 Okay, hello everybody, good afternoon. Hello, hello. Wow, welcome to the final day of Puppets in the Green Mountains, 2022. It's been such an amazing festival. It's beautiful to see people show up for all the panels and follow these discussions. Thank you all who are joining us remotely and thank you howl round for bringing this out into your community. Thank you to FACTV who has been helping us to live stream these panel discussions and have them for our archives. So yes, the community makes this work. I want to thank you a moment to especially give a little shout out and thank you to the Vermont Humanities Fund which has in particular sponsored this series and the conversations we've been having here throughout the festival. There's just one, no there's two more events of the festival before we close with a big hurrah. Body Concert, we'll be playing at NUIT at 2 p.m. today and at 5 p.m. Kristal puppeteers, Tears by the River will be playing in Patne. There is a slight chance of thunderstorm so we're doing a little quick pivot dance and we're gonna be inside at Next Stage in Patne which is a beautiful venue right next door to Sandglass. So spread the word, take a holder's log and an email but make sure everyone knows Next Stage for Tears by the River. And without further ado, I'm gonna turn this over to Leith who has joined us throughout the whole festival as our facilitator for these panel discussions. Leith comes to us from the Roots Social Justice Center, the Youth for Change program and is himself an aspiring writer and it's been really great to get to know him more and work through this time together. We're gonna hold just a moment as we get the last few in the door. I love that these audiences, the panel's audiences have grown throughout the festival, it's really great. Okay, so thank you, thank you all for being here and thank you Leith, I turn it over to you. Yeah, we're gonna be doing this in a similar format to the way that we presented the panel yesterday, the ad new. We're gonna start with a question I'm gonna be asking all three of you a series of questions that mostly have gotten from the interviews that I had with you Yeah, a few days back. And then I'm going to have you try to ask questions amongst yourselves and see what you all are curious about, just about the other person's work. And then I will give the audience time to present questions for you. You were here yesterday, at least, due to we're here yesterday, you know how it was done. So to start going right into it, I noticed during both our interviews that language, like whether it's non-traditional language, but just language in a very broad term was very important to both of you. Patty, you were talking about law as it was like a very, like a, as opposed to language, though very strict and kind of difficult to use except in specific circumstances. And you were talking about language in a little more broad sense though, it was more traditional while also talking about art as being a language. And like the beginning of this question is already apparent from how I proposed it, but how important do you hold language in regards to colonization, decolonization, and do you think that theater, this part of the question is presented towards the two of you, obviously, as the language of its own that could possibly work better at conveying a message than traditional language, like English or Japanese or Arabic or something else? Yes, for whom? You've heard all of them for a while, but I think the gentlemen will do. You can stop. Well, is it for me first? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go. You're making it a little bit more challenging, but I think it's a lot. You're making it a little bit more challenging, but I think the gentlemen will do. You're making it a little bit more challenging, but I think the gentlemen will do. Definitely. Well, my name is Patricia Whalen, and I'm a judge and my most recent judgeship was as an international judge in war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and I did, maybe the trials I did or the genocide trials for Shabadidza, as well as other trials involving crimes against humanity and war crimes. So that's a brief bit of my background. And in terms of the show that I saw on Friday night, I've also been for the past year of actuating Afghan women judges from Afghanistan, which has thrown me into the world of, again, a second diaspora, the first that I'm intimately familiar with is Bosnia and the second now is Afghanistan and all the problems that go with that. When we were talking about language, I was laughing because we were sort of talking about the difference between art and law, and both are very big words and it's a big tent for each of those words. But for law, and I'm a practitioner, I'm not a scholar, I'm really a practitioner of law, it's those words, it's very specific words that we use, it's very prescribed in the legal profession, how you describe something, how you define something, how you prove something. And so it's very limited. It's really a tool, and hopefully it's a tool to achieve justice, but it is a limited tool. And in terms of art, which I'll let them speak to, I would perceive the tent of art as being much bigger way, a much broader way to describe just about anything. I have something, now I'm gonna let them respond, but I have some very specific examples of the limitations of law and the limitations of creativity and imagination in law. Even though I think within law, there is room for both creativity and imagination. But I will turn that over to you now. Thank you so much. So hi everyone, I am Osama Abid. Thank you so much, Sandy Klaras Theater for his generous invitation to be here. We've been so privileged and lucky to be here. I am theater director, puppeteer, musician, Palestinian-Jordainian, and for me, you ask me about the language. I would go for some more specific examples, specific examples that I faced or met. I was in Delhi, in India, in one festival, like a meeting by Acetaj Theater for next generation. And I saw one performance, which