What must Sayed Ramatullah Hashemi think of his new school’s insignia? Yale University’s crest features the words “Light and Truth” emblazoned on an open book–in Hebrew. This must irk Hashemi, former deputy foreign secretary of the Taliban, the anti-Semitic, Islamofascist theocracy that misruled Afghanistan and hosted Osama bin Laden before 9/11.
Hashemi has generated headlines since it emerged that Yale admitted this former adviser to the notorious one-eyed Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar. As Yale officials stated, Hashemi got in–despite his fourth-grade education and high-school equivalency certificate–because “Universities are places that must strive to increase understanding.” The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund reports that Yale, which bars military recruiters and the ROTC, discounted Hashemi’s tuition 35 to 40 percent.
Imagine if Yale had accepted German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop’s top aide in 1942 to “increase understanding” of Nazism. Maybe Yale should add David Duke to the faculty to help students “increase understanding” of neo-Nazism.
This affair may show that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Yale’s politically correct administrators hate that reckless Texas cowboy George W. Bush (Yale, class of 1968). How better to smack him, while preening their liberal feathers like peacocks, than to welcome one of W’s enemies?
Of course, Hashemi is not Bush’s enemy, but America’s. He is no Taliban defector, but someone largely unrepentant about fronting an autocracy whose diehards have killed 139 GIs while at war with this country, including one Wednesday in Helmand province.
Hashemi last year called Israel “an American al-Qaeda.” He trivialized stonings of adulteresses in Kabul’s soccer stadium by saying, “There were also executions in Texas.”
Reviewing Taliban public policy might “increase understanding” of Hashemi and the dictatorship he perpetuated.
As Yale alumnus Clinton Taylor wrote March 8 in TownHall.com, the Taliban was “a brutal regime of retrograde, misogynist, terrorist-abetting, drug-running, Buddha-blasting, gay-murdering, freedom-hating tyrants.” They expressed their feminism by banning the education of girls over age 8, closing Afghanistan’s women’s university, banishing females from their jobs, and forcing them into burqas. They also celebrated diversity by fatally collapsing brick walls onto the heads of gay men.
Consider these other Taliban evils:
‐The Department to Propagate Virtue and Eliminate Vice abolished white paper bags, since they could have been made from recycled Korans.
‐It banned kites under the theory that time spent flying them should be devoted to reading the Koran.
‐Not unlike the Nazis’ yellow stars for Jews, the Taliban ordered all non-Muslims to wear yellow badges in public.
‐In January 2001, Amnesty International reports, Taliban soldiers in Yakaolang fired rockets into a mosque as 73 women, children, and old men took sanctuary there.
‐According to the 2004 PBS documentary Afghanistan Unveiled, after blowing up a pair of huge, 1,500-year-old statues of Buddha in March 2001, the Taliban targeted the Hazara tribe in Bamiyan.
“From hundreds of women here, not one has a husband,” said a local woman named Zainyab. “From 100 children, maybe just one still has two parents. They bulldozed houses with women and children inside. They cut off women’s breasts.”
Rather than support this outrage by donating to Yale, alumni Clinton Taylor and Debbie Bookstaber organized a protest called “Give Yale the Finger.” They ask Yalies and concerned Americans to mail red, press-on fingernails (available at drugstores) to “President Richard Levin, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520.” This should remind him that the Taliban extracted the fingernails of women who wore nail polish.
The State Department must explain how it gave a student visa to a top official of a government whose agents still blast away at U.S. personnel.
Yale owes America an apology for giving aid and comfort to a former member of the government that gave aid and comfort to al-Qaeda as it plotted the September 11 massacre.
Meanwhile, Hashemi cannot believe his luck. “I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay,” he told the New York Times. Good point! Who knows how much valuable intelligence remains in this former Taliban’s skull?
Let’s find out. The FBI should arrest this young Yalie and fly him south for spring break at Guantanamo. Then, Sayed Ramatullah Hashemi can help U.S. interrogators “increase understanding ” of America’s battlefield enemy.
– Deroy Murdock is a New York-based columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Arlington, Va.