He has dodged reporters for three weeks, ever since his presence at Yale was revealed in a cover story in the New York Times Magazine. Some claim he has fully repented his Taliban past, but in his sole recent interview–with the Times of London–he acknowledged he’d done poorly in his class “Terrorism: Past, Present and Future,” attributing that to his disgust with the textbooks: “They would say the Taliban were the same as al Qaeda.” At the same time, Mr. Hashemi won’t explain an essay he wrote late last year in which he called Israel “an American al Qaeda” aimed at the Arab world. When asked about the Taliban’s public executions in Kabul’s soccer stadium, he quipped: “There were also executions happening in Texas.”
And his photo beats anything you got from The New York Times Magazine.