You Must First Open your Eyes

John Fund in the WSJ, via RCP:

Three weeks after the New York Times revealed that former Taliban official Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi is attending classes at Yale, many at the university still have little to say about the controversy.
..... given Mr. Rahmatullah's service to one of the most brutal regimes since the Nazis, why should anyone--especially at Yale--give him the benefit of the doubt, especially when he has not publicly renounced the Taliban? Late last year he wrote an essay in which he said that the regime "honestly practiced what they had learned in their religious schools. They did what they had been taught to do. Whether what they had been taught was good or bad is another subject." When a Times of London reporter asked Mr. Rahmatullah this month about the Taliban's public executions in a Kabul soccer stadium, he quipped, "There were also executions happening in Texas."

Well, yes, but it shouldn't escape anyone that there should be a morally recognized difference between executing a murderer and executing innocent women and children. InsightMag.com:

When President George W. Bush compared the Taliban regime to that of Nazi Germany in a stirring speech a week after the terrorist attacks, he may not have gone far enough. This is, after all, a government so oppressive that it executes little girls for the crime of attending school. Girls age 8 and older caught attending underground schools are subject to being taken to the Kabul soccer stadium and made to kneel in the penalty box while an executioner puts a machine gun to the back of their heads and pulls the trigger. Spectators scattered among the stands then are called upon to cheer.

How soon people forget. Or maybe they never paid attention to these kind of details in the first place, like the group providing funding for the Yale Taliban, their motto, "In order to see the truth, you must first open your eyes". The group is headed by enthusiastic DNC supporters out in Wyoming, a personal injury lawyer and a woman who expressed this opinion about Vice President Cheney, one of her neighbors:

"I think the man is a murderer," said Tat Maxwell, 40, who has been a vocal critic of the administration. "In my opinion Cheney has made decisions about the lives of a lot of people, ours and theirs, with a lack of regard for human life.

So there you have it, the liberal elite, and an elite university, closing their eyes to the human rights abuses of the Taliban, which continue today.

Yale refuses to defend its position, but others are talking. Afghan exiles are appalled that Mr. Rahmatuallah was given a coveted place that could have gone to an Afghan man or woman who had been oppressed by the Taliban.....

"It would be better if he faced a court of justice than be a student at Yale University."