was coming on the border between India and China. And the interesting thing for me was that there were subtitles in English and there were subtitles in Delhi language. Because people there, in India, they have a lot of languages. And English played a role of being a colonization tool to make people understand each other somehow. The performance, these people didn't, they considered Indian as a colonization. So they look more Chinese, more than Indian. And the whole performance was about this topic of Indian being colonizer. The second example, we are coming from Czech Republic and there's a really long tradition in Czech when it comes to Czech language and how German was dominated as elite language. So it was, like the Czech language was suppressed somehow. And the only way to preserve language was through puppeteers who were touring in the countryside and they were still performing with their own language. National theater was also built by the same, the community in some how. And it was the first time for Czech language to be spoken in the theater. So theater and puppet theater played a huge role in preserving the language. The third example, one theater director and puppeteer, Israeli, he learned Arabic language to teach at University Palestinian students in Arabic because he said this is a decolonization tool against the military state. So somehow the language can have a lot of possibilities where you can see it as a decolonization or a colonization tool. And it's sometimes misleading because it carry a lot of possibility of interpretation. When it comes to war and war results, I am all the time having the feeling our problem all the time with terminologies and how we label things, how we categorize things. When you say refugee, it's by itself stigma and it's racist. And we cannot just put all people in one package and deal with them as numbers and as figures. Although we need to. We need to, but... Yeah, I know, I don't know. Thank you. I'm Matej, nice to meet you. I'm a Czech-based, Prague-based artist, musician, actor and tech, now tech-focused, I'm here. Thank you, some glass, thank you too, to be privileged to be here. I want to follow up on what Patricia said, that maybe art can pinpoint those things or put a light on things which law cannot describe. That's something with the imagination. We can just imagine, we can be the human beings, we can imagine the pain of those victims, the anger of those who did those horrible crimes and what so. But the law hasn't this tool or cannot use this imaginative tool. It has just prescribed precise words. Maybe, sorry, can I ask Patricia a question now? How do you use the imagination in your work? How do you overcome this gap between the fairly stated words of law to the imagination? Well, let's see, I mean, I think for me, when I hear a witness talk or when I hear their pain, I mean, what I imagine is... Well, I guess what I can relate to or hope I can relate to is some level of empathy with that. But as a judge, their pain can't, their pain often is irrelevant to what I'm doing. And that is what, that's sort of my pain in being a judge, if that's clear. So, in other words, I was telling, when we were preparing for this panel, I was telling this story about one of the things that happened in Shreveganica was that bodies were moved more than once and they were moved by large pieces of machinery which cut up those bodies in different places and they were put in many graves. Body parts were found in three or more graves sites. So the process of identifying the dead and basically putting the bones back together, all of that was really traumatic for the families involved and the investigators involved. But was it a crime? You know, what I was really dealing with was trying to get the, of course, covering and concealment of bodies is part of the crime. And that's all we need to know. We don't need to know more than that. We don't need to know that next level of what took place with those bodies or the human need to find those bodies. When I was writing the decision, I really felt compelled to try to convey the humanity behind that or the horror behind that. And so I turned to Antigone and her search to bury the bones of her brother because I thought, oh, that's it. That is the horror underneath this. This is what they intentionally or unintentionally stumbled into. And so I wrote that. I was really quite proud of it. On the war crimes panel, you sit as three judges. The other two judges were like, what? What is this? It doesn't belong here. Antigone? I mean, who's Antigone? You know, we went through this whole thing, but it was true. For them, this was pointless. It was a waste of space on the written page in a legal document. And we operate as a panel, so I couldn't use that. And that felt very limiting to me because without that kind of understanding of the human need to bury the dead, sometimes I would feel, what am I doing here? What's the purpose of what we're doing? I would add just one thing because I feel also when it comes to terminology and language, it's also, what's legal, what's illegal? And this is like standards, the standardization of things. This is problematic also because how can we say this is legal, this is illegal? In some cases, you know? And I see the hypocrisy of Europe now with the Ukrainian refugees and the way they perceive Europe with all respect. It's also trauma, it's war, it's horrible. But we are not far away from Syrian refugees. And the way they were dying on the borders between Belarus and Poland, it showed clearly the hypocrisy of Europe. And still are dying? Still, still. Yeah, so it's illegal, illegal, visible, invisible too. Because also the way we make things visible, it's also play a big role in how you shape the cultural imagination of people towards some topic. Because the media, how the media is just perpetuated all the time, two categories for refugees, they are either good or bad. And the idea of good is like victimization. And the idea of devil, it goes for more like they are threat, they are beneficiaries when they