Posted on 02/26/2006 8:00:44 AM PST by george76
"Naivete".....hmmmm, I hadn't considered that.
i'm thinking of Solzynitsen at Harvard...
"i'm thinking of Solzynitsen at Harvard..."
>>>>>>>>>>>>..........
wanna bet this guy goes to Yale on the Taxpayers Dime?
gotta love the multiculture/leftist/Western white male haters ..they get us to support our own downfall.
This is nothing new Mansour Farhang left his position as a professor at Cal State University Sacramento to answer the call of Ayatollah Khomeini to become revolutionary Iran’s first ambassador to the United Nations. This was at a time during which American diplomats were being held hostage in the embassy in Tehran. He fled back to the United States a few years later after falling out of favor with Khomeini and being threatened with death if he remained in Iran. Sacramento State welcomed him back with open arms reinstating him into his teaching position along with full tenure. He now teaches international relations and Middle Eastern politics at Bennington College, Vermont.
Read the actual New York Times article --- it's actually a fascinating, complicated story.
Is there anything useful to post here ?
It's here and it's actually a piece of garbage. It's interesting, sure, but heavilt spun and poorly written.
The conclusion is the Taliban weren't so bad and the "warlords" and opium traffickers who've been put back by the US are worse.
He follows the news from Afghanistan every day - increasingly dismayed, as are many, by the return of the warlords, the rise of opium trafficking, the lawlessness and violence that have plagued his country all his life.
"“I thought he could do a lot as a student/teacher,” Hoover said. "
No one could argue that point. of course, the cameraman, being a member of the MSM, meant "do a lot" to overthrow capitalist oppression in United States.
Maybe.
It was largely for his children's sake that he was pursuing an education on the other side of the earth — for their future and, in some inchoate hope-filled way, for his country's future too. What he often said was that he wanted to be a bridge between the Islamic world and the West. None of the summer students in New Haven knew much about his personal circumstances; of his history they knew nothing at all. He had discussed it with the Yale admissions office, and with an administrator in the provost's office who during a dinner with him seemed concerned that he might be a spy.
Very long article. These features usually wrap back around to a point somewhere near the end. Will see.
"Must of had some awesome SAT scores. WTF?"
more likely he's doing the "football player" curriculum, ie---being provided with the answers to tests in advance, and given good grades even if he fails to memorize the right answer.
Of course, you have to realize that the average grade and Harvard now is very close to straight A's. They give out no C's and very few B's. Recently, there was a bit of a problem because the president of Harvard complained about the weakness of the grading system. The problem has been solved however (the president, Summers, has put in his resignation, effective for a few months from now. The actual incident that caused him to be removed (straw that broke the camel's back) was that he said the reason there are so few women achieving in science might be genetic.)
"The conclusion is the Taliban weren't so bad and the "warlords" and opium traffickers who've been put back by the US are worse."
The New York Crimes
This is what breeds conspiracy theories.
I think you have to read it to get a feel for yourself.
But he got a high school equivalency degree and has friends raising money for his education and he was let into Yale on a special non-degree program which is dependent upon his grades before he can apply to be allowed into a regular degree program.
Yes, but I'm not exactly sure what.
"Many of the Pakistani Pashtuns in Quetta were Communists, and they hated the Afghan refugees. They called us bagori, which means 'escapees.' I remember in school they'd call us puppets of the Americans. I got into a lot of fights with these people. They'd say things like, 'The Russians have a missile that can hit the White House,' and I'd say, 'The Americans have a missile that can hit a dot on the back of a cow standing in the Kremlin!"'
[. . .]
"I went with my father to see Kandahar and our village," he recalled in the late-afternoon hush of the Commons dining hall. "The reason why the Taliban were so successful at first was they were seen as the ultimate good guys. They stabilized the country. The areas they controlled were unique for peace and security. I said to my father, 'I really want to join them."'
[. . .]
