At Claremont McKenna College, Professor Bassam Frangieh singlehandedly runs the Claremont Colleges' Arabic program where he teaches tomorrow's diplomats about the Middle East, plans study abroad programs - and supports terrorist organizations, Hezbollah and Hamas.
Alumni, students, and faculty worry about this radicalism. Professors are important - especially when they train future diplomats (Ronald F. Lehman '68, Surin Pitsuwan '72, Lawrence George Rossin '75), defense officials (David Mason '79, Chuck DeVore '85), elected officials (Congressman David Dreier '75, Mayor Tom Leppert '77) and ambassadors (C. Steven McGann '73). Repeated requests from alumni, students, parents and faculty for comment has been ignored. The college trots Frangieh out for fundraising; CMC Magazine Winter 2011 listed him as reason #33 to give to Claremont McKenna months after they found out about his views. Its PR director, Richard Rodner, scrubbed all mention of Frangieh's views from Wikipedia. Dean Greg Hess emailed the faculty saying that it was only "a student writer's opinion" that Hezbollah and Hamas are terrorist organizations - ignoring that it was the State Department - where CMC students hope to work - that designed them as such.
Notwithstanding the cover up, Frangieh's views are clear. He told an interviewer in 2006 that he looks to Hamas with "great joy," and supports violence against Israel, saying in the wake of Hamas's election, that it "might be able to produce the beginning of salvation… I wonder what else would the Arabs have without Hamas and Hezbollah? Nothing. Except humiliation. I congratulate Hamas on its victory." Meanwhile, in his academic work, he's written in favor of suicide bombing and martyrdom. In a speech before the University of Bridgeport in 2007, he said that Islam is "very democratic," and praised Saddam Hussein as a model leader who "wasn't a thief" and who "really did something for his country." (Frangieh apparently wasn't aware of the Oil-for-Food scandal.) Frangieh has also made his views known through petitions, which he says, "stem from the heart and are cast onto paper." In 2006 he signed a pro-Hezbollah petition that ran with a flyer encouraging its signatories to "Boycott Israel…We are all Hizbullah now." Supported and promoted by prominent anti-Israel, anti-American activists like Tariq Ali, Omar Barghouri, and Norman Finkelstein, the petition demanded a boycott of Israel and Israeli academics to stop the "Zionist killing machine" and called Hezbollah the "Lebanese Resistance" and the "legitimate" army and praised its "heroic operations" against Israel. Another anti-Semitic 2007 petition blamed a "Zionist conspiracy" for then-Senator Biden's plan to divide Iraq into three separate autonomous regions in language eerily similar to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Frangieh's choice of speakers is biased as well. In 2009 he brought the Syrian ambassador, Imad Moustapha, whom he instructed his class to warmly serenade with singings from the Koran. (One student even asked, in all earnestness, what students could do to help Syria promote peace.) Along with the Muslim Student Association (MSA), Frangieh also brought Imam Zaid Shakir, who blamed America's access to guns for Ft. Hood. Yet another major guest was PLO member Sari Nusseinbeh, who during the first intifada helped terrorists avoid arrest and secure funding.
Frangieh's radicalism affects other areas of the college as well. His wife, Aleta Wenger, is a former State Department official to the Middle East who currently works as the director of Claremont's Center for Global Education, which is, in effect, the public face of the college overseas. Like her husband, Wenger also has conspiratorial views of Israel's military, accusing it, without evidence, of bombing universities and hospitals. According to Internet postings, she supports the Hamas-linked Gaza flotilla movement. She wrote,
I now have a good cause to support financially, and am very happy that my fellow Americans are interested in joining the blockade movement. Now to see if I can get on that boat. As a retired U.S. foreign service officer now unleashed, I can do and say what I want. Now let's hear all of your readers tell me how naive I am… but I'm telling you, I've truly been there and seen it all… go Gaza flotilla ships go!!!For her part, President Gann, who traveled with Frangieh and Ms. Wenger on a Middle East junket in March 2010, compared Frangieh's advocacy for Hezbollah and Hamas to another professor's testimony in the Prop 8 case last year. Gann hopes to fund the program with money from the Kuwaiti royal family, several members of whom attended Claremont McKenna College. President Gann, according to one board of trustee member, did send out a memo that essentially copied Dean Hess's. The board of trustee member noted that this was the first time Gann had sent all of the trustees a memo since the famous Kerri Dunn incident in which a professor of psychology faked a hate crime against herself in 2004.
Gann has soft-pedaled these substantive charges. To build the program that Frangieh heads Gann moved quickly. No one on Frangieh's review spoke Arabic or, according to one faculty source, even Googled his name. Nevertheless, President Gann moved to grant Frangieh automatic tenure at Claremont - the first time ever that a professor received such an award of tenure. Dean of Faculty Greg Hess took another unprecedented tenure decision and denied Professor (and sometime Weekly Standard reviewer) Christopher Lynch a tenure-track position for, "lacking substantive publications" despite the enthusiastic support of the Government department and significant publication record. Hess refused to comment on that glaring double standard.
At Yale, Frangieh, as a language instructor, was denied consideration for tenure, because in the words of the provost, he lacked "substantive original research." At Claremont, he has free range to create classes that teach his interpretation of the Middle East, despite his lack of credentials. He has a Ph.D. in Arabic literature - not history - and yet teaches the required course for Middle East studies majors, "Trends and Movements in the Middle East," which promises to expose students to the "major themes in Arab society, culture, and tradition." Islamic-motivated terrorism, anti-Semitism, and suicide bombing are major themes in Arab society - and Frangieh supports all of them.
Frangieh was reportedly brought to campus by Professor P. Edward Haley. Haley is a noted - and vocal - campus critic of Israel and teaches a required course for international relations majors. Named director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights in 2008, Haley renamed it the Center for Human Rights Leadership. In effect, the organization dedicated to the study of the Jewish people's greatest plight, and on whose board Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel sits, is headed by a man who single-mindedly criticizes Israel, who brought to campus to teach the next diplomats a man who supports terrorist organizations that seek to exterminate Jews worldwide.
Frangieh's students - tomorrow's State Department - defend Frangieh as popular professor and stress that Hezbollah and Hamas aren't only terrorist organizations, as if that somehow excuses their anti-Semitism or murder of innocents. Surveying the chaos in the Middle East, where Hezbollah toppled Lebanon's government without firing a shot and the Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood riots all over Egypt, we know that every bad idea our State Department has comes first from the campuses where cowardice and moral relativism reign, even in our best schools. As we wonder why the State Department is so impotent to speak up for human rights, we forget that sometimes impotence is a learned trait.
But Claremont McKenna isn't a hotbed of radicalism. Hezbollah, prior to 9-11, killed the most Americans of any terrorist organizations in America. We wouldn't tolerate a professor who supported al-Qaeda, so why do we tolerate one who supports Hezbollah?