Posted 1:27 AM by Jason
Me=Always Lost

So I attended (technically yesterday now I guess) a lunch discussion on “US Human Rights Policy/Kurds in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq” put on by the Human Rights Center and the Amnesty International group here at the law school.  In all honesty, I walked into the wrong event (not unusual for me), though I maintain that they were in the room that was supposed to have the event that I had planned to attend.  In any event, it was still interesting, and I am at least a bit sympathetic to the Kurdish people’s grievances.  Here are a few problems that I had:

1.  The random, pointless, haphazard anti-western/anti-American statements.  Now, these may play well with the AI crowd, but seriously, you’re not reaching new people when you do this.  When you insult Winston Churchill and quote him favorably in the same talk, in my mind you should

2.  The speaker’s demand that (paraphrasing) “if you are a sensitive person you refer to northern Iraq as Iraqi Kurdistan” or some such.  Seriously, no one is being insensitive by referring to the accepted political borders.  Also, this Kurdistan never has, as best as I can tell, existed as a nation state, and those who demand it should be open to the possibility first that it is possible to have personal and political freedom without the creation of a new nation state.

3.  The attempts to invoke Israel, slavery, and the American Civil War in my mind fell flat.  

I have no dispute with the stories he told themselves, only that it left me wondering about statistics and evidence outside of these anecdotes.  

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