I received an e-mail suggesting I write about Rahmatullah Hashmeni’s attendance at Yale. Recently, the New York Times Magazine had a feature article on Rahmatullah, who was the chief spokesperson for the Taliban. Without the Times article, he may have remained an obscure special student, hoping to be admitted as a regular undergraduate. After the Times story, every local paper had its own angle. I wondered whether there was anything left to say.
I changed my mind when “The Drudge Report” noted that a high school class in Parsippany, N.J., was about to try President George W. Bush as a war criminal. The story was picked up by talk radio and blogs. There were, as you might expect, expressions of outrage. Calls from outside the district were 10-1 against holding the trial, which the teacher, Joseph Kyle, referred to as a hearing before an “international court of justice.”
