"Understanding Evil" - as taught by Yale

During the last two weeks, bloggers and commentators have been all over the story of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, an Afghani national who formerly served as "ambassador at large" and spokesman for the evil fundamentalist Muslim Taliban regime.  Hashemi was admitted to Yale University as an international student this semester, and is currently residing in New Haven by the grace of a student visa.

I do not pretend to know anything about the admissions process at Yale for older, non-traditional students, but I suspect that there are many capable, intelligent young folks, denied traditional admission to Yale, who are scratching their heads over this.

Blogger Penraker notes the response by Yale students to the uproar over Hashemi's admission:

Listen to the ideologically blinded view of this student- she has been taught, like many students these days, to utterly ignore evil, and excuse it at any cost ... [Hashemi] becomes a correctable, huggable, misguided youth. There is a lot of "our little brown brother" in her statements:

When I asked her if any of the revelations about Mr. Rahmatullah's past disturb her, she said that "while he has made some mistakes," she trusts that university officials had "investigated things" and satisfied themselves about him ...

... When I pointed out that Mr. Rahmatullah has proved in the past that he is a skilled liar, Ms. Aaland said there are dangers in any contact with others. "But why not come from a place of trust, break out of old molds and consider him innocent until proven guilty?" she asked ...

Penraker also notes content from another Yale newspaper editorial:

Is gay marriage immoral? Merely asking the question infuriates many Yale students. In response, they walk away in a huff, angry and indignant -- they don't engage the questioner at all ... But Yale students are quite committed to the existence of a moral standard. Consider the extensive moralizing on campus: It is wrong to eat a banana that is not fair trade ... a student is in error when he does not recycle ... the University is bad if it invests in Darfur, the Iranian president is wicked, Larry Summers is misogynistic and so on. (Penraker's emphasis)

His conclusion:

You've got to be carefully taught to be this resistant to honest, open debate. You've got to be carefully taught to hate some topics, while being endlessly open to others ... [Yale students] have been taught to have extreme anger over trivial things, while letting large, evil things sit right down next to them in the lunch hall ... When it comes to real, palpable evil, forgive, forgive, forgive.

Within the ivy-covered halls of academia, there appears to be a bifurcation of evil along two distinct lines: ideological evil -- that which stems from "conservatism," and innocent evil -- that which stems from honest ignorance of the post-modern worldview. 

The practitioners of ideological evil are those who generally fit the description of conservative, namely the Republican party, the US military, and the "religious right" -- or to some, Christianity in general.  They all share in active opposition to postmodernism and to the spread of socialism and secularism.

In contrast, those who practice innocent evil simply have not had the opportunity for proper tutelage and indoctrination by the Western leftist/socialist/secularist intelligentsia.  Their barbarism is forgivable, particularly if it stems from any act designed to cripple the influence of Christianity or capitalism.  They are only a few lectures and therapy sessions short of being fully vested members of the global community.  Apparently a degree from Yale helps speed up this process.

Innocent evil must be forgiven, understood, and even accommodated.  Ideological evil must be stubbornly rooted out, resisted, and destroyed.

All of this leads me back to Christian Peacemaker Teams, the sponsor of Tom Fox, a hostage recently murdered at the hands of terrorists in Iraq.  Upon Fox's death, CPT issued this statement:

In response to Tom's passing, we ask that everyone set aside inclinations to vilify or demonize others, no matter what they have done.

Ironically, CPT's involvement in Iraq began prior to the US-led invasion, when CPT sent "human shields" to protect the Hussein regime and discourage military action at the risk of inflicting greater civilian casualties.  CPT stepped up their involvement after Hussein's ouster and reoriented their mission toward documenting abuses of Iraqi citizens by the US military.  To this end, they initiated an "Adopt A Detainee" program, offering support for those rounded up by Coalition forces, all the while apparently having little or nothing to say about the imprisonment, torture, and killing ordered by Hussein himself, or the kidnapping, torture, and murder of hundreds (if not thousands) of civilians by terrorists and rogue Ba'athist factions since the fall of Baghdad.

The goal of CPT's work is a noble one -- to oppose violence as a means of solving conflict.  But their pleas for forgiveness and mercy for terrorists, contrasted by the doggedness of their work to undermine the United States and Israel, seems to betray a more deeply-held, strongly anti-American worldview. Or perhaps it is simply that truly evil regimes like Castro's Cuba, North Korea, or Iraq in the heyday of the Ba'athist government refuse to allow organizations like CPT any freedom to question their human rights abuses.  The fact that the US and Israel allow CPT to work freely within their areas of jurisdiction hopefully is not lost on CPT leadership.

There is much missionary-oriented work to be done in Iraq, and teams performing works of justice and compassion will be busy for a very long time.  But the roots of evil in Iraq far precede the arrival of US military forces.  Iraq needs a very long time to heal itself of the deep scars of Ba'athist oppression and terror, and of tribal and religious conflicts that Saddam's crushing power only subdued, but never fully resolved.  Any organization that decides to help heal Iraq must be prepared to face those issues, not just recite worn-out anti-American platitudes.

CPT doesn't exactly fit the "standard model" of the academic apologist that I outlined above.  Certainly CPT doesn't oppose the spread of Christianity.  And Christianity is clear in its teaching that God judges all men equally; He doesn't embrace one earthly people while destroying or arbitrarily damning another.  But CPT's pleas for forgiveness and understanding on behalf of organizations linked to terrorism -- while engaging in aggressive fault-finding with the US and Israel -- are disturbing and seem to reflect the teachings of multiculturalism and moral equivalence more so than Christianity.

One final thought -- if Yale wishes to convince us that it does not teach its students to rationalize certain types of evil, then maybe it should consider giving International Student status to Abdul Rahman, who is currently on trial in Afghanistan, charged with converting to Christianity.  In a Muslim country, such a conversion is a capital offense.  Unlike Sayed Hashemi, who willfully ducked into the Taliban tent in order to avoid suffering, Rahman refuses to disavow his belief in Christ.  If suffering and martyrdom merit "hero" status, Abdul Rahman is the real deal.  If he survives this trial, it is a sure bet that he could teach Yale -- and anyone else willing to listen to him -- far more than a member of the Taliban.