On the subject of Yale’s Taliban student, the WSJ’s John Fund notes that “University officials are embarrassed–but not embarrassed enough”:
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 […]
Yale’s decision to admit Mr. Rahmatullah is particularly jarring given constant reminders of the Taliban’s crimes—both past and present. Last week, as President Bush visited democratic Afghanistan, its TV news aired fresh footage of beheaded bodies being paraded through a street. The men had been murdered because they opposed local Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists.
Last week I described Mr. Rahmatullah’s remarkable visit to The Wall Street Journal’s offices in the spring of 2001. After a meeting in which he defended the Taliban’s treatment of women and said he hadn’t seen any evidence that their “guest” Osama bin Laden was a terrorist, I felt I had looked into the face of evil.
[…]
You would think Yale would feel compelled to explain its decision to admit Mr. Rahmatullah. Instead, a cone of silence has descended over the university. Yale officials didn’t return my calls or those of other reporters for several days last week. Finally on Friday, spokesman Tom Conroy said the university would have no comment, citing privacy concerns that preclude it from discussing any individual student.
Almost no one will now defend Mr. Rahmatullah’s presence as a special student, even though a week ago many had no such inhibitions in a splashy New York Times magazine piece, which broke the news that he had been at Yale for eight months. In that piece, Richard Shaw, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions before he took the same post at Stanford, explained that Yale had missed out on another foreign student of the same caliber as Mr. Rahmatullah but that “we lost him to Harvard,” and “I didn’t want that to happen again.”
Now Mr. Shaw isn’t returning phone calls, and much of the reaction from Yale to the outside world is downright hostile. One faculty member told me he wasn’t interested in questions about Mr. Rahmatullah and accused me of pursuing “another Journal attack on Yale’s lax liberal standards.” He then threatened to attack me in print as “slimy.”
At the same time, many Yale alumni and students tell me they are concerned that Yale refuses to explain why it honored Mr. Rahmatullah with a prize perch when countless well-qualified Americans–not to mention other Afghans–would jump at the chance but will never get it.
[…] in 1996 [Afghanistan] more or less fell into the lap of the Taliban, a group of young fanatics straight out of “Lord of the Flies.” After the Soviet departure from Afghanistan in 1989, the country had become an anarchic stew of feuding warlords. The Taliban consolidated power into a central government and soon had control of 90% of the country.
But as soon as they were secure in power, they revealed they were medieval fascists. Homosexuals were thrown into ditches and then had concrete walls bulldozed over them. Women caught wearing nail polish had their fingernails pulled out or in some cases their fingers chopped off. Everything was banned from television to kite flying to paper bags. Paper bags? Apparently one of the mullahs heard that bags in Kabul’s market had been made out of recycled copies of the Koran, so they had to go.
Mr. Rahmatullah became an apologist for all of this during his propaganda tour of the U.S. in the months before 9/11. Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” captured one testy exchange he had with an exiled Afghan woman who told him, “You have imprisoned the women. It’s a horror, let me tell you.” The Afghan diplomat responded with a sneer: “I’m really sorry for your husband. He must have a very difficult time with you.” Asked by the Times of London last week if he regretted that statement now, he replied: “That woman, for your information, did divorce her husband.”
[…] Having lived overseas as a child and traveled to many developing countries, I am all for students knowing more about the world. But the arguments for accepting Mr. Rahmatullah are surreal. “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?” freshman Benjamin Gonzalez asked the New York Sun. “If we just dismiss him, what does that say about us?” It may say that moral relativism has such an entrenched hold on campus that some people can no longer make needed distinctions.
Some, though, are more discerning. James Kirchick, a senior who describes himself as a liberal Democrat, is appalled that campus feminists and gays trash American society as intolerant but won’t protest now that “an actual, live remnant of one of the most misogynistic and homophobic regimes ever” is in their midst. “They have other concerns, such as single-sex bathrooms and fraternities,” he told me.
There was a time when some at Yale summoned outrage at the Taliban. In 2000, a band of 30 protesters gathered outside Pierson College when it hosted a “master’s tea” for Taliban representative Abdul Hakeem Mujahid. While the protesters chanted outside, Mr. Mujahid calmly told his audience that “99% of [Afghan] women approve” of the Taliban and that the regime was committed to elevating the status of women in society. Eli Muller, the reporter who covered the event for the Yale Daily News, was shocked that his lies “went nearly unchallenged.”
