Posted on 03/12/2006 11:24:03 AM PST by Dark Skies
In a breathtaking double standard, Yale continues to block ROTC training from its campus and argues - against the opinion of a unanimous Supreme Court - that its law school has the right to limit access by military recruiters.
I vividly recall Rahmatullah's visit to The Wall Street Journal's offices in the spring of 2001. I was surprised when he defended the Taliban's brutal treatment of women - they were barred from school after age 10 and often banned from appearing in public without a husband or an older male relative. Then I was shocked when he said he hadn't seen any evidence that the Taliban's "guest" Osama bin Laden was a terrorist. I felt I was looking into the face of evil.
I walked Rahmatullah out. I will never forget how he stopped at a picture window and stared up at the World Trade Center, which terrorists had failed to destroy in 1993. When I finally pried him away, I couldn't help but think, "He must have been thinking about the one that got away."
You would think Yale would feel compelled to explain its decision to admit Rahmatullah to its classrooms. Instead, a cone of silence has descended over the university. Thursday's Courant reported that "Yale has stopped short of defending its decision to let Rahmatullah study on campus and pointed out that the U.S. State Department was the one to give him a visa." Fair enough, and it's wrong for the State Department to also hide behind bureaucratic obfuscation in refusing to explain its decision.
But that doesn't excuse Yale from refusing to address the concerns of its alumni, students and outraged Americans. "We hope that his courses help him understand the broader context for the conflicts around the world," Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said.
"We acknowledge that some are criticizing Yale for allowing Rahmatullah to take courses here, but we hope that critics will also acknowledge that universities are places that must strive to increase understanding."
Yale points out that Rahmatullah is currently not in a degree-granting program, but neglects to mention that its plans all along were for him to apply for a full four-year degree program next month.
Some say that Rahmatullah has turned over a new leaf and renounced all of his previous views, so he should be given a chance to educate himself in the values of the West. Well, after eight months at Yale there's precious little evidence the lessons are taking. In an interview published March 3 in The Times of London, Rahmatullah acknowledged he had done poorly in his class "Terrorism: Past, Present and Future," something he attributed to his disgust with the textbooks: "They would say the Taliban were the same as al-Qaida."
He shifted blame for many of the Taliban's brutal practices onto its Ministry of Vice and Virtue, even though he had defended their actions in 2001. As for the infamous filmed executions of women in Kabul's soccer stadium? "That was all Vice and Virtue stuff. There were also executions happening in Texas."
One shouldn't depend on one interview for a full picture of someone's current views. But late last year, Rahmatullah wrote an essay titled "Ignorance! Not an Option," which appeared on the website of the International Education Foundation, the charity headed by CBS contract cameraman-producer Mike Hoover that is sponsoring Rahmatullah's stay in the United States. In the essay (which is no longer on the website), Rahmatullah took Americans to task for both their "xenophobic" attitudes and their ignorance of the Taliban.
He claimed the Taliban "were too ignorant to know that their guest" - Osama bin Laden - "was harming other people." He concluded that the Taliban "honestly practiced what they had learned in their religious schools. They did what they had been taught to do. Whether what they had been taught was good or bad is another subject."
If this is sincere repentance, Yale needs to acknowledge that at the school that fathered literary deconstructionism, the term has lost its meaning.
Although Yale officials aren't talking, students and alumni are. Two Yale graduates, Clinton Taylor and Debbie Bookstaber, have launched a campaign to get people to mail Yale false nails as a form of protest over the Taliban's treatment of women - which extended to yanking the fingernails out of those who dared to wear nail polish.
Bookstaber, who was a coordinator of the Yale Women's Center for two years, has gone further. She wrote Yale President Richard Levin to complain about Rahmatullah. "Apparently when you combine a sub-par fourth-grade education, a B-plus college average in a special program, and a job history as a spokesperson for a regime that hates America, destroys priceless Buddhas, oppresses women, stones homosexuals and enforces brutal sharia law in violation of U.N. human rights agreements, you have the magic formula for admission to Yale."
In a column lamenting how Larry Summers was deposed as president of Harvard last month, The New York Times' John Tierney, a Yale graduate, reported on all the reasons our elite schools are so disdainful of the values of many Americans. He quoted Fred Siegel, a historian at Cooper Union, as saying that "the Achilles' heel of academics is their status anxiety. The only way to attack them is with mockery."
It's been more than half a century since William F. Buckley mocked the woolly-headed thinking he found at his alma mater in "God and Man at Yale." Now we have Taliban Man at Yale. If that doesn't cry out for mockery, nothing does.
I hadn't thought of this angle before. However, I do think there is a difference between admitting him as a student and having him on the faculty, which would indeed be stunning hypocrisy.
Perhaps training for the next politically expedient bit of political theater.
I can't believe this. I'm surprised he hasn't been attacked. Where is the outrage?
Is that a picture of the Yale graduating class of 2016?
This Taliban believer at Yale bumps an American student off the accepted list, and they're fighting military recruiters on campus. But who cares about that in the larger scheme of things? They're smart, elitist, Progressive thinkers who know so much more than the average lowly taxpayer who helps pay for professors and clean toilets, but whose kids don't stand a chance of getting in. If I were a Yale alumna, they wouldn't get one more dime. Ever.
Perhaps the governing elite in need of a boogeyman to justify their nanny state perspective are actively involved in mitigating outrage at these sort of things.
There was an article posted here at FR a week or two ago that posited the theory that many of these Progressive actually would welcome being forced to live under the harsh rule of some of the regimes they champion.
After thinking about it a while, I've come to the conclusion that there may be something to that idea.
Here is a link that defines that term: Status Anxiety.
After reading about Alain Botton's new book, I am beginning to see where and why many of the American left are going off the deep.
...meanwhile decent, law abiding Americans can't get into Yale...
Americans, don't let your sons and daughters apply to Yale. (Harvard's probably laughing like crazy.)
Oh? You take the government's money, you conform to the government's regs. How hard is that to understand?
Ignorant, self-assured, doctrinaire, unapologetic. Rahmatullah fits right in at Yale. What's not to like?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.