Are The Gods Crazy?

This is one for the books! But Yale doesn't surprise me--after all, it gave Hamas its start back in the late 80s when students wrote the covenant of hatred--The Avalon Project--that is still on the University's web site. We need to search out Richard Shaw, the Dean of Yale Undergrad Students, and put his feet to the fire (figuratively, I mean) (he "didn't want to miss out on a student of the caliber of Rahmatullah Hashemi?" Why the Hell not?) How would you like to sit next to this character--who is there tuition free--in a class? We also need to see who at the State Department, as the Wall Street Opinion Journal asks, approved this student visa? Are there ANY standards in place for issuing student visas? If a Taliban spokesperson can get a State Department student visa for a non-degree program, we have to assume that anyone can get a student visa. Security is a priority? My great aunt's patooty it is!

If this same institution is so unpatriotic to NOT allow ROTC training on the campus, the world is truly upside down. And, you do have to ask what kind of a self-destructive path we are following these days. This morning I was hopeful about the President and the purpose of his trip to South Asia. Tonight, I just don't know. Maybe we've just lost our collective minds....

Former Taliban Spokesman Now Yale U. Student
NewsMax
Monday, Feb. 27, 2006 10:59 a.m. EST

A one-time member of the Taliban has apparently taken up studies at Yale University.

While his former colleagues in Afghanistan’s former Taliban government are dead, hiding, or imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi is studying at Yale on a student visa.

Once the Taliban’s "ambassador-at-large,” Rahmatullah was the subject of the feature article in this weekend’s New York Times magazine.

He surfaced at Yale through the efforts of Mike Hoover, a CBS News cameraman, whom he met while serving as an interpreter for the Taliban. Rahmatullah was admitted to Yale despite only having a fourth-grade education and high school equivalency certificate.

"[Yale] had another foreigner of Rahmatullah’s caliber apply for special-student status,” explained Richard Shaw, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions, to the Times.

"We lost him to Harvard,” he continued. "I didn’t want that to happen again.”

And so, Rahmatullah enjoys the pleasures of coed life in New Haven, Conn. The man who criss-crossed the United States on a speaking engagement in 2001 to defend the subjugation of women and the annihilation of ancient Buddhist cultural monuments now attends classes with women and Harvard-Yale football games among a diverse student body.

He has already taken one class of peculiar interest: Political Science 145, Terrorism: Past, Present and Future. The class meets in Luce Hall, the same location where Rahmatullah gave a speech as "roving ambassador” for the Taliban on May 27, 2001.

John Fund of the Wall Street Journal met Rahmatullah on his U.S. tour in 2001 and is incensed by the revelation that he is now studying at Yale. "There is something to be said for the instinct to reach out to one’s former enemies,” he wrote in Monday’s Journal. "But there are limits."

He continued: "[Rahmatullah] willingly and cheerfully served an evil regime in a manner that would have made Goebbels proud. There are many poor, bright students – American and foreign alike – who would jump at the opportunity to attend Yale. Why should Mr. Rahmatullah go to the line ahead of them all?”

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Why, indeed!

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Photo credit: http://www.gg2.net/upload/taliban27022006.jpg