are coming to take over our culture, they are coming to change our culture, something similar to fascism somehow. So these kind of narratives and how to subvert such narratives through law by being creative and find different way maybe. And through art, I'm really interested to find different ways. How we can find different ways and open more imagination that the human experience is not limited, human experience is complex. And we live in time now. We are all affected by globalization, by modernity, which influence the idea that there is nothing called singular identity. We have multiple identities and we have also, in the case of refugees, it's become even more, it's more about fragmented identities. So also for me I'm interested how can we also through this language of theater to express this fragmentation. Thank you. Yeah, I just kind of want to add to the entire conversation. My next question was mostly based on, and then bringing art, you were talking about, you were talking about art is bringing imagination and passion into how we think about, I don't want to say persecuting, because that's just what I'm thinking. But just how people... I'd love to help you. The cogs are turning, but they're kind of stuck. I guess just skipping to the question and skipping the setup. Do you think that there would be a way to have art and more emotion and passion be more directly brought into law? In a way where we'd be able to be easier or even in the courtroom, or do you think that that's impossible and should not be done? Or bringing emotions into law if it should somehow be in the law? I can imagine saying you are criminal with emotion. Well, first of all, if anybody knows me, they know how passionate a person I am, and I think I bring every single bit of that passion to the law. When I was a lawyer, it was easier to do because I was an advocate. And I always thought of the law as a bloodless sword, something I could wave and wield and find a way to get at whatever justice I was trying to seek. As a judge, we're traditionally not supposed to show passion because you want a neutral arbitrator. You don't want to come into a courtroom as an attorney and see a judge go, Yeah, you're right. Oh yeah, you feel the shit. You don't want that. You want to be heard and heard fairly, and that sometimes can be tricky. I'll give you one incident now that's sort of changing the court, and that's victim impact statements. Now they're sort of accepted throughout the states, but when I started practicing law, and I think there's a number of their attorneys in the room, that was considered really weird at first, and what was the role of that, and what was the purpose of that, and was the victim's painful story going to somehow skew the legalness, the legitimacy of the process in sentencing. I think now it's much more accepted because we understand that people need it to be heard in court. People need to have a voice. But is a judge swayed by those victim impact statements, or is a judge swayed, or not swayed, but influenced more by evidence than what's in front of the judge? And sometimes that's a big gap, and it's difficult for people to understand. You know, I'm all for the legal... The other thing I'll say about language is I went to law school in the 70s, sort of like a hundred years ago, and at that time we used a lot of Latin, we used a lot of words that really, you know, it was like only lawyers had keys to the kingdom, and the more complicated you express something, or the more Latin you use, the more you could establish your own, you know, higher up legitimacy or some crazy notion like that. And now, of course, I think, and I would hope to see, and I used to do this in a lot of trainings, is to get people to use very clear basic language that anyone could understand. Because the trick in the law, no matter what hat you have, is who is your audience? Just like you, you ask this, who is your audience? You know, as a first instance judge, a trial court judge, frankly, my audience was the appeal court, right? If I wanted anybody to hear what I had to say, it was the appeal court, you know, I wanted them to agree with me. On the same time, you have an obligation to the people in front of you. You know, who's the more important people in the room? And family court, the most important person in the room isn't in the room, it's the children, right? You know, they're nowhere to be seen. You know, who's their voice? So all of these questions that you ask, I think all the time, you know, who's voice do you want to convey? Who's voice are you speaking to? Who's your audience? It's as important in law as it is in the theater. I don't want to make too many connections about how much we have in common. But anyway... So you are puppeteer. I wish I was a puppeteer. In fact, if I had your talent and creativity, I would be a puppeteer. But alas, you know, I'm not. I'm actually trying more to be an artist these days and realize my frustration in the sense of writing. You know, when you write in the law, it's industrial writing, right? I mean, any lawyer in the room knows exactly what I'm talking about. It is just industrial writing. There's no way you do it. There's no... Even though we've had some beautiful writers in the law, it's rarely lyrical. So, you know, when I've been writing since I retired from the bench, now I write all the time and it's very free. And I feel like I can now explain things that I never could. And there are stories I want to tell that, you know, my whole career has been about the prevention of violence and, you know, that. And I don't know how much we've achieved in that area in the law. But if I can write about why, you know, as a tool of prevention, if someone can hear that, you know, and I, you know, my decisions are like 500 pages long. And I just say, like, doubt anybody here's read them. In fact, maybe like 10 people in the world have read them, really. I mean, it is a very narrow audience, you know. So now I'm hoping to, you know, use art to reach out to more people. Alright, kind of, I think, getting away from