Will Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi approve if they blow up the statue of Nathan Hale?
Taliban ambassador and spokesman Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi’s boys blew this up in the old country, one of a collection of the world’s oldest giant religious statues:
Now this bucket of offal (remember: “I feel very sorry to your husband“?) has been admitted to Yale. He must have charmed Yale the way he charmed dopes on other campuses into believing that the rationale for destroying the ancient art was poor children in Afghanistan as reported by Carina Chocano in Salon:
“The council of people had told [the foreign agency restoring the statues] to spend that money in saving the lives of these children instead,” Hashemi said, explaining that 300 children have died since economic sanctions were imposed in January. “And these guys said no … The people were really pissed off. They said, ‘If you don’t care about our children, we are going to blow those statues.’”
Will new Bulldog Hashemi appprove if some Taliban sympathizer were to get some TNT from Mullah Omar to do the same to this man on the Old Campus? After all, America is not without poor children too.
Memo to the Alumni Fund in response to your recent inquiry: the answer to your question is no.
UPDATE
If you follow the links in this piece to the articles about Hashemi and the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas, you will observe that the commentators go out of their way specifically to deny the religious motivation in the destruction of the statues. This is absurd of course; the statues were destroyed precisely out of the the religious beliefs of Taliban Islam. Chocano, cited above, says this and then denies its meaning: “Citing the Islamic principle of the thing, Qadarullah Jamal, the Taliban’s minister of information, claimed the statues were destroyed because they were being worshiped as idols. This explanation was widely repeated, first by the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, then by Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil and then by much of the Western press. On the surface, it explained everything. On reflection, it explained nothing.”
The USA Today article by W.L. Rathje of Discover Archaeology Magazine, did the same: “First, it is important to recognize that the massacre has little to do with religion.”
Those articles were from 2001, when nobody wanted to connect the dots, and people wanted to explain away every strange and revolting practice of Islamists as an aberration instead of the pattern itself. It’s 2006: people should know better now, incliuding Yale.
We would advise Yale to check out its art museum and Sterling Library to remove material offensive under “the Islamic principle of the thing, Qadarullah Jamal,” as the Taliban information minister noted in his explanation of the rationale for the Buddhas destruction. Better safe than sorry — you never know who might be pictured along with Satan in that Sassetta painting, or what offensive cartoons might be lurking in the stacks.