Quaker Initiative to End Torture

Author
Anne-Marie Zilliacus
2006 Article cover

Excerpt:

“We are not the kind of people who want to kill, imprison, go to war ille¬gally, condone torture—by troops, by law enforcement personnel, by outsourcing to another country. Yet these things happen and have hap¬pened at our expense, with our tax dollars. Fear is the reason we have let it happen—fear of criminals, of the other, of becoming a victim ourselves. When this happens, we can convince ourselves that we must put conscience aside. We become trained to think of ourselves as less than ourselves, forgetting the universal connections between and among us that make us better than ourselves.

It is this fear and the acquiescence that grows out of it that the Quaker Initiative to End Torture (QUIT) seeks to address.”