Former Taliban Ambassador, a Yale Student, Provokes ‘Consternation’

A press report that a former “roving ambassador” for the Taliban is now a student at Yale University has provoked a degree of “consternation” among the Ivy League school’s students and affiliates.Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, a 28-year-old Afghan who in 2001 toured America to defend the Taliban regime, was admitted to Yale as a non-degree student in January 2005 and has been taking classes there since the summer semester. He can apply to study for a regular undergraduate degree at the college this spring. His enrollment was first reported in the New York Times Magazine.“I have mixed feelings,” a senior in the college, Keith Urbahn, told The New York Sun. He said there was a certain degree of “consternation” among his mostly conservative friends at the school, but that “most people on campus are not really upset.”“There’s something viscerally really bothering about having a student who was a member of a regime that for all intents and purposes declared war on the United States of America by harboring bin Laden,” he said.Mr. Urbahn added that until Mr. Hashemi publicly acknowledges that the Taliban was “oppressive and complicit in terrorism” and disavows its positions, he should not be at Yale.Other students were less perturbed.“If we didn’t accept him and try to learn from him, how could we say we’re this diverse body and institution of higher learning?” a freshman, Benjamin Gonzalez, said. “If we just dismiss him, what does that say about us?”Mr. Gonzalez is the coordinator for the Queer Peers Counseling Program and a member of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Cooperative. He said many of his classmates thought the announcement that Mr. Hashemi was a student at Yale was a prank or joke, and that many undergraduates reacted with shock. “The general consensus was that they were uncomfortable with it at first, but after they thought about it” they changed their position.A senior in the college who is a contributor to the Sun, James Kirchick, said, “If you have Daniel Pipes come it’s like World War III, but you have someone from the Taliban, and nobody cares.”Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum and fervent supporter of Israel. He is also a columnist for the Sun. In 2003, nearly half the students in the audience at a speech Mr. Pipes delivered at Yale wore black bands over their mouths in protest.The Eugene Meyer Professor of political science and philosophy at Yale, Seyla Benhabib, said in a telephone interview that it is perfectly clear Mr. Hashemi is not an ideological zealot. “How fortuitous it was that at the age of 18, because he knew languages,” he worked for the Taliban, she said. Mr. Hashemi speaks Urdu, Farsi, Persian, and English, and worked as a translator in Afghanistan for the Taliban and others. He also worked for the United Nations’s UNICEF for a time starting in 1996.Ms. Benhabib, who is the director of Yale’s Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics, said having contact and communication with people in the Middle East is better than isolation. “I think that clearly there is a need to educate the younger generation of leaders in that part of the world,” she said. “I would much rather have someone at Yale University where they will hear a full spectrum of views, from the right, to the center, to the left.”The editor of the New Haven Advocate, Mark Oppenheimer, who holds both a bachelor’s degree and a doctorate in religious studies from Yale, said Mr. Hashemi’s knowledge of four languages may have made him more qualified than the typical applicant to Yale. “He sounds like a remarkable guy,” Mr. Oppenheimer said.He did say that Mr. Hashemi’s admission raised questions: “What if some low-level Nazi were applying after World War II? Where do you draw the line?”Contacted by the Sun, several fellows of the Yale Corporation, the governing board of Yale University, declined to comment.The most palpable outrage over Mr. Hashemi’s admission to Yale came from John Fund, who wrote in the Wall Street Journal yesterday: “This is taking the obsession that U.S. universities have with promoting diversity a bit too far.”Mr. Hashimi did not return requests for comment yesterday.“In some ways I’m the luckiest person in the world,” he told the New York Times. “I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale.”The Times article focused on Mr. Hashemi’s distance from the Taliban even when he was working for it, mentioning that he often refused to wear the black turban that characterizes members of the regime, and quoting him as saying that after his 2001 tour of America he “nearly got into a fight” with the chief justice of the Afghan supreme court, Mullah Saqib, by pressing him on why the Taliban did not have schools for women.On his speaking tour he attempted to defend the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, two giant, 1,500-year-old statues. “I tried to distance myself from it, but inside I was dying. If I said I had nothing to do with it and didn’t support it, I would have been in trouble back home,” the Times quotes him as saying.

Former Taliban Ambassador, a Yale Student, Provokes ‘Consternation’

Former Taliban Ambassador, a Yale Student, Provokes ‘Consternation’

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