After the talk, Mr. Muller observed someone approach a spokeswoman for the Taliban and invite her to give a talk at the law school on women’s rights. Mr. Muller concluded in an op-ed piece entitled “Sympathy for the Devil” that the “moral overconfidence of Yale students makes them subject to manipulation by people who are genuinely evil.” That year, Lynn Amowitz, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, found that 18% of the 223 women she interviewed who lived under Taliban rule had attempted suicide by drowning in local rivers, drinking pesticides or overdosing on children’s medicines.
Six years later, even after 9/11, the Yale community represents the world turned upside down. Beth Nisson, a senior, writes that Mr. Rahmatullah’s admission to Yale “should serve as a model for American higher education.” Della Sentilles, the co-author of a feminist blog at Yale, insists one can’t be judgmental about the Taliban. “As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other cultures, especially statements that suggest one culture is more sexist and repressive than another,” she writes. “American feminism is often linked to and manipulated by the state in order to further its own imperialist ends.”
Ziba Ayeen, a Afghan-American who fled her native land with her family in the 1980s, isn’t amused by such thinking. “The irony of Yale educating an official in a regime that barred women from going to school is too much,” she told me.
When I asked several people at Yale if the reaction to Mr. Rahmatullah would be different if he were, say, a former official of the apartheid regime of South Africa, the reaction was universal: Of course he would be barred. When I asked why, I was told I had no idea how liberal a place Yale was. “But what is liberal about the Taliban, then or now?” I innocently asked. Eric White, a senior, told me that many students believe that regimes run by whites, such as apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany, come out of Western traditions and are judged differently than non-Western regimes. “There’s a real feeling that we don’t have the right or understanding to be able to hold those regimes to the same standards.”
[All emphases mine]
Sorry to hit on these themes so consistently, but though the relativistic, morally confused response from many Yale students—many of whom have doubtless been fed a steady diet of multiculturalist dogma (from classes divided into topical studies of individual identity groups, to history and literature seminars that deconstruct or “problematize” American individualism and Enlightenment thinking, and which tend to highlight the perceived evils of the west in general, and the US in particular)—is hardly surprising anymore, it is still worth pointing out each time it manifests itself so clearly.
Even more worrisome, though, is that our best and brightest have become so enamored by the progressive agenda of competing collectivisms that they are unable to use their own critical faculties for anything more than the simple parroting back of platitudes from multicultural indoctrination, which tend to culminate with the familiar (and intellectually lazy) observation that, “truths” being what they are—man made and culturally-dependent—the passing of judgment on the Other (whom we can’t for a moment pretend to “understand,” as we don’t share their “authentic” insights into their own culture) is the greatest of all western sins. The irony being, that what we are surrendering here, as the pinnacle of our new progressive critical thought, is the very propriety of employing critical thought itself in order to understand and critique anything outside our own increasingly narrowed purview.
To their credit, several of the feminists whom I discuss such issues with regularly have come to recognize multiculturalism as the enemy of any feminism that advocates for the equal rights of women. But here, the co-author of a feminist blog writes, without a hint of irony, that “As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other cultures, especially statements that suggest one culture is more sexist and repressive than another”—the upshot of this observation being that women’s rights issues are not, and never have been, “universal,” which means that should a group of dedicated men seek to reinstitute a form of aggressive patriarchy within the US, Ms. Sentilles only ideological recourse would be to fight back by advancing a narrative that carried more weight within the culture. Right now, that animating societal narrative here in the west is a universalist narrative that upholds the rights of the individual regardless of race or gender. But by arguing that such universalists narratives are in fact but localized cultural narrative with no power beyond their generalized acceptance, Ms. Sentilles is laying the groundwork for the deconstruction of western feminism itself.
As I’ve pointed out now on a number of occasion, the poison of any social philosophy that allows for the unmooring of our established, western liberal universal of individual rights—or any philosophy that uses the west as its de facto scapegoat—is the first thing that we need to combat if we are to win the war on terror. And that fight must begin here at home, where nearly forty-years of deconstructing the tenets of classical liberalism while promoting the tenets of a soft, identity-based politics has made it difficult for us to act with the kind of clarity and resolve that we will need in the years ahead.
University humanities departments, in my experience, tend to self-support a particular ideological paradigm by hiring like-minded individuals; so the agitation for change, at least for the time being, has to come from without (while pressure is applied to promote a true diversity of thought within the established higher education system). I don’t know how best to accomplish this, to be honest with you; so I write these essays as a way to engage with the cultural discussion as best I can.
