Shaming Yale

John Fund today continues his superb coverage in Opinionjournal.com of "Taliban man" at Yale, with a column on a worthy Afghani woman Yale might have admitted, instead of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the Taliban's former ambassador at large.

Makai Rohbar, an Afghan student whose family legally immigrated to New Haven in 2002...  attend[s] classes at Gateway Community College, also in New Haven. She had never imagined that she could be accepted into Yale or ever find a way to pay for it.

She left a refugee camp in Pakistan with her mother, Maroofa, and her four younger siblings in 2002. Like Mr. Hashemi she has only a high school equivalency degree, because schooling in the refugee camp was limited. Her mother can't work and knows only basic English, so she and her sister Rona are the only means of support for the family beyond food stamps and $600 a month in housing assistance from the state.

I asked her what her life was like. "It's hard, but certainly better than Pakistan," she told me. "I am very grateful, but I must work 50 hours a week and also go to class. Sometimes, I am so tired I can't attend." She earns $8 an hour as a clerk in a local retail store.

Meanwhile, Hashemi, whose Taliban regime brutalized women, continues to enjoy his Yale education with no financial contribution of his own. And Yale's feminist groups, to their eternal shame, have not bothered a single demonstration against this spokesman for a truly oppressive regime that killed women for minor infractions against Islamic sensibilities, and shrouded them so that only their eyes and mouths showed, lest males be inflamed.

My sense is that Taliban man at Yale is a bridge too far for the entire Ivy League. His favored treatment personifies the contempt of intellectual elites for not just ordinary Americans, but for basic notions of decency.

Kudos to Mr. Fund for keeping this issue in the public eye.

Thomas Lifson  3 27 06

Posted at 12:00 AM | Email | Permalink |