Yale Admits Former High-Ranking Taliban Official

Diversity-- catch the fever!

Are there no limits to how arrogant and out-of-touch America's Ivy League schools can get? Last week it emerged that Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former deputy foreign secretary of the Taliban, is now a student at Yale while at the same time the school continues to block ROTC training from its campus and argues for the right of its law school to exclude military recruiters. King George's troops played the music to "The World Turned Upside Down" as they surrendered at Yorktown. Perhaps the Ivy League should adopt that tune as they surrender all vestiges of common sense.

Yale's decision to admit Mr. Rahmatullah is particularly jarring given constant reminders of the Taliban's crimes--both past and present. Last week, as President Bush visited democratic Afghanistan, its TV news aired fresh footage of beheaded bodies being paraded through a street. The men had been murdered because they opposed local Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists.

...

You would think Yale would feel compelled to explain its decision to admit Mr. Rahmatullah. Instead, a cone of silence has descended over the university. Yale officials didn't return my calls or those of other reporters for several days last week. Finally on Friday, spokesman Tom Conroy said the university would have no comment, citing privacy concerns that preclude it from discussing any individual student.

Almost no one will now defend Mr. Rahmatullah's presence as a special student, even though a week ago many had no such inhibitions in a splashy New York Times magazine piece, which broke the news that he had been at Yale for eight months. In that piece, Richard Shaw, Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions before he took the same post at Stanford, explained that Yale had missed out on another foreign student of the same caliber as Mr. Rahmatullah but that "we lost him to Harvard," and "I didn't want that to happen again."

Now Mr. Shaw isn't returning phone calls, and much of the reaction from Yale to the outside world is downright hostile. ...

At the same time, many Yale alumni and students tell me they are concerned that Yale refuses to explain why it honored Mr. Rahmatullah with a prize perch when countless well-qualified Americans--not to mention other Afghans--would jump at the chance but will never get it.

Clinton W. Taylor, an angry Yale alum, has rewritten Yale fight-songs to reflect their embrace of the Taliban and dhimmitude.

So why did Yale do this? I can think of several reasons.

"Diversity." The list begins and ends with this one. It is important for Yale to consider itself the sort of institution that is so diverse it would make special allowances for any prospective student of "diverse" background, even if, apparently, that background included complicity in a murderous, woman-enslaving, homosexual-murderering, totalitarian thug-regime.

But the question nags: Would they allow in a multiple rapist? Surely he has a diverse background, too. Or a KKK member? Again, if they simply want "diversity of experience and thought," they should welcome such prized students to their campus.

There are some acts which are "bad," and some acts which are "bad, but not really all that bad." Raping a woman is bad. Raping a woman as an expression of your diverse cultural beliefs is, well, not really all that bad. Murder is bad; killing in order to defy the hegemony of Western culture is, well, kind of understandable. Which leads to the obvious...

Vicious Anti-Americanism. The difference between the rapist and the KKK member and the freshman Eli Jihadi is, of course, that the first two threaten values dear to the Yale faculty, and that the latter actually promotes a value dear to them-- sticking a thumb in America's eye, defying "conventional bourgeois values," etc. (Also-- the sixties impulse to let one's freak flag fly and shock the straights.)

Arrogance. I'm sure Yale also thinks it can infect this little murderous bastard with its brand of transnational, transgressive progressivism.

Because they're arrogant. They're smarter, they're more enlightened, they're just plain better, and so of course the Frosh Islamist will be converted upon exposure to their values and, who knows, export them back to Afghanistan.

I can only giggle at the idea. For Christ's sake, Yale can't even infect America with its often ludicrous and anti-human values, and we all share, mostly, the same Enlightenment-engendered classical liberal tradition of Western thought. They can't persuade America to allow them to continue banning the military from recruiting on its campuses, but they think a guy whose resume includes ripping out women's unchaste whores' painted fingernails and burying homosexuals perverted vermin in concrete is going to suddenly buy into the progressive spirit of Yale?

FWIW, my own conservatism hardened in my latter years of college and then even more so in law school after being exposed to the uglier, more transgressive, most arrogant sorts of liberalism. I can imagine how well their new student will cotton to walking foam-latex vaginas promoting V-Day. Will he be persuaded to take a more progressive stance of sexual liberation and openness, or will he be hardened against the licentiousness of the West, and the rather unIslamist way we allow our women to mouth off and flaunt their sexuality whoreishness?

I think the answer is pretty obvious. But I'm sure most of the Yale faculty is so satisfied with themselves and full of smug superiority they actually imagine they'll be able to convert this little monster.

I only wish I could read the guy's application essay. Perhaps he said he blew up the thousand-year-old Buddha statues not as an act of religious intolerance and historical blasphemy, but as some kind of "guerilla art" commentary on the liberating creative destruction of hegemonic icons.

Or some crap like that.

Yale has afforded this guy a very diverse population of women to beat with sticks and homosexuals to murder. What a public service.

posted by Ace at 03:57 PM

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