Controversy has erupted at California’s Claremont McKenna College after a student journalist exposed how the head of the Middle East Studies Department, Dr. Bassam Frangieh, is an open supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah. The college has responded by pretending his record of praising the terrorist groups doesn’t exist and editing Frangieh’s Wikipedia entry.
Charles C. Johnson of The Claremont Independent has done extensive research on Frangieh, including having his Arabic works translated. Johnson tells FrontPage that more incriminating material is on the way, but what has already been discovered is nothing less than shocking.
In May of 2006, Frangieh congratulated Hamas on winning the Palestinian elections, saying, “I wonder what else would the Arabs have without Hamas and Hezbollah? Nothing. Except humiliation.” He said that he “view[s] Hamas with great pleasure” and even went so far as to say, “Hamas might be able to produce the beginning of salvation.” This lavish praise cannot be denied, clarified or downplayed. It is clear that Frangieh is an unabashed supporter of the terrorist group.
He also supports specific acts of terrorism. He signed a petition in 2006 describing Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel, which included the firing of rockets on civilians and the kidnapping of soldiers, as a “heroic operation.” The document referred to Israel as a “Zionist killing machine” that is “motivated by historical ambitions…[and] a racist supremacist ideology that denigrates the indigenous population, their culture, and their very existence.”
It describes Hezbollah as the “Lebanese Resistance” and asks the Lebanese government to enlist it as its army. The petition also demands that the international community boycott Israeli products, cut off diplomatic ties and even boycott Israeli academic and scientific institutions that do not condemn the invasion of Lebanon.
Frangieh also wrote an essay in 2000 titled, “Modern Arabic Poetry: Vision and Reality” that praises an extremist poet named Abd al-Rahim Mahmud, whose poetry has made its way into Palestinian and Saudi textbooks designed to indoctrinate the youth into supporting terrorism and hatred. Two of his most popular poems, “The Martyr” and “A Call to Jihad,” are particularly admired by terrorists.
In his essay, he said that even if Arab poets blew themselves up, it would not force the change he feels is necessary in the region. “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,” he writes.
Though Frangieh views all the Arab regimes as corrupt, one stands out among him as the best: Saddam Hussein. He says the dictator “really did something for his country” and “wasn’t a thief,” though he is quick to add that this doesn’t mean he is defending Hussein’s brutality.
Frangieh also espouses wild conspiracy theories. In 2007, he signed a petition condemning a resolution that would divide Iraq into three sectarian-based autonomous regions as a “Zionist plot.” It described the war in Iraq as “barbaric” and hatched by “cowboys” seeking the country’s wealth. Like other anti-American conspiracy theorists and Islamic extremists, he sees U.S. foreign policy as secretly orchestrated by Zionist imperialists with evil motives.
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Most likely this creep enjoys tenure and will be able to spew hatred and lies to students for many years to come.
Well, if anything bizarre is ever going to happen, bet your bottom penny it will
definitely happen in CALIFORNIA….
What I can't understand is why academic institutions allow this kind of people
in their staffs, corrupting the minds of young people and I speak from
experience, having gone through the same indoctrination in my youth
It is very easy to understand. Money. Saudi oil dollars administered by Wahhabi and Brotherhood agents paid to unconsciously unprincipled academics have set up Islamic Trojan Horses in their other version of Jihad.
There is nothing shocking about this revelation. Wahhabi and Brotherhood payola with Saudi oil dollars have been buying up the relatively cheap whores who run America's academic world to riddle us with Trojan Horses.
Hopefully the site admins is not a new branch of the White House.
WOW – I just finished reading Jamie's Glazovs book "United in Hate-the Lefts Romance with terror–" This guy fits right in with the Left described in the book!!!!!!!!
One can't be surprised by the fact that the likes of Ward Churchill or Bassam Frangieh get teaching jobs in the liberal world of our universities. What is remarkable is how both quickly rose to head their respective departments, and how they've been protected and defended by administrators and faculty colleagues when their indefensible statements came to public light.
How is it possible for example, that Ward Churchill, who had a degree in art from an un-accredited college, rose to become head of the 'Ethnic Studies Dept' at U of Colorado? He had done none of the requisite academic work that would have qualified him for such a position (he authored no books or articles in peer-reviewed publications).
The answer is easy: Churchill's demagogic, radical politics were what made him the darling of the faculty at U of Colorado…and resulted in his securing the position of Dept head. Yes folks, that's it. His single qualification was his fanatical anti-Americanism….which just goes to show the state of academe in America today.
Claremont McKenna College must be relentlessly hounded until it severs ties with Bassam Frangieh. Proponents of terrorism – and Frangieh's statements are unequivocal – should NOT be educating our young people.
The Palestinians support Hamas, Hezbolla, and al Qaeda, and strap munitions on their own women and children and send them out on homicide-suicide missions to murder other innocent women and children in markets, restuarants, on school buses, and in their homes. The Palestinians in their own words and by their actions are committed to the genocide of the Jewish people therefore, have foreited their rights to even exist.