that part and bringing it back to what you said earlier. You were touching upon it. It was a question I did want to ask. It was a question that you did answer during our interview already. Oh, the... But you stopped him before he continued. So I kind of thank you for that. So I do have the question. You told me during our interview that you didn't like the term refugee because of its stigmas and strong whitewashed labels surrounding the term. I either heard or just, like, didn't help refugees. The label is, like, bad, not good, evil people. Or, like, poor, helpless victims. And it just didn't help them at all. Could you elaborate on this? And is there any label that you can think of that you prefer to be referred to as? Or that you prefer to be referred to as, if any? Because I don't like labels, I will not give label. Okay, so for me, there are a lot of different examples that... First of all, Syrian refugees who arrived to Europe, most of them, they pay for the smuggler $15,000 for each, but one, yeah? I have one friend who stuck in Yarmouk camp in Syria with his family. He has 15 members and he said, I cannot, I cannot go to Europe. I need, you can count, yeah? So it means most of the refugees who arrived to Europe, they are mid-class high. And you can imagine that the smuggler himself is a refugee too, yeah? In a few cases, it can happen that you can find some people who are absolutely in need. Let's call it like this. So for me, like this, I feel it myself, I am of a Palestinian background. And in the camp, most of the people, they didn't want to get humanitarian aid and stand in line, accused. It was a feeling of humiliation. Part of them is my family. So in a way, and most people realize that the most effective way is to really get educated and actually change the reality somehow or challenge it or find different way how you can break out of this. So what I feel that, yes, it's, there are a lot of, I'm not saying, I'm not saying we should not help refugees, let them do whatever. So I'm saying that, see the human experience as a complex and not too limited to one point of view. That's the only thing what I see. Okay, and then when you're young, leaving Palestine as, how did you and others around you build new communities in wherever you left to? And what did that grow into? Do you feel that these communities are stronger, different, and those who haven't experienced war-based expulsion and the like? Actually, I never been in a war. Like for me, I never been in a war. I'm maybe war result because I was born in Jordan. My family passed through the evacuation displacement three times. They lost their houses, so they were in three different refugee camps until they arrived to Jordan. And for me, there's something so strong here, what I was speaking today also about it with Inez, that here the community is so, you can feel that there is community and people support each other a lot here, which is amazing. I love it. And I feel it in our culture that we have it also. We have this kind of solidarity, people gather, people help each other somehow. In the community where I was, I was involved as a volunteer with orphan welfare association, which was running a program summer camp for orphan children from refugee camps, from Jordan, from Syria, Lebanon, and sometimes from West Bank, if it's possible. And 300, 400 participants with international volunteers coming from USA, from Japan, from Europe. So it was really a so rich program. And it shows how the community can easily support. And it's not about here financially, let's say, because the support can go further. I remember, for example, it was so easy to get the food for the whole summer camp. We have 10 days, 10 days summer camp, and just to go to one store of meat, for example, and say, okay, we need this amount of meat for the whole period of time, and people were supporting. The same thing, we needed transportation. One private school bus, they give it for free. And in the end of the day, you look, and it's not like about money, because they didn't get a lot of money as a support. But on the other hand, everything running incredibly. If you calculate the budget of it, it would be a lot, you know. But it's all about solidarity and how people can really support the idea. And the amazing part that some young children who grew up through these summer camps, they make it, and some of them become in the States, some of them become politicians in Jordan, even like one of them, yeah, really, one of them become ministers in Jordan. And or in Europe, some, like they become businessmen or rich, and this keeps supporting the program and running the activities. The other way of solidarity is like we have the system of sponsorships, but in the meaning of scholarships, even. Like I don't give you fish, but I teach you how, yeah? Yeah, and it works with some orphan family, and one businessman can come and can support one child until he finishes university. And by this, they change the whole family life somehow, yeah. So this is only some examples of how it functions in the community. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's just change, change. You already touched on this, but like, what specifically are some of the very explicit limits of international law on the topic of war refugees and other kinds of international distress and violence? It's almost unending, but let me just explain one definitional limit in international law when it comes to refugees, and that's the definition of family. I imagine if I gave each of you a piece of paper and I said, put down your family members, it would look different for each one of you. You know, we have family by choice, we have family by marriage, we have family by birth. It would be, and it would just be different. The almost universal definition of family for western countries, at least looking at immigration, is the following. Wife, husband, children under the age of 20. That's it, that is it. If you have a son who's 21, a daughter who's 22, they don't come with you. Your mother doesn't come with you, your father