Monday, March 20, 2006

Party at Leonard Bernstein's pad

While examining Yale's admission of former Taliban official Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, I can't help but think of Tom Wolfe's sixties classic "Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" about the courting of fringe activists by New York's social elite.

But the Yale controversy goes much deeper than a dinner party at a famous conductor's Park Avenue duplex. Dubya's alma mater is essentially spitting in the face of the scores of Afghans who were routinely tortured by the fundamentalist Islamic government. Yale apologists say they're trying to bridge a cultural gap, but why not invite, say, an Afghan woman to attend classes there?

While no longer in power, the Taliban remains an organized source of terror. In the current Vanity Fair, author Sebastian Junger detailed some of the atrocities still being committed by these Islamo-fascists:

They include skinning a man alive and leaving him to die in the sun. Another man was forced to watch as his wife was gang-raped. Then his eyes were put out, so that the horrific crime would be the last image he would ever see.

Perhaps Rahmatullah's many defenders should attend Thursday's lecture by Malalai Joya, a 27-year-old member of Afghanistan's parliament, who is coming to the Yale campus to discuss women's rights in her home country.

"He should apologize to my people and expose what he and others did under the Taliban," Joya told conservative columnist John Fund. "He knew very well what criminal acts they committed; he was not too young to know. He should give interviews so we know what he thinks now. It would be better if he faced a court of justice than be a student at Yale University."

No comments:

Post a Comment