YAF Spokesman Condemns Yale's Admission of Former Taliban Envoy
by Jim Brown
March 20, 2006
(AgapePress) - - Yale University is being denounced for defending its decision to allow a member of the Taliban to enroll at the prestigious New Haven, Connecticut, school. Yale has been roundly criticized by alumni and others of late for admitting former Taliban deputy foreign secretary Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi and giving him a 40 percent tuition discount. In defending the decision to enroll Hashemi, Yale spokesman Helanie Klasky commented that universities "must strive to increase understanding, especially of the most difficult issues that face the nation and the world."
Jason Mattera with the Young America's Foundation (YAF) believes Yale has a problem with labeling evil as such. He says of the Taliban-run government in Afghanistan, which employed Hashemi as a computer operator and, later, a translator and a diplomat, "It's an evil regime he worked for, plain and simple."
The Taliban "mass murdered women and pulled their fingernails out -- gratuitous torture," Mattera asserts. "So for [Yale's administrators] not go out and just label it evil ... and not be moral relativists in this situation is a mystery to most normal Americans, liberal or conservative," he says. "It doesn't matter what your stripe in this situation is."
With those standards, the YAF member says, "Yale [admissions officials] should just court Kim Jong Il's sons." That is, he adds, "if they haven't already."
Mattera contends that Yale would apparently rather welcome terrorists than members of America's own military on its campus. And yet, he says, Hashemi is a seemingly "unrepentant member of the Taliban," who as early as last year "wrote an article calling Israel the American version of al Qaeda."
Hashemi is "obviously anti-Semitic," the conservative spokesman asserts, adding that the Afghan-born, Pakistani man has repeatedly defended the Taliban's oppression of women and has even "joked about the issue of women and the Taliban in speeches before, and yet he's taking a class, ironically enough, at Yale in terrorism."
Mattera notes that Yale University has taken a financial hit from angry alumni and other outraged donors. He says he doubts Hashemi, who was initially enrolled as a non-degree-seeking student, will be accepted into a full-time undergraduate program.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