Does this thug enjoy tenure and the prerogative to spew hatred and lies to thousands of students during a disgraceful but disconcertingly long academic career? I'm enjoying teaching a college class that considers communism, fascism, and islam in the same totalitarian category. Students react well to facts and documentation. They get to read selections from the communist manifesto, mein kampf, and the koran and understand Israel to be the only protector of individual rights in the Middle East. All is not lost.
"Claremont McKenna" – yet another college to cross off the list of possibilities for my kids
In his essay, he said that even if Arab poets blew themselves up, it would not force the change he feels is necessary in the region. “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,” he writes.
If Frangieh really believed this, he, his wife and their children (if any) would have martyred themselves ages ago on behalf of their glorious cause. Oh — that's right. People like Frangieh, the mullahs, abu Mazen, and the royal haouse of saud prefer that other people do the dieing while they enjoy the best that this life has to offer.
Retired 2002 from a midwest Ph.D.-granting dept. of English after nearly a half-century in academe, and I couldn't get out fast enough. Humanities and social science departments in particular hire a lot of people for whom political fulminating is the name of what "teaching and scholarship" has become. Mainly, these people are lazy–nothing simpler than regurgitation on cue of the same old same old. Unlike the hard sciences–climategate is a melodramatic "horror movie" version of this–have concrete and specific ways of proving negatives: "this conclusion doesn't work because it doesn't work." No such negative rules in the humanities and social sciences, consequently it is impossible for these areas to filter out the intellectual charlatans.
Instead, what you get is paranoid and angry types utterly without professional ethics, who therefore have no problem exploiting classroom situations for the purpose of delivering leftist sermons. This works, too: students who catch on fast learn that all they have to do is parrot back to the professor her own ideological trash in order to earn an "A" grade.
Not all departments and professors operate this way, but there are enough of these types on-board to murder any department's capacity to police itself in an intellectually respectable manner.
In addition, academics tend to be intellectual and physical cowards–I do not exaggerate. I once criticized a feminist asst. prof. in her tenure review for writing an anti-heterosexual male hate diatribe. The rest of the males in my department voted for her, but afterwards they agreed with me, and positively marveled that I had the guts to say what I said in that meeting. I responded, "Guts?? What the hell is with you people?" That was the kicker incident with me, the last straw in a whole parade of intellectually-shoddy hiring and tenure decisions stretching back the early 1980s. By the time I retired I had no respect for the intellectual and professional integrity of any of my department colleagues, and they knew it. I walked out of my office for the last time, no "farewell" party (I said I didn't want one), and never looked back.
Your story makes me so glad I graduated from college in the late 70's before there were enough tenured radicals to change academe into the intellectual cesspool it has become. And to see what passes for academic achievement in our supposedly elite universities makes my head swim. Hopefully with organizations such as FIRE and honest voices like The Claremont Independent, we can begin the difficult task of bringing some intellectual sanity and professional accountability back to our colleges and universities.
voltimand Thank you. Your experience resonates with my own past as a public school educator in Canada. Your story consoles and suggests that we are not entirely alone. It is consoling and encouraging also that many young people -at least those i meet through my own children – appear to have survived the baleful influence of cowardly hacks. fiana
CMC is supposed to be a conservative place. Back in the day, when I went to Pomona College, CMC was Reagan country. Where is Henry Kravis? They are destroying his beloved CMC, turning it into another Pitzer College.
I graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1973, and it was already a leftist cesspool and is twice as bad today. The faculty are twice as bad as the students.
Who is behind all this at Claremont McKenna College?
The left? The pseudo liberal? Arab Money?
Since Claremont College and the Heritage Foundation both have connections to the Mellon Family, I would like to post this on Heritage Foundation's Facebook page or e mail it to them. Unfortunately, I lack the technical skills. If anyone else reading this has the know-how, I'd appreciate getting this to them. Thank you.
There is little scholarship and integrity left in Near East Studies in the US today, thanks to Edward Said, Persian Gulf money, and an influx of Muslim "scholars". I wrapped up my studies in the field in the 1970s, shortly before the changing landscape became clear.
I don't think much will come of this expose. His colleagues will rally to his defense as usually happens. It wasn't that long ago that another California professor was passing around a "study document" for his students comparing photos from the Nazi era to photos of IDF soldiers. He's still teaching.
We have free speech in the U.S.; however, when it incites violence, then it no longer is protected under our First Amendment. Examples: The KKK, Aryan Nation, Black Panthers (at least pre-2009).
What is wrong with the students who keep attending his classes? No students in his classroom day after day would seem to be a good way to convince the school to fire this friend of terrorists.
Perhaps we all could write to our congressional people in D.C., demanding that none of our tax dollars should go to support anything concerning this school, with explicit explanation as to why we are making such a demand.
There is an ongoing attempt (since early 2009) to overrun our country with a combination of socialism and acceptance of those who are terrorists or closely connected to them.
I love my USA and refuse that sort of junk. How about you?
“In truth, immediately i didn’t understand the essence. But after re-reading all at once became clear.”
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