Speaking at a Yale College Master’s Tea last week, Columbia Professor Todd Gitlin lamented the condition of the American Left: “There is currently a degree of intellectual paralysis, public fog, and collective and enthusiastic ignorance that defies comprehension.” Professor Gitlin may as well have been speaking of Yale itself these days. 

Yale is in a dilemma. It made a huge, indefensible blunder when it admitted the senior advisor to Mullah Omar as a special student, and now it’s taking hits from students, from alumni, and from the media. 

Leave Islam, go to the gallows.  That’s still the rule in Afghanistan, as we see in the sad case of Christian convert Abdul Rahman, on trial for his life there.  How could the Taliban possibly justify such a barbaric practice?  They didn’t really even try.

Exactly what was it that new Yale student Sayeed Rahmatullah Hashemi did for the Taliban?  A little digging shows he was far more than just a mouthpiece.  To paraphrase one of my critics, Mr. Rahmatullah was quite the rising star in the Taliban firmament. 

We’d be lying if we said we were surprised at the public outrage to Yale’s admission of former deputy foreign secretary of the Taliban, Sayeed Rahmatullah Hashemi.  It was an outrageous decision. We hoped to crystallize a national response with our campaign to send fake red fingernails to Yale. From the reactions we’ve received, we’ve really nailed them.

Since the New York Times and Wall Street Journal broke the news about the admission of Taliban official Sayeed Rahmatullah Hashemi to a special student program at Yale, we’ve received numerous emails from outraged Yale Alumni. One email stood out from the rest—"I won’t give Yale one red cent this year, but maybe I will give them a red fingernail instead!" 

Nice civilization you got here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it. That was the sinister subtext of a letter addressed to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, asking him to “take all those responsible to task under law” for the infamous Mohammed cartoons. The letter is remarkable for when it was sent—and for who sent it.

George Bush doesn’t care about black people? On the contrary. The president took quite a gamble on behalf of the Liberians. Today a democracy stands where chaos stood before, because Bush acted according to one of his most radical and most noble principles: that men everywhere, regardless of race or religion, want to be free and to govern themselves.

The Left’s outrage factory has been working double shifts these days, fabricating massive quantities of indignation over the "illegal" use of white phosphorus--also known as “Willie Pete” or “Willie Peter”--artillery rounds by American Marines in the siege of Fallujah. If the anti-war activists are so incensed by the use of incendiary weapons, however, they might want to look a little closer to home.