doesn't come with you, your aunt doesn't come with you. Your same-sex spouse doesn't come with you. Your best friend doesn't come with you. People who lived in your household for 20 years or more don't come with you unless they meet that definition. And that definition is a legal definition. It's a hard definition. You don't get around it. There's no way to get around it. So getting around that definition takes a lot of creativity, I'll tell you. We've managed to do that with the Afghans that we have been evacuating now because we made a commitment as women judges to evacuate all members of their household and who they consider family. It's really been a struggle, but we've been successful so far for 170 of those judges. But it requires a lot of knowledge. I mean, I'm not an immigration lawyer. We are dependent on some of the best immigration lawyers in the world to help us do this work and understand how the system works, and it just makes me so angry. I can't tell you how angry it makes me because we have more resources available for us to do this than an average person. I mean, I'm on a seven woman judge committee. All the judges except for two of us are judges on the Supreme Court of their countries. They have tremendous political influence, tremendous power in a way. And it's taken everything we could do to make this happen. So what about the average normal person? You know one person is more important than the other in immigration, right? I mean, how do you decide who comes, who stays, who gets in, who gets out? All of that is defined by law, by laws. And, you know, okay, this is my political bit for everybody right here. All of you know me, you know I'm an advocate. After this is over, call your congresspeople. Ask them to change the definition of family for purposes of immigration. Okay, just one thing, that's one simple thing. Just put it out there. Immigration needs massive reform. Don't get me wrong. But that's one thing you can all do is call up and say the definition of family doesn't meet who we are anymore as the people. Get that point across. Okay. Thank you. I wanted to pass the give you the time to ask questions amongst yourselves. You kind of already have. If you don't have any, then I'll pass the questions on to the audience. But if you do, let me know. I think I'll give for the audience. All right, then I give the question to the audience. I don't know how I'll give you the microphone. You can repeat the question. All right. What would be a better definition of family? What would be a better definition of family? Well, I, okay, thank you. I mean, personally, I think we should go back to like what San just said, the basics. You know, go to the person, you know, who's their family. You know, what's so hard about asking that question? Now, there are legal tests that go with that. So you can't like bring your entire neighborhood. Okay. But the one of the legal tests is persecution, who's at risk. You know, obviously for women judges, anybody in their household is at risk. It doesn't matter if they're Aunt Sally or, you know, a 25 year old son. You know, they're living in the household of a person that's a target of the Taliban. They're at risk. Okay. So you can still use those legal tests to make appropriate decisions, but get rid of the tie. You know, and one test that I agree with is who is dependent upon you and who are you dependent on? I mean, it's such a simple question, right? You know, who depends on you and who do you depend on for your survival? Those are questions that could be asked and answered and would easily define an immigration status. And that's what I would support, you know, asking logical questions that meet the test. I mean, we can argue about borders and whether or not countries should determine who gets into their country or not. You know, these are big questions, you know, big questions of sovereignty and stuff like that. But if we assume that countries can regulate who comes into their borders, then the questions we should ask about who we should be letting in should be kind of sensible questions. That's what I'm saying, you know, sensible, honest questions. That's what Bruce was talking about, just to ask, go and ask. It gives me the sense that we as people forget to communicate. It's like imposing, you know, giving the just the arguments and not giving the feedbacks. Something goes wrong. We had, I was collaborating with an American activist. Her name is Monika Hanke, she lives in Brooklyn. She worked at the Living Theater and with my wife, Rika Daye. We did workshops in Austria with refugees. Some of them were from Iraq and from Syria, Afghanistan too. And there was one Iraqi who his family stuck in Italy and he stuck for three years in Austria. And he was in our workshop and it wasn't possible for him to go to Italy at all. It wasn't possible to go to Iraq. And during the workshop he even, he was doing a radio show in a community radio. He was doing radio show, yeah, about how to raise children in German. And he didn't understand German. So he was writing in Arabic, translating to English, then somebody helped him to translate into German. And he was reading in German every hour in the morning about raising children. Yeah, then after we left, we finished the workshop, after one year he got rejected for his asylum seeking as a refugee. Why? Because he's coming, the claim that you are coming from an area, there is no more Iraq. There is no more Iraq. And they sent him back to Iraq and his family stuck in Italy. While other participants who were there, also from Iraq, they got approved for their asylum seeking. I saw your puppet show last night and I lived two years in Hala, teaching in the Carter School. And we traveled all over Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, you know, which wasn't good. And you know, I appreciate what I saw last night, but I think it's so sad. Here's all that beauty. I mean, even the dead cities were beautiful to me, you know. And are you doing anything to also show the beauty of the life and the communities there, honey? I