The Kateri Peace Conference

I checked out the Kateri Peace Conference this year, from Saturday morning until early afternoon (I didn't stay after the lunchtime speakers). It was .... interesting, ranging from good, to mixed, to extremely annoying.

The good: the first speaker, Professor Bruce R. Hare, was excellent. He spoke about the "selective indignation" that people feel when their own ethnic group is insulted while being oblivious to the offenses against others, and about race as a social construct so unsupported by science that it amounts to a "mental illness," since there is really only one race, the human race - so why do we call pink people white and brown people black? We still code people as binary, black or white, so that we can put them in perceptual boxes.

I was very impressed with Professor Hare and will be seeking out his work in the future.

The workshop I attended, on Caryl Churchill's controversial short play "Seven Jewish Children," was the "mixed." The play does acknowledge the origins of contemporary Israeli attitudes in the memory (whether personal or historical) of the Holocaust and the fear that it might happen again, but I could see in the workshop how it was being used by participants like Professor Lawrence Davidson. Davidson was a co-presenter at the event which followed, two talks on "U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East," which were delivered during lunch.

The conspiratorial view of pretty much everything ("all the fault of the Zionists") reminded me of far-right-wing propaganda. The other speaker, Janet Amighi, casually dismissed the shooting of dissidents in Iran as a reasonable response to the West subsidizing dissent within Iran to destabilize the Iranian government.

I wanted to ask, "So Baha'is and other Iranian dissenters don't count as indigenous if anyone elsewhere in the world supports them, but Palestinians do?" (The Baha'i Faith originated in Iran, and their beliefs prohibit them from participating in political activity.) I had a number of questions, but my questions were not taken. Well, after all, dissent is a Zionist conspiracy, isn't it?