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John Fund of the Wall Street Journal may be getting somewhere with his campaign against the ex-Taliban spokesman who's attending Yale, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi. Enrolling a former minister for the Taliban is like enrolling a former Nazi official, Fund says.
Tuesday the Yale Daily News ran an editorial complaining that little is known about what Rahmatullah really believes, beyond vague assurances that he is "thinking about change" in his home country.
What kind of change? He didn't say. He says he resents being lumped with extremists in the Taliban (there are Taliban moderates?), but he has never repudiated the goals he espoused.
Since Yale was quite eager to get him on campus, the editorial said, "we would like to know what kind of research the university conducted to conclude that he has changed from the young man who handled press for the repressive Afghan regime." Asking for information may not sound like much, but it's a breakthrough of sorts at Yale, where the administration has mostly been silent, and defenders of the former Taliban mouthpiece say they feel confident that the administration must have checked him out.
Word of Rahmatullah's presence on campus reached the outside eight months after he went to Yale, thanks to a warm but not very informative article in the New York Times Magazine.
Posted at 04:00 PM by John Leo
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