Because over the last few years, I’ve come to recognize that America is battling for its very soul—and the battle is between those who promote liberal founding principles, and those whose learned relativism has taken a turn toward Machiavellian power politics and the attempt to wrest control over metanarratives, and has done so while, ironically, clinging to the liberal label.
(h/t Terry Hastings)
****
See also, Cathy Young.
Let’s just call it the Dhimmi tango.
Jeff, and thank you very much for recognizing the true nature of the struggle and informing me of it. Keep it up!
We’re doomed, if the Ivy League has become this. Most people still believe an Ivy League education is something special, and when that now becomes this, our society is doomed.
Read here about ways to expose anti-Americanism in quick debate.
Ted Kaczynski?
So, how exactly did he get his visa? And when did he get it? And why was it honored. Yale is wrong, but seriously, who let him in?
More to the point, why is he still here? Shouldn’t he be in some “black prison” in some unnamed allied country?
WTF? Do I have to do everything? My van’s almost out of gas, dammit and with taliban man in the back, how’m I gonna pick up chicks?
I’ve got 250 acres in a remote part of West Virginia.
T/W I’m just saying that people vanish without a trace every day.
How soon before Mr. Tal-i-ban is elected to the Student Senate?
The hell with Yale, they can admit who they like. What I want to know is who gave this jerk a student visa? And why do they still have a job?
I think you are right on when you state that it is a lack of critical thinking in favor of parroting ideas given to them, which is largely responsible for some of the current mad thinking. Either you believe in the concept of universal human rights or you do not. If you do not, then complaints about the use of torture against those who come from places where this is commonplace are unfounded. After all, we would then just be treating the individuals, as they should expect to be treated in their society. Consider it a sort of twisted kindness, if you will, and not something to be decried.
I believe that we can, and must, judge because the live of very real people hang in the balance. To do anything else is to accept that evil, or whatever word you would use in it’s place and retain the same meaning, will triumph so long as it occurs outside our field of vision.
I was recently forced to watch two of three job talks all titled “Menstruation in Patriarchal Japan†or something like that, and this was a search for an Asian historian. Not that there’s anything wrong with that particular subject, but things have gotten a little carried away in the academy. I think that there is a movement away from that kind of thinking in at least a few disciplines.
What I find most astonishing is that they (standard caveats) either deny that women have made progress in Afghanistan altogether or devalue it by criticizing the methods that stimulated the process. The “methods†that they claim were taken are actually a series of specious assertions and half-truths that they’ve wrapped in one of their keywords: “imperialism†“colonialism†“patriotism†etc. They’ve spent forty years attaching nefarious meanings to these terms and removing their historical context to make them useful weapons in contemporary political debate.
I hope it doesn’t come down to an explicit competition of metanarratives. It just seems so unsavory.
Anybody hear that?
C’mon, there it goes again.
Huh. Could have sworn I heard the deafening roar of indignation from the campus feminists, womyn’s studies students and gay rights activists over Yale admitting a former apologist of one of the most mysoginistic, gay-hating theocratic regimes on earth.
Bartender, send these groups a round of drinks on me. Serve them a tumbler of icy cold hypocrisy with a splash of dhimmitude.
“As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other cultures
…
“American feminism is often linked to and manipulated by the state in order to further its own imperialist ends.â€Â
Gawd, think about the philosophical contortions she had to go through just to say, “look, if it’s not anti-Americanism, then I don’t give a crap?”
“… the passing of judgment on the Other (whom we can’t for a moment pretend to “understand,†as we don’t share their “authentic†insights into their own culture) is the greatest of all western sins.”
Jeff, you give her too much credit assuming that this perspective is reasoned multiculturalism.
Under any scrutiny, the mask falls off and you have another pissed-off anti-American kid.
If, as a neo-con I condemned Bill Clinton’s intervention in Bosnia, but lauded Bush’s Iraq campaign, I’d be acting on a right-wing agenda, not principles.
The same applies to this ass-hat.
I’d say we need to educate more ex-talibans in our schools. Let them go see the vagina monologues. Let them hear the leon kass’es. The college republican panel discussions. Let them who hate (hated?) us for our freedoms know exactly what those freedoms are.
And then they can go back and become well-connected diplomats, bank heads and energy industry consultants. Back, knowing that a US president will know to hold their hand as they walk, and talk of old days at Yale.
How did that work out for the 9/11 hijackers? How long were they here before they commited their murderous acts?
Sometimes hate isn’t rational actus. When it’s based on faith it almost never is.