mean, I understand what you did last night, very painful. And I appreciate it. It could be back there, you know, even in Damascus. But what's next? Yeah, thank you so much. I'm happy that you like it. And yeah, I think when it comes to beauty, I think if you've been there, you know everything about how beautiful the land is, how beautiful the culture, the food. We have an amazing kitchen. Yeah, so it's for me, like this story, I don't see it as really traumatic or just as from my point of view. I don't know how people receive it. Because for me it has this level of aspiration and to see the war in different different way than it is about just that he's victim. Okay. Actually, even the idea that am I the war maker that he's saying. I remember I was in Yarmouk camp. I couldn't sleep. I had exams and I was going to eat to drink Iran to be able to sleep. This salty me salty yogurt. And behind me there was some crazy guy and he was saying sentence. These Iranian they know how to do words. I did the world, you know, and he was saying it in this way, you know, and it struck me like that. The idea that you are up to the level you believe that you are the cause actually of the war, not some but all you are the reason. And yeah, for me, I see the beauty of the beauty can be seen through the relations sometimes the family relations. The connection is not about just showing landscapes and just, you know, so I hope this element was there. The one that you can sense through family relations. This is very strong in our culture. And this idea of how people can connect to each other. The food popcorn. We use food in everything in every performance we do. We have food elements. So yeah, I have one solo performance also smooth life for eight people about my childhood, my relation to my father where I cook during performance. So I share something beautiful. And it's, yeah, people if they look like the performance they have put me. The moment of your father's very, very moving. I did feel the family. And I mean, I do know everything we ever celebrated there. I have two things I want to add. The first one is for you, the second is for you. So this is like, it was part of an earlier question that I forgot my question for. And then just continued on. I watched the show yesterday. But I never understood really what, like I am the war maker was supposed to mean from this perspective. From what you were just saying, it sounds like you didn't really know what it meant either. Or like, no, you knew it. It's more that he in, like he in every in every place he went to a war happened. So I'm just asking a question. Was he the war maker? That's it. That is the war following him? Or he's the one who's causing the war by stepping to any country cares? Is it a cares? That really any country would, when he arrived to us, 11 September happened. Like also like crazy. He went to Lebanon in the explosion happened in Lebanon. After all these years, he went back and he get married from the same ex-girlfriend from Damascus. That he met in Damascus. After 15 years, they get married in Lebanon. And after a few months, the port was exploded. Unbelievable. It's considered circumstantial evidence. I'm curious the entire show. I'm a very logical person in a lot of ways. So I was like, I don't get it. I just add to this that he also, his first war happened when he was how many years old? He was very young. He was very young. And if you are raised in this, you know, if you're born to this, your perspective of the world is different. As you are watching as a child, your home city being destroyed, you cannot get it. You have just your little experience of this world and maybe I am cause of this. Because I am seeing this, right? Yeah. Kind of like some young children think they might be the cause of a divorce or something. Exactly. Exactly. That's it. That's it. Yeah. But then going on to my second edition. I will add one thing. There is a Pakistani poet, Muhammad Iqbal. He says, the eyes that get used to see fires, they don't cry. So in a way, like he sees things in different way. And that's why I don't see really, there are different sides of war. I remember even from the Civil War in Beirut, the bombs are dropping or people are shooting at each other and people are making barbecue at the batteries. Yes. People, like their life should go on. It's not, yeah. So people after a while, it's become in the camp where I come from. Sometimes the Jordanian army was tear gas bombs on the camp. And this top, for example, one day, and I hear the two guys, young children, they were saying in the bus, oh my God, today we didn't smell gas, you know, at all. So it became kind of natural for them. And this is the thing that you twisted somehow. It's bizarre. It's bizarre. You twist it in your mind that you don't want it to be accepted as this is horrible. Like the human, like the... Denying, kind of denying. Like the human, I guess like, it's natural for humans to adapt, but sometimes you kind of take an extra step with coping. I guess just like be able to live with the absolute chaos that's going on around you. It's bizarre, don't it, people? But your answer to the question that you were asked, Patty, earlier, reminded me of a performance made by Peridot's Teatro last week on Saturday that was also about immigration. And during the performance it referenced a series of questions that are asked to people who are trying to get into the US that you were saying like ask people questions that aren't absurd. These questions are insane. I'm assuming you know them. I don't know if you do because you were saying that you aren't an immigration judge. But could you like talk about these leverage on them? Yeah, I don't know the specific questions, although I've had people write me and say they asked me this, you know, why did they ask me this? So I can't, but there is a standard group of questions that are a bit crazy. You know, even asking people why, you know, even asking people why they chose to leave, which is a valid question because you need to be able to establish persecution or