Truth be told, Rahmatullah was beginning to wonder about some aspects of life with the Taliban. He was appointed to the position of diplomat in the Afghan Embassy in Islamabad in 1998, and when Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil became foreign minister in 2000, he made Rahmatullah a "roving ambassador." The international image of the Taliban was increasingly dominated by the Vice and Virtue busybodies who were checking the lengths of beards and thrashing women with leather straps and herding crowds into the Kabul soccer stadium to witness lashings amputations and executions. Even among ordinary people, he was increasingly reluctant to appear in his black turban. Before long he found himself wrapping on turbans of a less controversial color.
[. . .]
"On the East Coast the questions were much harder, especially about bin Laden and the Buddhist statues," he recalls. "The statues had just been blown up. 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."
[. . .]
When he rose to speak on "Prospects for Afghanistan" at the Atlantic Council, hecklers in the audience shouted. A gray-haired woman in the audience stood and lifted the burka she was wearing over her head. "You have imprisoned the women — it's a horror, let me tell you," she cried. Rahmatullah was caught on videotape responding: "I'm really sorry to your husband. He might have a very difficult time with you."
Unfortunately for him the exchange surfaced in Michael Moore's documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11." He appeared for about 30 seconds in the film, and it sealed his notoriety as the face of what many Americans considered to be an odious regime of terrorist-enabling male chauvinists.
[. . .]
"I nearly got into a fight with the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Mullah Saqib, who had verified the edict to demolish the Bamiyan Buddhas," he recalls. "I said, 'Why can't we have women's education?' And he said, 'We'll have it later.' I said: 'There isn't any time. Why are we waiting?' He said to me, 'I think you were really indoctrinated by America.' That really ticked me off. I wanted something good for Afghanistan. I was saying what I was saying because it was for the good of Afghanistan, not because I was being paid by the C.I.A. He was a sycophant — he didn't want to upset the conservatives."
[. . .]
In the fall of 2003, he took a high-school equivalency exam in Quetta and was awarded a degree. In February 2004, he got a call from his old boss, the former foreign minister Mullah Muttawakil. He had been released from the American prison at Bagram Air Base and was now under house arrest in Kabul. He asked if Rahmatullah would like to return to Kabul and clear his name with the American authorities. Yes, he would, he said, and a week later in Kabul, Rahmatullah saw Muttawakil for the first time in two years.
[. . .]
The Karzai administration invited Rahmatullah to work for the government, but with the Northern Alliance now controlling the Afghan military, he feared for his safety in Kabul. Since the regime's collapse, Rahmatullah had stayed in touch with Mike Hoover. In the spring of 2004, he jumped when Hoover proposed the possibility of Rahmatullah's attending college in the United States. "I thought he could do a lot as a student/teacher," Hoover says.
[. . .]
He follows the news from Afghanistan every day — increasingly dismayed, as are many, by the return of the warlords, the rise of opium trafficking, the lawlessness and violence that have plagued his country all his life. Would things be better if the Taliban were still in power?
"Economically, no. In terms of security, yes. In terms of general happiness, no. In the long-term interests of the country? I don't think so. I think the radicals were taking over and doing crazy stuff. I regret when people think of the Taliban and then think of me — that feeling people have after they know I was affiliated with them is painful to me. When I read that the neo-Taliban are burning girls' schools, I am ashamed."
Many distinctions could be drawn between his old life and his life at Yale. But he had seized on one.
"You have to be reasonable to live in America," he said. "Everything here is based on reason. Even the essays you write for class. Back home you have to talk about religion and culture, and you can win any argument if you bring up the Islamic argument. You can't reason against religion. But you cannot change Afghanistan overnight. You can't bring the Enlightenment overnight."
Is the Yale chapter of NOW supporting this guy?
I think it's a bit unfair not to include the next paragraph after the one you quoted....
"Would things be better if the Taliban were still in power?
"Economically, no. In terms of security, yes. In terms of general happiness, no. In the long-term interests of the country? I don't think so. I think the radicals were taking over and doing crazy stuff. I regret when people think of the Taliban and then think of me — that feeling people have after they know I was affiliated with them is painful to me. When I read that the neo-Taliban are burning girls' schools, I am ashamed.""
It gives a more accurate picture of his opinions.
This guy looks like a good candidate to be wiretapped and then tortured.
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