Free Republic

SAN FRANCISCO — Three Hayward cousins have pleaded guilty to shooting a man in the face with a BB gun because they thought he was gay, and were sentenced to six months in jail. Mohammad Habibzada, 24, Shafiq Hashemi, 21, and Sayed Bassam, 21, also will be on probation for three years and must complete as much as 400 hours of community service, including 40 hours of hate-crime sensitivity training, according to the San Francisco District Attorney's Office. Police said the men went to San Francisco on Feb. 26 armed with an air rifle and video camera, targeting people who...

SNIPPET: "(03-03) 17:42 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- Three cousins from Hayward have been charged in San Francisco with a hate crime and assault for allegedly firing a BB rifle at the face of a man they believed was gay, an attack the men videotaped, authorities said Wednesday." SNIPPET: "Mohammad Habibzada, Shafiq Hashemi and Sayed Bassam, all 24, are scheduled to be arraigned today in San Francisco Superior Court. They are free on $50,000 bond apiece." SNIPPET: "Investigators believe the assailants chose the victim because he appeared to be gay. When the men were pulled over, police found a video camera...

Senior al Qaeda and Afghan Taliban leaders are reported to have met with Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud to advise him to move his group's operations into Afghanistan and halt attacks against the Pakistani state. Several meetings were said to have been held last week after an 11-man delegation of al Qaeda and Taliban heavy hitters arrived in Waziristan to deliver a request from Mullah Omar, the Amir al Mumineen, or the leader of the faithful in Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to a report in The Nation. The Taliban dispatched Sirajuddin Haqqani, the powerful military commander of the Haqqani Network,...

Critics of Yale’s decision to admit former Taliban diplomat Rahmatullah Hashemi have suggested that the ensuing controversy was partially to blame for the decrease in applications to Yale this year... Applications to Yale for the class of 2011 decreased 9.7 percent ... While Yale administrators blamed the decline on last year’s record-low acceptance rate and natural year-to-year fluctuations, critics of the University have argued that high school students may have been disillusioned by Hashemi’s enrollment. Hashemi took classes at Yale through the Nondegree Students Program from the summer of 2005 through the end of the 2006 academic year, gaining national...

Vast majority of Iranian lawmakers vote to move up presidential elections by 18 months, final say on matter up to Ahmadinejad's arch-rival. Will Ahmadinejad's term be cut short? The Iranian parliament voted on Sunday to unite the presidential elections with the upcoming parliamentary ones, this according to the official Iranian news agency. The proposal, which passed with a surprising 80 percent majority, may cut the term of sitting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by 18 months. The bill must still be ratified by the Iranian constitutional committee, which is headed by former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Ahmadinejad's arch-rival, a fact which many...

A student at Yale University who was once a roving ambassador for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan has been denied admission to a degree-granting program at Yale, one of the student's financial supporters said yesterday. The student, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, apparently can continue to take courses at the university as an untraditional student in a non-degree program, as he did during the past academic year, said Tatiana Maxwell, the president of the International Education Foundation, which was created to raise money to send Mr. Hashemi to Yale. It was uncertain yesterday whether Mr. Hashemi, who is 27, will do so;...

Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi created a firestorm of controversy when it was revealed in February that the former Taliban official was enrolled as a student at Yale University. Now it appears Hashemi’s days at Yale may be numbered. In an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, John Fund writes: "The continued outrage over the news that an unrepentant former official of a criminal regime whose remnants are still killing U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan is part of the Ivy League is catching up with him. Yale is about to establish tougher standards for the program under which he is applying to become...

Yale now doesn't even attempt to claim that Mr. Hashemi has changed. In conversations with donors, president Richard Levin has fallen back on two arguments: that Mr. Hashemi currently is a nondegree student, and that the State Department issued him a visa. But Mr. Hashemi's application to become a sophomore in Yale's full degree program, the same type of program that Mr. Farivar graduated from at Harvard, is pending before Mr. Levin. That makes his continued presence at Yale especially relevant as Yale's Board of Governors, the body that supposedly runs the university, prepares to meet this week. Many in...

The Collegiate Network has given its annual award to highlight the negative influence of political correctness to Yale University for enrolling a former Taliban official with a fourth-grade education. "Yale pursued [Sayed Rahmatullah] Hashemi's admission in the name of that sacred cow, diversity, which now appears to extend not only to people of various sexes, creeds, races, ethnicities, sexual preferences and practices, but also to enemy combatants who make war upon the United States," the conservative group said. The winner of the second-place 2006 Campus Outrage Award, also called the Polly Award -- "Polly" being an abbreviation of the term...

Having tired of yelling at my television, I have set down to write the painfully obvious: Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, the Ivy League Mullah, is a CIA asset. His admittance to the country and his acceptance to Yale are merely payback for services rendered. Mike Hoover, Hashimi’s sponsor, was one of only a handful of journalists allowed into Afghanistan by the CIA in the eighties to observe the war against Russia. Bob Schuster, Hoover’s attorney friend, was a 1967 graduate of Yale and apparently had the connections to obtain a slot for Hashimi at the Ivy League school. Although I cannot...