other things. But they ask it in such a way that people are like, don't you know why I left? I mean, like for Afghans, you know, do you really need to ask that question, you know? Do you really need to ask that question of Ukrainians? Did you really need to ask that question of Haitians at the border, which never even got a chance to be asked the question, you know, which is another issue? You know, but, you know, it's a process, it's a procedure, it's a bureaucratic procedure. I wish I had those questions, you know, I didn't see that show, so I can't really speak to them. Well, it's the questions that, no, I'm good. Any person from Mexico that is where I'm from, and from many other countries in Latin America, if you want to come here with a tourist visa or a work visa, even if you're a little kid, you have to answer this, like, 100 questions that are, you're a tourist, you're a prostitute, you have been involved with child soldiers, and even if you're a little kid, you have to respond to all these questions. And we, using the performance, just a little extract of those, and we had a beautiful puppet, butterfly puppet, that is being interrogated with these questions, and of course it's a metaphor. But yeah, these questions, you know, I have to answer them every year for my work visa, and I'm still shocked by it that my little kid has been answering them since he was, you know, three, and now he's nine, and it's part of our lives. And I just, yeah, I just wonder who wrote these questions, or do they actually work for something? Or just to make you afraid? You know, I will tell you, it's interesting that you say that, you know, when you're on a plane, you know, I don't know if you get those forms coming into the U.S., and it also has some questions on there, and one of the questions I know during the Bosnian conflict that's still there was asking people about their military service. And those, you know, were probably more rational questions to ask, it wasn't like, you know, but those questions, that's exactly how, in fact, one of my trials involved a man named Miller Utterbush, who is convicted of genocide, and he was in North Carolina at the time when he was found when investigators tracked him down, and he was really a few weeks short of citizenship in the U.S., but he had lied on those questions, and he had failed to disclose that he had been a member of the Serb Army, and specifically the unit that they were looking for, and he had lied about that, and that was enough to actually deport him to the Hague, where he could be arrested. So, in that case, I kind of support the question, you know, but you're right, you know, I honestly, when I think of the law, what I'd love to think about it is that it is logical. You know, it's something you would enjoy if you're a logical person, it would work for you, right? And I would think that there is logic behind everything we do in the law, and that's actually, I mean, one of the legal tests for any kind of behavior of government is, has the government acted in an arbitrary and capricious way, because we don't like that, right? We want it to be logical and fair and evenly fair, but the law is anything but that. I mean, you look at those kind of regulations and you wonder, you know, who wrote them, you know, and what's the purpose of that, and also for some of those questions, you know, to ask that of a child, or I mean, it's just, it is absurd, you know. It's surreal for me. Yeah, well, yeah, and also it's, you know, I mean, how many times do you have to go through that? That's the other thing, you know, like, how, you know, at what point, think of the amount of resources that are wasted on that, and the amount of government resources and energy and all of that, you know, I don't know. I mean, but worst, I can't even talk about immigration. For me, bureaucracy in Europe, it's like dictatorship in Arab world. It's really similar, you know, like really this kind of unbelievable. I pass it through it with my family also, like with my wife, she's Hungarian, European. Yeah, and it's, the questions, the immigration office, I had to bring translator with me into Czech language. Oh, I have to, I just want to tell you a really funny story, though. My son, who came to visit me in Bosnia, and he at the time was in a circus. You know, he was the only child I've ever known who did run away into a circus. But, and he had a long beard. He was a fire eater, okay. And he had this huge long beard, and he had it wrapped with ribbons all the way through. It was quite decorative, right? And he had long hair. So he arrived at immigration in Bosnia, and they were like, are you, are you a hubby? And these are, Bosnian Muslims are really a total different breed. You know, they're really funny in so many ways. But they also had very little experience with other Muslims. This is early on in 2007. And they just had no idea. They just looked at him and like, who is he? You know, and they, as a consequence, they kept asking one more funny question after another. And also, their English back and forth wasn't that good. And they said, this is also great. They said to me, well, why are you here? And he said, well, I'm here to visit my mother. And they said, well, what does she do? And he said, well, she's in the court. And they thought, he said, in a choir. And they said, in a choir? And he goes, what does she sing? And I was like, happy birthday? And finally, you know, and they were really concerned about his beard. And he said, well, does a Wahabi put ribbons in their beard? Which of course, no way, right? So, you know, eventually they let him in. And this is kind of humorous aspect of it. But really, what are we doing at Borders? Yeah, just to go to this point that the interview, like a lot of list of questions which are absurd, totally. Every question is like crazy. And then the one who was reading, the questions start to laugh. I felt myself reading Kafka or something, you know. I laughed also, like I said, what's this? And she said literally, maybe the one who wrote it was really drunk. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry to ask these questions for you. Maybe the one who wrote it was really drunk. And I don't know why it's... Come on, come on, Czech Republic, you know. Czech Republic, yeah. And working hours. Yeah, definitely, he was drunk. I have stolen, we've stolen a lot. I have stolen a lot of time. Just like a couple more questions and we gotta wrap it up. I'm so thankful. Yeah, I was just having the interview of the two questions and I think my quality challenge for the rest of my attention is because when you were applying to come to the US, one of the questions on our GS162 phone was whether we had taken part in a female genital mutilation. And I think if anybody knows, it's actually me even who actually carried out these... Yeah. The man would not even be there. This is just one of those theological questions that are, you know, you have to go, no, no, no, no, no, no, all the way down. And there are many of them. Have you committed genocide? Have you committed genocide? Definitely. Yeah, I can write part time genocide. Yeah, I was part of the crime. I didn't say anything. Yeah, and maybe involved something. Yeah, but my question of what I most thought was more in relation to some of the labels which you have forgot to add here on. And it's always a struggle. For example, we know... I mean, we know so many migrants from Africa who usually try to reach European shores via the Mediterranean. And the media usually refers to them as illegal migrants. And sometimes the language changes to irregular migrants. Or... And there's so many different types that they're given. But interestingly, when Europeans come to the continent, then we refer to them as very, very conveniently as expatriates. Yeah. It's a very... Yeah, so the... My question is... I mean, to the jaguar for us, but how can we find... I know it's hard to label or to find a right way of referring to people who are on the move A that we want to know. They're living for economic reasons or for persecution. But how can we, as a society, find a way or a term or a description that is humane and also gives them dignity as they are on the move? Because at the moment, it's always very... We are not in Africa because we don't usually have those stamps. I mean, now we have... I don't know whether you know there's this deal between the UK and Rwanda where the UK now wants to start sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, which is still very controversial. But we don't have that because we don't also have borders. We have them, but you can easily move there for us. And so, people always cross. You can't ask them, you can't go to Kenya, you can't go to Tanzania, you can't go... There are official crossings, but there are also many, many unofficial people so we don't have those labels to set up. So I don't know whether you have any suggestions or any thoughts or any time. Well, I spent the last year really trying to learn the difference between all those labels to see how I can actually use them to help people. So I don't know, I don't know if there's any... I don't have a better word. But what I do think is whatever we do, we can treat people with dignity. That's sort of, for me, the bottom line. So it doesn't matter what legal label is put on their head, whether they're an economic migrant or a refugee fleeing conflict or somebody coming to work in this country and not necessarily intending to stay a tourist. It's not the label so much for me as the treatment of the person. And we should, at a very minimum, require that we acknowledge our common humanity and treat people with dignity. Until such time that they do something that doesn't... Well, I don't even know if it's a behavior issue. I just think we should treat people with dignity. One of the things in court, especially dealing with people that have a committed genocide or mass atrocities, I've required everybody involved in my courtroom to treat people with dignity a long time. It doesn't... Because that's the only way we can move forward. I don't know any other way to use those tools that we have as just people. The border issues are quite difficult and the discrimination in immigration, I think for Americans what we need to understand is that immigration is discretionary. People don't have a right to come into the US. It's that simple. We don't necessarily have a right to go into Poland or the Czech Republic or anything. All of that travel is controlled by the sovereignty of a country. And to a great extent, it's completely discretionary. So there's no appeal... Americans, we love appeals. Oh, you don't do what we want, we're going to go to the next person and the next person. And we have this right of appeal to hopefully we get the Justice Department going through that right at the moment if you're following the news. Hope to try to get a sane person to hear their case. That's nowhere really in immigration. It's really a discretionary act. And at any point, you know, a bureaucrat can put the thumb down and he can hear out. There's very little you can do about it. All right, unfortunately we have no more time. We're going to pass it to Shashana so she can wrap it up. Thank you, everyone. And may the conversation continue that we formally close here with our live stream. Not everyone who is at home, but the point of these conversations is that they continue to ripple. We start them here in this rather formal setting and then release you to take it out into the world. And it's so amazing to me that we are able to welcome artists from all over the world for this festival and have this opportunity to talk together. And we talk through our art, we talk about our art, we talk through where we came from, and there's so many layers of conversation happening in and amongst this puppet festival. And I like to always take us back to the art that brings us together, the means by which we are all here. Because I think this is part of the ends of why we are all here. And I'm so grateful for this conversation. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, ladies.