Gregg Dahl declares that “the subject tonight is women and peace”. He then relates peace to war. The Encyclopedia Britannica devotes sixty pages to war and no pages to the subject of peace. Over one hundred years ago ‘Abdu’l-Baha wrote, in The Secret of Divine Civilization: There is the well-known case of the ruler who is fostering peace and tranquility and at the same time devoting more energy than the warmongers to the accumulation of weapons and the building up of a larger army, on the grounds that peace and harmony can only be brought about by force. Peace is the pretext, and night and day they are all straining every nerve to pile up more weapons of war, and to pay for this their wretched people must sacrifice most of whatever they are able to earn by their sweat and toil. How many thousands have given up their work in useful industries and are laboring day and night to produce new and deadlier weapons which would spill out the blood of the race more copiously than before.” Since that time we’ve had two world wars and many smaller ones. The problem is global, affecting everyone everywhere. Ms. Nakhjavani speaks next and talks of the last two years she and Gregg spent in Sierra Leone and how removed from the threats of the first world they felt. She tried organizing a “Peace Forum” at the university where she was teaching. One of her students remarked that such a forum was irrelevant because it was foreigners who colonized Sierra Leone, enslaved its people, kept it in debt “and now you want us to adopt all your nuclear fears and nightmares. Go ahead and annihilate yourselves, why drag us into it?” She discovered that peace had a much broader meaning there. The struggle for economic equality between the sexes is described. “We are not yet at the stage of equality.” The traditional attitude of women towards themselves needs to be changed.