Actus is on to something. Let the Talib see the Vagina Monologues. After that, terrorists will add universities to their list of targets. Mushy liberalism will come face-to-face with harsh reality and all who are not killed will be wiser for the experience.
You think this guy is like that? I did say ‘ex-talibans.’
I don’t think the 9/11 hijackers were interested in getting an elite western liberal arts education. In general, I don’t think we should let people not interested in elite western liberal arts education into elite western liberal arts institutions.
Secular values for all!
Sometimes hate isn’t rational actus.
I think there is at least a possiblity that this guy is ‘like that’. Don’t you?
I’m all for forgiveness, but has this guy done anything to indicate that he is repentant or understands the error of his ways?
You bet, and one of those ‘secular values’ is freedom to choose which religion is right for you, and how you wish to worship. If you recall, this was not one of the taliban’s strong points.
Either way, his presence is more likely just a symptom of the larger problem.
Another student of the “same caliber” as a Taliban thug, eh? 7.62x39mm I presume.
Good to see the language is as clear as the thinking at Yale these days…
When does this guy get his guest shot on “Gilmore Girls”? Rory is between boyfriends at the moment…
I’ve got a better idea, instead of letting ex(?)-Taliban types into Yale, let’s round up a bunch of promising young Afgans and Iraqis (of both sexes) and give them scholarships to business and engineering schools, on the condition that they go back to their countries of origin and start businesses.
Riight. Because it makes so much more sense to confer a thin veneer of western-educated respectability on ex-fascists than–oh, I don’t know–to give the precious few international student spots in America’s Ivies to Afghan students who already genuinely *want* to liberalize their country. And because the modern western university is just *so* *damn* *confident* in it’s own liberal values that a western education is *just* the thing to convince an ex-member of the Taliban that he was wrong to believe that women are chattel and the evil colonialist western usurpers are in the right. The guilty white western professors who have him in their classes won’t be in the slightest bit intimidated by Mr. Rahmatullah’s “otherness” or privileged victim status–they’ll fearlessly challenge every last one of his cherished beliefs, because THAT’S WHAT A REAL LIBERAL UNIVERSITY EDUCATION IS ALL ABOUT. Right?
Seriously, actus, you think that being ‘educated’ by a crowd of people who think they have no right to criticize a non-westerner will do Mr. Ramatullah a damn bit of good at all, as far as subtly and subversively inculcating him with liberal values is concerned?
Right. Target universities as opposed to targetting east coast urban centers. Cuz the liberals don’t feel targetted like the heartland.
That wasn’t the image I got from the NYT mag piece on him. He didn’t seem interested in dying, or killing. He did seem to be vetted by our govt as not being a threat. Sure there is ‘at least a possibility’ that these people are all wrong and he’s lying. I don’t know how to compare the threat to that of other ways that undergrads are dangerous to each other.
Right. And now he’s going to lear all about that, though it sounds like he’s already started to figure it out. “Secular values for all” means even talibunnies get to have them, when they want them.
Huh? Did you think the WTC was attacked because Al Qaeda thought, “Gee, there are a lot of progressives in there. We need to change that.”
The WTC was hit because it was a symbol of commercial power. The Pentagon was hit because it was a symbol of military power.
My opinion? Libs DON’T feel targetted by the Islamofascists. Feel free to think otherwise.
TV (Harry)
I didn’t get a sense that there was much competition for undergraduate spots from whomever is been decided to be the ‘genuine’ liberalizers.
I don’t think liberal arts education is subtle or subversive.
Since when do ‘secular values’ guarantee a Yale education? Particularly, when do ‘secular values’ guarantee the fascists their pick of the top spots in all the most prestigious universities? Maybe God loves the prodigal son most of all, but that don’t sound too ‘secular’ to me.
And why shouldn’t the gentleman in question want a degree from Yale? It’s damn prestigious, whether you believe the stuff they make you regurgitate on your exams or not–but his desire to go to a high-end Western university says nothing but *nothing* about his interest in ‘secular values’ and everything about the social prestige of the Yale degree.
I don’t think they do. I have no idea how Yale made its decision.
I’m of the opinion that schools do more than just give you a diploma. Of course its still possible to not take things seriously.
One of the essay questions on the Princeton application is (or was) ‘How would you solve the problem of racism in the world today?’. I’d like you to take a wild stab of a guess at how many of the respondents who answered ‘Kill all the X and Y’ or ‘bring back separate but equal’ would be likely to be admitted. The modern university application asks to know something about the sort of person you are before letting you in–it’s not just a matter of good grades (whether or not it ought to be). The dewy-eyed kid with a social conscience who wants to change the world has the advantage over the kid who listens to Panzerfaust and wears Hitler T-shirts–I personally don’t see anything wrong with this, do you?
