At Claremont McKenna College, one of America’s best conservative liberal arts college, Bassam Frangieh, a supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, teaches a senior seminar on “Trends and Movements in the Modern Middle East” about “the emergence of the Modern Middle East,” “Islamic political movements.” The required course for Middle East Studies majors draw on “concepts from political science, history, language and literature” – which is pretty impressive list for Frangieh, the director of that Mid-East program and he teaches it without even having a degree in Middle East history. (His Ph.D. is in literature.) But in the promotion of views hostile to peace is his specialty. He has brought exclusively anti-American and anti-Israeli speakers to campus, like Syrian ambassador, Imad Moustaphan, who denied his regime’s funding of attacks on Israeli civilians or Imam Zaid Shakir, who blamed guns, not jihad, for the attack at Ft. Hood.
Claremont McKenna once would never have stood for this. President George Charles Sumner Benson founded Claremont Men’s College (later Claremont McKenna) to teach veterans that which they had fought for in Europe and Asia: civilization through the liberal arts, the arts that make men free. Benson worried that students in America “graduated without imbibing any deep sense of the values of American life.” CMC would be different. It would teach an appreciation for the American way, the surest way of securing peace. Claremont McKenna has risen to the 9th best college in America, sandwiched between Harvard and Yale, according to Forbes magazine. In light of this advocacy, that reputation stands in danger.
Today, Professor Bassam Frangieh, director of the Middle East studies program, teaches Arabic to the next generation of “leaders in the making.” The new program was founded with the high hopes that they will join the diplomatic corps and promote peace in the Middle East. If Claremont McKenna’s president, Pamela Gann, has her way, that program will have a study abroad component in the Middle East (most likely in Jordan).
But Frangieh, as seen in an investigation I published in The Claremont Independent, a student news magazine of the Claremont Colleges, supports two terrorist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah. He looks to Hamas, a group designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization with “with great pleasure,” and signed a petition that supported Hezbollah and condemned Israel as a “Zionist killing machine.”
I had numerous petitions and statements from Bassam Frangieh professionally translated from Arabic.
Here’s what I found:
- In a May 26 2006 interview after the controversial election victory of Hamas in the Palestinian territories, Frangieh celebrated, saying that he “view[s] Hamas with great pleasure.” “Hamas might be able to produce the beginning of salvation,” he told an interviewer. “I wonder what else would the Arabs have without Hamas and Hezbollah? Nothing. Except humiliation. I congratulate Hamas on its victory.”
The U.S., the U.K., the E.U., Japan, Canada, and Israel all list Hamas as a terrorist organization. Jordan, where the proposed Middle East study abroad program will likely be located, banned Hamas entirely in 1999. According to the State Department, Hamas is funded by Iran, Palestinian expats, and “private benefactors” in Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.
- During the summer 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Frangieh signed a pro-Hezbollah, anti-Israel petition that condemned Israel as a “Zionist killing machine“. Among other things, the petition called for a worldwide boycott of Israeli academics and institutions. According to its signatories, the “Zionist state” was “motivated by historical ambitions vis-à-vis Lebanese territory and waters and by a racist supremacist ideology that denigrates the indigenous population [of Lebanon], their culture, and their very existence.” The petitioners called upon Lebanon to adopt Hezbollah – which it terms the “Lebanese Resistance” – as its legitimate army. The signatories deny that Israeli retaliation was due to the thousands of rockets fired indiscriminately on Israeli population centers beginning in July 2006 and the simultaneous kidnapping and killing of two Israeli soldiers near the border – actions described as part of a “heroic operation carried out by HizbAllah” in the petition Frangieh signed. [Emphasis added]
Frangieh also signed a petition condemning a nonbinding 2007 U.S. Senate Resolution supported by then-Senator Biden dividing Iraq into three separate autonomous regions. The petition called the resolution a “Zionist plot,” led by “Zionist masters” who work with “Cowboys” and “flee their countries in search of riches,” thereby purposefully undermining a “strong Iraq” and dragging it into a “barbaric war.”
Frangieh endorsed the most barbarous of attacks – suicide bombing – in a 2000 essay he wrote that celebrated Arab poet “martyrs” who fought Israel. That fight is justified because, according to Frangieh, Arabs have suffered the “most devastating blow” with “the creation of the state of Israel and the transformation of the Palestinians into a stateless people.” (He ignores that Israel allows Palestinians not living in the territories to vote and serve as members of the Knesset.)
Here’s what Frangieh wrote in that essay:
Nietzsche wrote, “The ideal condition cannot be achieved by dreaming, we must fight and struggle to achieve it.” Clearly, the fights and struggles of isolated poets and individuals have not succeeded in making change. Even if the best one hundred Arab poets loaded themselves with dynamite and exploded in the streets of Arab capitals, it would not be enough. For real change to come about, thousands of people will have to die; thousands must martyr themselves. It appears that only massive revolution will succeed in overturning the corrupt regimes of the Arab world. Only then can significant and radical change take place. [Emphasis added]
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While Claremont McKenna’s administration once stood up for its motto, “civilization prospers with commerce,” it now seems it supports those who support barbaric terrorism. Claremont McKenna’s president, Pamela Gann, has ignored requests for comment from alumni, parents, and students. But in some more private gatherings, she has even equated Professor Frangieh’s comments to that of Professor Miller, who testified on ballot initiatives in the federal litigation on California’s Prop 8. In so doing, Gann suggests that supporting California’s right to define marriage is equal to endorsing terrorism.
Gann has done that, I suspect, because she supports the creation of an Arabic study abroad program in the Middle East after a junket there last April where she met with royalty and Middle Eastern diplomats. Since that visit, Gann recently gave an honorary degree to Mohammed Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah, who is deputy prime minister and foreign minister of Kuwait and one of the first non-board members, non-commencement speakers to be so honored. He is also a member of the Kuwaiti royal family and a source close to fund-raising tells me that the honorary degree was, he worries, meant to get the Kuwaiti royalty to fund that a CMC school abroad. The foreign minister administers the Kuwaiti Fund for Arab Economic Developments, a $15 billion slush fund, with projects in more than 100 countries.
Frangieh, is slated to run that CMC school, with presumably his wife, Aleta Wegner, a former State Department official and director of study abroad programs at Claremont. There is no indication that the school will do anything, despite alumni, parent, and student concerns.
Given Frangieh’s views and his role in training future diplomats, every American, every real lover of peace, ought to ask for an explanation, if not his dismissal.
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