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Former Taliban Spokesman Now Yale U. Student
A one-time member of the Taliban has apparently taken up studies at Yale University. While his former colleagues in Afghanistan’s former Taliban government are dead, hiding, or imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi is studying at Yale on a student visa. Once the Taliban’s "ambassador-at-large,” Rahmatullah was the subject of the feature article in this weekend’s New York Times magazine. He surfaced at Yale through the efforts of Mike Hoover, a CBS News cameraman, whom he met while serving as an interpreter for the Taliban. Rahmatullah was admitted to Yale despite only having a fourth-grade education and high school equivalency certificate. "[Yale] had another foreigner of Rahmatullah’s caliber apply for special-student status,” explained Richard Shaw, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions, to the Times. "We lost him to Harvard,” he continued. "I didn’t want that to happen again.” And so, Rahmatullah enjoys the pleasures of coed life in New Haven, Conn. The man who criss-crossed the United States on a speaking engagement in 2001 to defend the subjugation of women and the annihilation of ancient Buddhist cultural monuments now attends classes with women and Harvard-Yale football games among a diverse student body. He has already taken one class of peculiar interest: Political Science 145, Terrorism: Past, Present and Future. The class meets in Luce Hall, the same location where Rahmatullah gave a speech as "roving ambassador” for the Taliban on May 27, 2001.
John Fund of the Wall Street Journal met Rahmatullah on his U.S. tour in 2001 and is incensed by the revelation that he is now studying at Yale. "There is something to be said for the instinct to reach out to one’s former enemies,” he wrote in Monday’s Journal. "But there are limits." He continued: "[Rahmatullah] willingly and cheerfully served an evil regime in a manner that would have made Goebbels proud. 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 them all?”
Editor's note:
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