Free Republic

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...

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,...

In a breathtaking double standard, Yale continues to block ROTC training from its campus and argues - against the opinion of a unanimous Supreme Court - that its law school has the right to limit access by military recruiters. I vividly recall Rahmatullah's visit to The Wall Street Journal's offices in the spring of 2001. I was surprised when he defended the Taliban's brutal treatment of women - they were barred from school after age 10 and often banned from appearing in public without a husband or an older male relative. Then I was shocked when he said he hadn't...

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...

I was more than a little puzzled to see the self-satisfied mug of Rahmatullah Hashemi '09 smiling at me from the front of the News on Monday. The last time I saw that Cheshire grin was in Michael Moore's otherwise manipulative "Fahrenheit 9/11," which, for all its demagoguery and factual errors, at least captured the Taliban's odiousness. In a clip lasting 30 seconds, an indignant woman confronts Hashemi -- who no less than five years ago was a chief spokesperson for the Islamist theocracy -- at a public event. "You have imprisoned the women -- it's a horror," she shouts,...

Never has an article made me blink with astonishment as much as when I read in yesterday's New York Times magazine that Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former ambassador-at-large for the Taliban, is now studying at Yale on a U.S. student visa. This is taking the obsession that U.S. universities have with promoting diversity a bit too far. Something is very wrong at our elite universities. Last week Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard when it became clear he would lose a no-confidence vote held by politically correct faculty members furious at his efforts to allow ROTC on campus, his opposition...

The Taliban’s former spokesman, Rahmatullah Hashemi, is now an undergraduate at Yale University, The New York Times reveals in a lengthy cover story by Chip Brown in its Sunday magazine this weekend. The cover line reads, “He was the Taliban’s spin doctor. So what’s he doing at Yale?" In fact, the story shows, Hashemi was at Yale once before—in 2001, appearing at a forum representing the Taliban, a few months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A small clip of Hashemi appears in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” film. “In some ways,” Hashemi, 27, says today, “I’m the luckiest person in the...