Wow, Me Be College Boy Now! A Special Guest Commentaryby Sayed Rahmatellah HashemiGreetings American swine-dogs! It is me, Sayed Rahmatellah Hashemi the former spokesman for Afghanistan's Taliban Government, and now student at your University of Yale. I tell you I am much surprised by what my room-mate Squid calls the "buzz-killing" over my getting into your elite institution of higher indoctrination education. Sure, I have a fourth grade education and a high-school equivalency certificate from Uncle Rashid's Discount Madrassa & House of Kabob, and that might not make me qualify academically for Yale, but I bring something that is...

Yale is in a dilemma. It made a huge, indefensible blunder when it admitted the senior advisor to Mullah Omar as a special student, and now it’s taking hits from students, from alumni, and from the media. How can Yale spin its way out of this one? They have at their fingertips an invaluable resource, someone who made a career of defending the indefensible. In fact, this PR flack extraordinaire was so successful that he was reportedly on the fast track to become the Taliban’s next foreign minister. Unfortunately for Yale, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi isn’t talking. Others are taking up...

Something is very wrong at our elite universities. Last month Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard; today Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi will speak by video to a conference at Columbia University that his regime is cosponsoring. (Columbia won't answer questions about how much funding it got from Libya or what implied strings were attached.) Then there's Yale, which for three weeks has refused to make any comment or defense beyond a vague 144-word statement about its decision to admit Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi--a former ambassador-at-large of the murderous Afghan Taliban--as a special student. The three backers of the foundation that,...

A statement from Yale University, defending its decision to admit former Taliban spokesman Ramatullah Hashemi, explained that he had "escaped the wreckage of Afghanistan." To anyone who is aware of the Taliban's barbaric treatment of the Afghan people, such words are offensive--as if Mr. Hashemi were not himself part of the wrecking crew. It is even more disturbing to learn that, while Mr. Hashemi sailed through Yale's admissions process, the school turned down the opportunity to enroll women who really did escape the wreckage of Afghanistan. In 2002, Yale received a letter from Paula Nirschel, the founder of the Initiative...

Leave it to the elites of academia to come up with a novel new way to address the modern terrorist movement. Readers have probably heard by now that Yale University has added to its student body a former member of the Taliban. It's one of those stories that, no matter how many times you hear/read it, you still have to shake your head in disbelief. It seems there's no real need for America's enemies to utilize a Trojan horse in an effort to defeat us. We've lowered our defenses and have invited our adversaries with open arms. Yale's action is...

Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn has sent a letter to Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff about the decision to allow Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the former Taliban spokesman, into the United States to become a student at Yale. Dear Secretary Chertoff: I write to you regarding Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the former Taliban spokesman currently attending Yale University on a student visa. In 2005, Congress passed the REAL ID Act and expanded the terror-related grounds of inadmissibility. Under current law, an alien is inadmissible or removable on terror-related grounds if he is a representative of any designated or nondesignated terrorist organization. Further,...

Since the New York Times and Wall Street Journal broke the news about the admission of Taliban official Sayeed Rahmatullah Hashemi to a special student program at Yale, we’ve received numerous emails from outraged Yale Alumni. One email stood out from the rest — "I won’t give Yale one red cent this year, but maybe I will give them a red fingernail instead!" She was referring to the Taliban’s policy of pulling the fingernails off of Afghani women who dared to wear fingernail polish. Some of these women even had their thumbs sliced off as punishment. To date, Mr. Rahmatullah...

University officials are embarrassed--but not embarrassed enough. Monday, March 6, 2006 12:01 a.m. Are there no limits to how arrogant and out-of-touch America's Ivy League schools can get? Last week it emerged that Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former deputy foreign secretary of the Taliban, is now a student at Yale while at the same time the school continues to block ROTC training from its campus and argues for the right of its law school to exclude military recruiters. King George's troops played the music to "The World Turned Upside Down" as they surrendered at Yorktown. Perhaps the Ivy League should adopt...

While most American parents can only dream of sending their kids to a first-tier university such as Harvard and Yale, a former ambassador for the oppressive and brutal Afghan Taliban is enrolled at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, even though he possesses none of the qualifications to attend such an institution for higher education. "Yale University enrolls the Taliban's former spokesman as a student, but continues to prohibit other students from organizing a Reserve Officer Training Corps chapter on campus and also seeks to deny students the right to hear from military recruiters about employment opportunities," say members of...

Educating A Terrorist At Yale By Linda Chavez March 2, 2006 I thought I'd lost the ability to be shocked by anything that happened on an American university campus -- that is until I read the New York Times magazine this weekend. In an article entitled, simply, "The Freshman," author Chip Brown describes a charming tale of a young man come to study at one of the premier institutions of higher learning in the country. He might more aptly have titled his piece "God, Country, and Yale." Only in this telling, God is the vengeful Allah of Islamist fanatics, and...