Thursday, March 16, 2006

Yale suspends the anonymous emailer

OpinionJournal - John Fund on the Trail: 'Temporarily Relieved': "Yale University still isn't talking about why it admitted a former top Taliban official as a student, but yesterday the Yale Law School issued an apology to two alumni whom one of its officials had attacked in an anonymous email as "retarded" and "disgusting" for daring to protest Yale's admissions decision.

Harold Hongju Koh, the law school's dean, said that Alexis Surovov had been "temporarily relieved of his duties" as assistant director of annual giving while an investigation is conducted into whether he obtained information from confidential donor databases to launch his anonymous attack. Mr. Surovov was unable to explain to me how he had obtained personal information on Clint Taylor and Debbie Bookstaber, the two Yale alumni, without looking up their private records.

Others also have some standing to be concerned about Mr. Rahmatullah's presence at Yale. Yesterday, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the Judiciary Committee's Border Security panel, wrote Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff demanding that he explain exactly how Mr. Rahmatullah was given an F-1 student visa.

Even Yale isn't defending its action by suggesting that Mr. Rahmatullah has recanted all of the extremist views he espoused during a propaganda tour the ambassador made of the U.S. a few months before 9/11. No one at the International Education Foundation, the Wyoming-based group that is sponsoring his stay in the U.S., will explain an essay Mr. Rahmatullah wrote last year that appeared on its Web site (since removed) in which he called Israel "an American al Qaeda" aimed at the Arab world. In that essay he also claimed the Taliban "did what they had been taught to do. Whether what they had been taught was good or bad is another subject.""

No comments: