Yale Alum Blasts Ivy League School for Enrolling Former Taliban Official
by Jim Brown
March 7, 2006
(AgapePress) - - An alumnus of Yale University says the Ivy League school apparently "considers the U.S. military more evil than the Taliban." He bases this conclusion on the fact that Yale recently enrolled former Taliban spokesman Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi as a student.Rahmatullah, an avowed fascist, was granted a student visa by the U.S. State Department. Nevertheless, his presence on campus is not sitting too well with some alumni. Former U.S. Army Captain Flagg Youngblood, who now works for the Young America's Foundation, is outraged his alma mater would welcome the Taliban -- especially while the school continues to ban the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) and military recruiters from campus.
"I'm ashamed, frankly, as an alumnus of the school," Youngblood says. "I don't understand why Yale would want to prioritize inviting an enemy of our nation to study when it won't even promote patriots on campus working for our common national defense. It's the world flipped upside down."
The U.S. military veteran and Yale graduate notes that when he was a student at the Ivy League school in New Haven, Connecticut, he had to drive 70 miles to the University of Connecticut campus in Storrs to participate in ROTC. He says the fact that Yale welcomes the Taliban while barring U.S. military recruiters and ROTC training activities truly demonstrates where the elite school's allegiance rests.
Youngblood feels the place offered to Rahmatullah in a competitive school like Yale ought to have been offered to an ally or a citizen of the U.S. "I mean, there are thousands of American citizens who could fill a spot like that in a heartbeat," he says.
The former Army captain observes that a patriotic U.S. citizen could have profited greatly from the vast resources Yale has in its archives and libraries. "And yet we chose a foreign national -- an enemy combatant no less -- to invite in to take a spot and exclude someone that could benefit in our own country," he says.
Youngblood has sharp criticism for the decision-makers at Yale University for allowing the former deputy foreign secretary of the Taliban to enroll as a student on the school's campus. Moreover, he says the State Department should never have allowed Rahmatullah into the United States in the first place.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