We need to work on your irony. Among other things.
My point still stands actus, despite your attempts to move us farther away from it. In case you forgot, which I doubt, here is what you said:
And my retort that ‘getting to know us’ didn’t work for the 9/11 hijackers is still a valid point. You are using an idealistic mindset to assume that once he gets to know us, he will not hate us anymore, and my response that this may well be wishful thinking, has a foundation in history with this VERY GROUP OF PEOPLE.
He may very well learn to think otherwise of us. On the other hand, he may very well deserve a bullet in his head for crimes against humanity so great that they will go into the history books.
You are also doing what you do best actus, moving the conversation in a direction of your choosing. Is that because you don’t have the capability to argue the actual content of these posts?
As a paid-up member of the Bush Cult(tm), I take exception to your blasphemous disrespect for my spiritual leader. I mean, Jesus H. Christ, actus–I thought you were a progressive–whatever happened to a ‘hermeneutics of respect’?
I see a bit. If only because I’m having a hard time stepping beyond other properties I associate with your caricatures. I don’t see the latter kid being a good learner, or someone who would take seriously an education like the first.
Gitmo must be overcrowded.
David Irving is a learned man *and* a bigot. He’s not the only one, by a long shot. Alas, the two simply are not mutually exclusive–if anything, a uniquely intelligent person is just even better equipped to defend the indefensible.
Go a little closer to home, for that matter–the Columbine killers were intelligent *and* fascist-worshippers.
If somoene wrote an essay about denying the holocaust, they’d be denied admission to the university on the merits of what they wrote: its wrong. Or at least I would if I was an admissions officer.
Just to put this in perspective:
Joachim von Ribbentrop (born Joachim Ribbentrop) (April 30, 1893–October 16, 1946) was Foreign Minister of Germany from 1938 until 1945. He was later hanged for war crimes after the Nuremberg trials.
I would so fucking pay to see that in person.
Aren’t the PLO and Hamas chock full of Ivy educated doctors and lawyers?
Bashar was studying in London before he got the call back to Syria, right?
Ahmed Omar Sheikh graduated from the LSE and yet still had Daniell Pearl beheaded.
Mohammed Atta was studying Urban planning in Hamburg.
Hasan al-Turabi holds a master’s from the University of London and a doctorate from the Sorbonne and leads the National Islamic Front in Sudan.
A western education certainly doesn’t mean one embraces Western ideals, actus. A liberal arts education certainly doesn’t imply one will embrace liberal ideals either.
Well, except for the second sentence I quoted. Cut it back to that first sentence and I’d pay to see that. The latter, not so much.
I’d be the last to say that they indoctrinate you at universities, that they guarantee where your ideologies will lie.
And of course, there’s no guarantee they know where your ideologies will lie when you are admitted. It isn’t too much to assume a Taliban spokesperson may actually believe in Taliban ideals, both upon entrance to and upon being graduated from an elite Western University.
So what is it you are saying?
Sure do wish for it, though:
tw: read-> some of us do it to all the threads
You think the government spending money on, say, universities that turn away military recruiters is indoctrination? Is that what the supreme court just allowed?
Isn’t that going to stifle dissent? Rewarded behavior is repeated behavior, what do you consider indocrination if not the repetitive teaching of the same point of view? Don’t you feel the government shaping public policy is completely ass-backwards from the way a free society should work?
I’m guessing that’s the point. The government is trying to stifle people who kick out the military recruiters. Just like with civil rights laws it tries to stifle people that violate those.
Well, its compliance with the policy set by our scheme of representative government. I don’t know if that’s indoctrination. But I suppose so. I suppose people have now internalized the fact that racial discrimination is wrong because we have stopped the behaviour of discrimation via civil rights laws.
I think congress makes this sort of public policy. Congress decides that we have a solomon amendment, for instance. That’s the way our system works at least.
How do you do that without spraining something? Do you have a double-jointed brain or something?
actus, which of these dewy-eyed kids with a social conscious do you imagine would be a ‘good’ learner? The kid wearing the:
*Hitler T-shirt
*Che T-Shirt
*George W Bush for President t-shirt
*”I used to be in the Taliban” T-shirt
*Free Palestine! t-shirt
I don’t know what all the worrying’s about.
