Penraker: Thou Shalt Not Debate Public Issues at Yale: "Yale has now refused to put on a once-planned debate over the presence at Yale of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi - the former Taliban. John Fund reports:I wonder what Rahmatullah's review of Brokeback would be. Please read the whole thing, and then pray for the Northeast.The union's vice president had invited me, along with Yale alumnus and Army veteran Flagg Youngblood, to debate both military recruitment and the Rahmatullah case, on campus March 29. But when he brought the proposal to the executive board, it was rejected."No matter how carefully we frame this debate, it would inevitably turn into a trial of a fellow student and his personal life and beliefs,"
But Rahmatullah is not just some student from the Midwest who stumbled onto campus, he is a former Minister for the Taliban.
And it gets weirder and weirder: Listen to the ideologically blinded view of this student- she has been taught, like many students these days, to utterly ignore evil, and excuse it at any cost. She will trot forth a multitude of platitudes to justify having someone who is a practiced liar and sworn enemy of the United States at her school. But no doubt she would never countenance the presence of an American racist, or sexist, or homophobe. But somehow when a racist, sexist homophobic foreigner comes along, whose redeeming feature seems to be that he represents something that is implacably opposed to the United States - well then, he become instantly forgivable. He becomes a correctable, huggable, misguided youth. There is a lot of "our little brown brother" in her statements:
When I asked her if any of the revelations about Mr. Rahmatullah's past disturb her, she said that "while he has made some mistakes," she trusts that university officials had "investigated things" and satisfied themselves about him. She noted that Mr. Rahmatullah was "very, very young" when he had been a Taliban official, and said that "it's not like the Taliban attacked this country."No, they only actively hosted and encouraged Al-Qaeda within their borders so that IT could attack the U.S. They publicly executed women for trivial matters. They imprisoned anyone who tried to practice a non-Muslim religion. They made Hindus wear yellow emblems to mark them publicly. They refused to let girls go to school. They blew up religious statues. They prevented the playing of music. Homosexuals were killed by making walls fall on them."
Usually random links to stuff I think is interesting, politically, culturally and morally. Sometimes I actually write some things, but not as often as I'd like.
Monday, March 20, 2006
Brokeback Yale
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment