Allah And Man At Yale

From IBD:

Posted 3/7/2006

Academia: If you doubt just how far to port our college campuses lean, consider that just as the nation's top law schools lose their fight to ban military recruiters, Yale admits a former member of the Taliban.

We don't know how many students have attended or are attending Yale under the G.I. Bill. But surely they are not amused by the admission to the alma mater of our last three presidents of Rahmatullah Hashemi. He is the former deputy foreign secretary of the Taliban, a group last seen still trying to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Yale was one of the dozens of colleges and universities that went before the Supreme Court in December to argue that the Solomon Amendment, under which the feds are allowed to withhold federal funds from universities that bar federal recruiters from their campuses, was unconstitutional. This week the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was not.

We have reservations about the use of federal funds as a club to induce certain behavior. But we do believe that the U.S. military has as much a right to recruit its "employees" on university campuses as any other employer. We also think it's hypocritical for those who preach diversity and free speech to seek to bar from their campuses those with whom they disagree. Voltaire, call your office.

All eight sitting justices rejected the schools' contention that being forced to allow recruiters on campus violated their First Amendment rights. "Students and faculty are free to associate to voice their disapproval of the military's message," wrote Chief Justice John Roberts. "Recruiters are by definition, outsiders who come onto campus for the limited purpose of trying hire students — not to become members of the school's expressive association."

These champions of diversity and human rights say the real problem was the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on homosexuality. Admitting military recruiters violates their anti-discrimination policy, they claimed.

But it was Congress, not the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that passed "don't ask, don't tell," and at least one of the schools has no problem with the Taliban's position on homosexuality.

The hypocrisy is particularly egregious when academia honors the likes of Ward Churchill, the nutty professor who thinks the occupants of the World Trade Center were "little Eichmanns" who deserved their fate, and when one of our most prestigious schools admits a spokesman for one of the most oppressive governments in history.

We don't know if Mr. Hashemi has his eyes set on medical school, seeing that his regime once forbade women from seeing a male doctor or from becoming doctors themselves. So if you were a woman under the Taliban, many illnesses were death sentences.

Maybe he'll attend the prestigious Yale Law School, seeing that women under the Taliban couldn't attend school, much less teach in one. Or maybe the Yale archaeology department will welcome the representative of a thugocracy whose first official act was to blow up one of the great monuments of civilization, two giant centuries-old Buddhas carved into the side of a mountain.

Rahmatullah told The New York Times: "In some ways I'm the luckiest person in the world. I could have ended up at Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale."

He's certainly luckier then the dead American soldiers who were killed by the Taliban and therefore will never get to attend Yale. And as for Guantanamo, Mr. Hashemi, we'll leave a light on for you.