Will the Kuwaiti Government Fund Claremont McKenna's Bassam Frangieh?

Now that Hezbollah has brought down the government of Lebanon without firing a shot, will the Kuwaiti government fund Bassam Frangieh, a pro-Saddam Hussein, pro-Hezbollah, pro-Hamas professor of Arabic and Middle East Studies at Claremont McKenna College?

According to a source close to President Pamela Gann of Claremont McKenna College, that’s exactly what she’s angling for – and part of the reason Gann awarded a rarely given honorary degree of laws to “His Excellency” Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Mohammad Al-Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah CMC ’78 earlier this past year.

Frangieh’s department is 33rd among the “101 Reasons to Give” to Claremont.

It seems that’s the direction things are going. Dean Greg Hess announced Friday Kuwait University (not the University or Kuwait, as Hess claims) has invited Professor Frangieh (Arabic) and Lisa Cody (History) to lead a group of CMC students to Kuwait during spring break. All lodging, meals, domestic travel and activities are to be provided by the University. Meanwhile Frangieh and his wife, Aleta Wenger, Claremont McKenna’s anti-Israel international director, will be journeying to Jordan with a group of students for an eight-week “travel, education, and practicum experience.”

“His Excellency” al-Sabah might want to think twice, though, before he dips into his $15 billion fund to support the college. Like many alumni, who are refusing to donate thanks to these revelations, he’d probably be aghast at what’s going on at his alma mater, especially given his country’s – and his family’s – history suffering at the hands of Saddam Hussein during his 1990 invasion of Kuwait. (The twentieth anniversary of the campaign to liberate Kuwait was this past Sunday.)

Like many Kuwaitis, the House of Sabah was forced to flee once Iraq annexed the small country and set off the first Iraq war. Sheik Faud al-Ahmad al-Sabah, a family member, stayed behind to defend the family’s royal home. He was shot and killed. According to a deserting Iraqi soldier. The sheik’s body was placed in front of a tank and crushed.

But, as StandWithUs notes, Bassam Frangieh, the new head of Arabic and Middle East Studies at the foreign minister’s alma mater, apologizes for Saddam Hussein. In a speech at the University of Bridgeport (see at the 18 minute mark), Frangieh sang the dictator’s praises, who he describes as “the only leader of the Arab world who really did something for his country,” and who “wasn’t a thief.” Frangieh made these remarks in 2007, long after Hussein’s genocidal reign and systematic thievery from the UN Oil for Food program – the largest financial scandal in U.N. history – had ended, and indeed, it appears, a short while after Hussein had been executed for his crimes against humanity. Though Frangieh was quick to say that he wasn’t “defending the guy,” he sure wasn’t condemning him. Instead, Frangieh celebrated Hussein’s “infrastructure” – the moral equivalent of saying that never you mind the Holocaust, Hitler made the trains run on time.

If Hussein had had his way, there would be no Kuwait today. The Kuwaiti government should return the favor – and help end Bassam Frangieh’s career at Claremont McKenna.

Other alumni would follow the foreign minister’s lead and reject the College’s attempts to fund raise at a West Side L.A. home and through its “101 Reasons to Give to CMC” brochure in the CMC Magazine.

Bassam Frangieh is Number 33 reason to give to Claremont McKenna College. Nick Owchar, CMC ’90, an editor at The Los Angeles Times, wrote that Frangieh is a man of peace, despite his past endorsement of violence and terrorist groups that call for it. (Mr. Owchar hasn’t replied to email requests for comment, but it appears that he wrote his piece in favor of Frangieh after I released the April article detailing Frangieh’s support for Hezbollah. Apparently an editor at The Los Angeles Times has yet to discover Google.)

Here’s what Owchar wrote:

“Assamalu Alaikum!” Bassam Frangieh, professor of Arabic, begins every class with this greeting, which means “peace be upon you.” Frangieh’s ambitions for the College’s Arabic program include study of Arabic language, literature, and culture. All of this, he hopes, will be complemented by summer academic travel to places like Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere. For now, however, Arabic language is the concentration, and it is a crucial one. Language is the gateway, Frangieh explains, to everything else, including peace. “Learn the language and you understand how others think, how their minds work,” he says. “It is of the most crucial importance. Any hope for a deep, mutual understanding between cultures must begin there.” [Emphasis added]

If language is the key to learning how others think, why is the only language taught in the Middle East Studies program Arabic? Why not Hebrew or Farsi? Some languages seem to be better than others.

Of course, “Learn the language and you understand how others think” was part of the reason I had translated the petitions that Frangieh has signed and the interviews he gave.

Now we know that Professor Frangieh thinks highly of Hezbollah and Hamas and Saddam Hussein. His defenders think, without evidence, that he was just supporting their political wings, which are also terrorist organizations according to the State Department. In Lebanon, we now see what “political wings” do when terrorist wings are threatened with exposure. They wreak political havoc, which is much the same thing that their terrorist wings do.

Claremont McKenna College – whose PR head, Richard Rodner, censored his Wikipedia page – thinks it’s no big deal, just a professor exercising his academic freedom. CMC Magazine places Frangieh next to our school motto – Crescit cum commercio civitas (Civilization prospers with commerce) – as a reason to give to the college, but it sure doesn’t seem very civilized to support barbaric terrorism.