The Missing Link

March 06, 2006

The Taliban at Yale

John Fund has done more reporting about the former Taliban official attending Yale:

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."

When I asked Prof. Vivek Sharma, who briefly had Mr. Rahmatullah in one of his seminars, about this double standard, he explained, "There's a belief among many at Yale that we really have to specifically understand the Middle East because of the American occupation there and that we must understand our enemies as deeply as we can."

I suspect the analysis offered above is partly right, and to me it is the height of racism: if you're a Westerner engaged in barbaric practices, we presume you are sufficiently rational to condemn; in contrast, if your heritage is non-Western and your skin a bit darker, we assume that you're so incapable of making moral judgments that we're as hesitant to condemn your barbarities as we would be of a child or an animal.

Posted by Conor at March 6, 2006 03:13 PM