OpinionJournal - John Fund on the Trail

OpinionJournal - John Fund on the Trail: "yesterday's New York Times magazine (said) that Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former ambassador-at-large for the Taliban, is now studying at Yale on a U.S. student visa."

"Yale is giving a first-class education to an erstwhile high official in one of the most evil regimes of the latter half of the 20th century--the government that harbored the terrorists who attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001."

The New York "Times reported that Yale "had another foreigner of Rahmatullah's caliber apply for special-student status." Richard Shaw, Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions, told the Times that "we lost him to Harvard," and "I didn't want that to happen again."

There is something wrong when someone like this is expressly given, one a student visa and two an education at an elite university. What is odder still is that an individual with a "fourth-grade education and a high-school equivalency degree might go about applying to one of the world's top universities," and actually be accepted; especially considering what John Fund points out later in the article, that "there are many poor, bright students--American and foreign alike--who would jump at the opportunity to attend Yale. Why should Mr. Rahmatullah go to the line ahead of all of them?"

It makes you wonder. You don't even have to get to the point that he was a representative of the Taliban, not just some Joe "al ibn" Schmo, but an individual within the government - an ambassador. Read the article for more detail and decide for yourself if someone responding with a sneer, jokingly to a burkha-clad woman at a speech he was giving for the Atlantic Council in response to her lifting of her burkha and saying, "you have imprisoned the women--it's a horror, let me tell you."

Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi said, "I'm really sorry to your husband. He might have a very difficult time with you."