[Mb-civic] Educating the Taliban at Yale - Cathy Young - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Educating the Taliban at Yale

By Cathy Young  |  March 13, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

IMAGINE IF you were in college and found out that the guy next to you in 
class had worked as a propagandist for one of the most oppressive 
regimes of modern times.

For some Yale students, this is not a theoretical question. Sayed 
Rahmatullah Hashemi, a former spokesman for Afghanistan's Taliban 
government, was admitted to the university last year as a special 
student in a nondegree program; this spring, he plans to apply as a 
regular student.

Hashemi's story came to light after he was profiled in an article in The 
New York Times Magazine. In 2001, not long before the destruction of the 
World Trade Center and the subsequent removal of the Taliban regime by 
the US military, Hashemi visited the United States on a speaking tour 
defending the Taliban.

Now, the 27-year-old Hashemi's presence at Yale is the center of a 
controversy. Is his admission an example of bridge-building or diversity 
gone mad?

A person with a bad past may deserve a second chance. Yet Hashemi's 
recent statements show a consistent tendency to whitewash his former 
masters. He suggests that the Taliban regime went bad because ''the 
radicals were taking over and doing crazy stuff" -- as opposed, 
presumably, to the sane and moderate early days. On the public 
executions of adulterous women, he explains to the Times of London that 
''there were also executions happening in Texas."

On his 2001 trip to the United States, Hashemi had a public exchange 
with a woman who tore off a burqa and denounced the plight of Afghan 
women. His response (preserved for posterity in Michael Moore's 
''Fahrenheit 9/11") was, ''I'm really sorry for your husband. He might 
have a very difficult time with you." What does he think of that 
incident today? To the Times of London reporter, he noted that the woman 
did get divorced.

One striking aspect of this controversy is the reaction from Yale's 
liberal community. Della Sentilles, a Yale senior, recently wrote a 
piece for the Yale Daily News denouncing such manifestations of rampant 
misogyny at Yale as the shortage of tenured female professors and poor 
childcare options. On her blog, a reader asked Sentilles about the 
presence at Yale of a former spokesman for one of the world's most 
misogynistic regimes. Her reply: ''As a white American feminist, I do 
not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other 
cultures, especially statements that suggest one culture is more sexist 
and repressive than another. American feminism is often linked to and 
manipulated by the state in order to further its own imperialist ends."

John Fund of The Wall Street Journal, who has been following the story, 
writes that the Yale students he interviewed were unanimous in their 
opinion that the reaction to Hashemi would have been more hostile if he 
had been associated with, say, the apartheid regime of South Africa. One 
senior told Fund that the general feeling was that it wasn't appropriate 
to be as judgmental toward non-Western regimes.

And the reaction from faculty? Jim Sleeper, a journalist and political 
science lecturer at Yale, has responded in the online edition of The 
American Prospect by attacking Fund (whom I know personally) instead of 
addressing the issues.

Sleeper also suggests that Hashemi's ''enrollment was facilitated less 
by the 'diversity' ethos than by yet another of Yale conservatives' 
recent, bumbling efforts to revive the university's old conduit to 
national intelligence."' (To this end, he gratuitously insinuates that 
Hashemi's American patron, filmmaker Mike Hoover, may have intelligence 
ties.) Perhaps that was a part of the motive. Either way, the fact is 
that Yale officials thought that Hashemi was someone who, in the words 
of one former dean, ''could educate us about the world." Whether coming 
from conservatives or liberals, that's a severely blinkered mentality.

If there is a justification for Hashemi's admission, it's that he can 
learn something from us. Chip Brown, the author of The New York Times 
Magazine story, tells the Hartford Courant that ''America would be a lot 
safer from terrorists if there were thousands of Rahmatullahs being 
educated in the US instead of the madrassas of Pakistan." Good point. 
But surely, these educational efforts could be directed toward young 
Muslims who don't have a record of collaboration with a brutal extremist 
regime -- and don't make excuses for that regime.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/13/educating_the_taliban_at_yale/
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