I’m sure he’s the first Ambassador who never learned to lie, especially considering he was an advocate for the most honest foreign policy ever.
Besides, we’re doing such a great job killing Al Qaeda with Western sophistication, considering the total lack of Western educated men in Al Qaeda’s command structure.
Sure there’s thousands of potential recruits with a post-4th grade education and SAT scores, but can you think of anyone else who would better rejuvenate the Muslim students association?
I was imagining a neo-nazi skinhead type. I don’t think they’d get much out of school. As for t-shirts? I don’t know how much aptitude for learning can be gleamed from a t-shirt.
It used to be amusing to watch actus rotate 360 degrees in a single thread.
It isn’t any longer.
I do have to turn around and address most of you coming at me from all sides, but I do make sure to end up going where I started. Or did you mean 180?
actus- could you give a brief synopsis of what you have been saying on this thread?
I was serious when I said earlier I’d lost track.
I thought you were saying that the Taliban kid, having chosen to get an elite liberal arts education most likely no longer would embrace talibanic thinking.
Secondly, I still have to ask:Do you think a taliban spokesman would get more out of school than a neo-nazi skinhead?
Its quite non-taliban to get a liberal arts education to begin with.
Comparing what I read of him in the NYT magazine piece to the stereotypical neo-nazi skinhead, yes Mostly because the totalist mind of the latter has it “all figured out,” while the former taliban ambassador-at-large is far from that.
Robin Roberts wrote:
The pea soup has lost its appeal as well.
Point, Patrick.
I’m curious as to why all of this is being left at the feet of Yale. Why isn’t anyone asking what the hell this guy is doing in this country in the first place? Why hasn’t he been deported?
Michel Aflaq, one of the founders of the Ba’ath Party, was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris.
But then, I guess it depends on which Western ideals we’re talking about, the ones that founded the US, or the ones that founded the Third Reich.
Although he would be more comfortable in a place that adheres to a rigid orthodoxy, stifles dissent, and demonizes its enemies, I think Rahmatullah will get along okay at Yale. He can show the Yalies his backswing.
There’s a reason why the left is soft on the Taliban: they envy the power. Rahmatullah is going to get laid… a lot. Send that man a box of cigars.
Is it?
I think it is only taliban-y to deny other people, the ones whom they govern, a western-style education.
Certainly one needn’t be liberal to pursue the liberal arts.
Just like one may be a pediatrician and yet found an organization like Hamas, as did Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi.
And you know, the “great healer” of alQeada spiritual leader fame, Ayman al-Zawahi, is also a physician.
Certainly it seems quite non-medical doctorish to promote suicide bombings. But there you go.
Yale should be embarrassed, but I do think people tend to romantacize those experiences that are well beyond their own.
I am reading Wild Swans, about 3 generations of Chinese women in one family. The author, the daughter of one of Mao’s original believers, is able to go to the US as a student and remains.
She travels the US in the 1980s to lecture on China, showing pictures of the Chinese Government Schools with no windows, no heat, and the students wearing no jackets in winter. She explains to her US audience that when she (the author) asked her government guide about the conditions, she is told the students simply do not get cold.
The author finds herself distraught when, lecture after lecture, audience members remark on how amazing Chinese students are, not getting cold like that.
I see that same phenomenon in some of the quotes Jeff included.
I think you give them too much credit for having open minds.
Open minds? Absolutely not. Double standards, absolutely.
It’s even been said that people like this–the intelligent and cultured fascists (Clockwork Orange, anyone? Just liking lovely, lovely Ludwig Van doesn’t guarantee you a functioning human soul) have double *minds*–I recall some psychological study of medical doctors who worked for the Nazis or some such–they essentially lived two different lives, as two different people: in one saving lives, in the other just as carefully ending them–they broached the inconsistencies required of them by dividing themselves into separate selves. The educated Nazi was in some ways a functioning schizophrenic–he could easily circulate in the best of company and in the very same day condone, abet, and commit murder.
Actus, having actually met Taliban (and fought them) I think it safe for me to tell you that the double standard is what the leadership is all about. Plenty of true believers, go-along-for-the-ride power seekers, and the usual scum that a despotism attracts tobe the bully boys, enforcers, bureauocrats and the like. But the leadership was all about “do as I say”, not as I want for me.
Mr. Ambassador is all about himself – he knows what to say and what to do to stay here and gain the benefits the suckers at Yale are ready to bestow upon him. He was perfectly happy to be the mouthpiece for those bastards in the TB too. He is amoral, like any psychopath usually is.