The fact that the former spokesman for the Taliban is now an honored student at Yale University — honored as in he was admitted even though completely unqualified — is an out and out outrage.
This is a guy who was once the spokesman for the Taliban in Afghanistan — the very same regime that hosted and protected Usama bin Laden while he was hatching the 9/11 plot.
His name is Rahmatullah Hashemi. He is now 27 years old, and he's been given a cushy free pass into Yale because he is some kind of star in the academic world. A real catch. You have to squeeze your brain a bit to imagine the Yale bigwigs whooping it up that they scored an actual Taliban official to be a Yalie, but evidently they did.
Rahmatullah told The New York Times: "In some ways I'm the luckiest person in the world. I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale."
That is Yale's disgrace. This is a university that is the alma mater of the last three presidents. How could Yale actually want a terrorist spokesman on its campus? What is wrong with those people?
And by the way, the Taliban spokesman is taking a spot that some young American might have had. So if you know a kid who didn't get into Yale this year, you probably shouldn't bring up the fact his or her spot went to a Taliban terrorist mouthpiece.
Did Rahmatullah blow up the World Trade Center? No, probably not.
But look at the news Monday. We're talking about the rise of the Taliban again in rural Afghanistan. We're still killing the Taliban if we have half a chance. And Yale lets this one have a prized spot on the campus of one of the two or three top universities in the country?
I must ask again: What were they thinking?
Oh right, we don't sniff over what applicants think to decide whether they can be students at our best schools. We're not the thought police. Right.
But do we look at the applicant's record? How does the Yale archaeology department regard the new student who once represented the Taliban on a tour of America to justify the destruction of the centuries-old Buddhist statues carved into the side of a mountain? Anthropologists, archaeologists, historians screamed in agony as the Taliban shelled the ancient statues. And now he's a student in their midst?
This is the academic world gone completely insane — almost as if they contacted mad cow disease, an illness that chews holes in the brain.
Mr. Taliban should go home. Yale should send him back now. Absent a certificate from a major deprogramming institute, he has no place anywhere in America, least of all on the campus of one of this country's most prestigious universities.
By the way, think any fellow students had a parent or relative killed in the World Trade Center by Taliban protected jihadis sent by bin Laden? If there are such students at Yale — and there damn well should be — should they have to quietly endure the presence of an apparatchik of the machine that plotted and executed their loved ones' most horrible demise?
Yale should do what it encourages its students to do: think.
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