he had, during the Vietnam War, been captured and imprisoned for 7 years during which he had been tortured on several occasions.


She was sentenced to death for the bombing of public facilities but her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She was released after independence. She raised the moral issue of torture which was very commonly used by the French then, but she was silent about the morality of exploding bombs and killing civilians. Women however did not fare very well in the independent, post revolution Algeria—see {36994} and {36995}.


Yasser Arafat
Yasser Arafat
  • Born: August 24, 1929
  • Died: November 11, 2004
  • Nationality: Palestinian
  • Profession: Civil Engineer

Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, popularly known as Yasser Arafat (Arabic: ياسر عرفات‎, romanized: Yāsir ʿArafāt) or by his kunya Abu Ammar (Arabic: أبو عمار‎, romanized: ʾAbū ʿAmmār), was a Palestinian political leader. He was Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from 1969 to 2004 and President of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) from 1994 to 2004. Ideologically an Arab nationalist, he was a founding member of the Fatah political party, which he led from 1959 until 2004.