Bassam Frangieh still hasn’t deigned to defend himself from the repeated exposure of his political views. No matter. We shall proceed onto the next of a long line of business: exposing his support for the Syrian regime and its client terrorist organizations. In past writings, we have already remarked that Frangieh brought the Syrian ambassador to campus, that he instructed his students to warmly serenade him with a recitation of the Koran, and that he offered no balance of the ambassador’s views in his classes.
Ian Johnson (no relation) CMC ’09 of The Claremont Independent wrote the definitive article of that visit, detailing Syria’s support of Hamas and Hezbollah and its willful violation of human rights, which were curiously absent from the questions from Arabic students in the audience, one of whom asked, in all seriousness, what she could do to help Syria support peace. This, despite, as Johnson notes, Syria’s support of jihadi killing of American soldiers in Iraq as recently as 2006 and its harboring of al Qaeda operatives as late as 2008.
Frangieh, we know now, also supports Syrian-supported terrorist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah. It turns out that he also supports the agents of Syria who are trying to overturn the government of Lebanon and decries the 2005 “Cedar Revolution” that sought to expel Syrian troops.
This post will examine Frangieh’s views on Lebanon and Syria which are made clear by a statement he made and by a petition he signed, the full text of which is below.
First the statement:
Suleiman Frangieh, Jr., is the scion of Lebanon’s Frangieh family, which founded the radical militant group, the Marada Movement. The Marada Movement are Lebanese Christian mafioso-types who recently joined the opposition government with Hezbollah. The very pro-Syrian Frangieh family brought the Syrians into Lebanon and ran them to the dissatisfaction of many Lebanese. This was, in part, what to the 2005 “Cedar Revolution” that culminated in a unity government, the very government that Hezbollah’s “political wing” is seeking to topple with the help of the Marada Movement. Meanwhile, Frangieh signed a petition, reproduced in its entirety below that criticized the Lebanese government for being stooges of Americans and Israelis.
Once again it seems that Frangieh descends into conspiracy theory driven. This isn’t the kind of rigor we expect from our professors, let alone those who head programs. Here’s the petition down below.
Source: http://ya-ashrafe-nnas.blogspot.com/2007/05/world-doesn.html
No. 2: We Accuse and We Invite
A group of intellectuals from various countries of the world signed statement number two entitled “We Accuse and We Invite,” having already signed statement number one following the events at camp Nahr al-Barid. Included in the statement was,
We, the undersigned, accuse many of the Lebanese leaders of using the Palestinian people and their resistance for their own sectarian and petty (like their leadership) purposes. We accuse them of covering up the attack on a crowded Palestinian-Lebanese camp under the banner of “sovereignty,” which is more often than not used in Lebanon against the weak and poor.
We accuse them of embracing a fascist doctrine, such as that which accompanied and justified the siege and raid of the camps at Tel al-Z’atar and Dabiya in the mid-1970s. To borrow from Bush’s speech on terrorism, that “all of the Palestinian people should bear the burdens"; the organs of Lebanese authority themselves publicly confirm that they are isolated. We accuse them of covering up the creation of a security apparatus that is not subject to oversight by the people and their representatives, as the impostors had previously covered up the security apparatus during the era of Syrian control over Lebanon.
We accuse the March 14th group specifically of promoting a project targeting the arms of the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance, while nevertheless strengthening the armaments of the sectarian gangs, thereby fueling the conflict in Lebanon which serves an imperialist project stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan.
We accuse some in the opposition of standing idly by, without protest, behind the ruling dynasty’s plans, merely because the target is an unprotected “sect” in Lebanon—the Palestinian people.
We also accuse some in the opposition of digesting the enemy’s speech against the Palestinian people. We accuse some of the Lebanese of closing their shelters and schools to the Palestinian refugees from camp Nahr al-Barid, when the Palestinian camps had opened their doors to the Lebanese refugees during the last Israeli war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006. We accuse our liberal intellectuals of promoting the concepts of “sovereignty and vigor,” instead of “brotherhood and citizenship.”
We accuse them of disgusting hypocrisy when they condemn the killing of Israeli citizens, yet do not object to a camp being utterly demolished on the heads of its owners. We likewise accuse them of being zealous for human rights in one Arab country but no others. We accuse Lebanese “nationalism,” which attempts to construct a nation on the carnage of victims of indiscriminate bombing in camp Nahr al-Barid, of abhorrent racism. We accuse some of the Palestinian leaders, for flawed sectarian and financial motives, of covering up the ongoing war.
We accuse the fanatical Salafis (who are supported and funded, by the way, by the same parties which support and finance the ruling Lebanese authority) of spreading hatred and sectarianism, as well as the “culture” of takfir, abolition, and unilateralism. We accuse those Lebanese, the ones who claim that the U.S. airlift is an innocent or humanitarian act, of naïve politics at best, and of collusion with the growing war at worst.
Building on what was said previously, the undersigned call for a stop for all acts of war against camp Nahr al-Barid. We reject the raids on the densely populated camp. We stress that the doctrine of the Lebanese people is an expression of the Israelis, not of the Palestinian people—[Israel] is the enemy, not a neighbor. We condemn the sectarian mongering which has been (applied crudely?) by the ruling dynasty, especially since the comprehensive elections of 2005. Work to change the inhumane conditions of the Palestinian camps in Lebanon. Give the Palestinian people in Lebanon their full citizens’ rights, until the time that they return to their nation of Palestine. Stop the talk of “Lebanese services” to the Palestinian cause—we know that principal parties in Lebanon changed this country into the headquarters of the conspiracy against the Palestinian cause.
We demand that national and democratic forces fulfill the history of the joint Lebanese-Palestinian struggle, and take initiative in saving the camp and its people.
The signers, between 28 May and 29 May at 5:00 PM:
As’ad Abu-Khalil, Kirsten Shayd, Sami Sharaf, Zayna Z’atari, ‘Asaf Khawri, Ahmad al-Khamisi, Bassam Frangieh, Ghiath al-Yafi, Malak Khalid, Susan al-Barghuthi, ‘Ali Wahhabi, Amal K’awashi, Mu’ath Nasar, ‘Umar al-Barghuthi, Bashir Naf’i, Kamal Khalf al-Tawwil, Ibrahim Yasiri, Rafiq al-Zayn, The Palestinian-Arab Club in Vienna, Muhammad Abu-Rus, ‘Ali Malah, Kamal Khalifa, Sahir Dawud, Raym al-Nuwayri, Najib Sufi al-Din, Khadr ‘Awarika, Hamid Dubashi, Faysal bin Khadra, Estefan Shayha, Ayman Haddad, Ahmad Dalal, al-Yisar Ghazal, Muhammad Shahab, Ranna Bashara, Muhammad Riyadh, Karam Danih, As’ad Ghasub, Hani al-Barghuthi, Zaynab Ghasan, Nasir ‘Aruri, Halal Shuman, Iyad Qishawi, As’ad Ghanim, Faysal Jalul, Marid al-Barghuthi, Khalid ‘Ayad, ‘Imad Qishawi, Bisam Abu-Ghazala, Salih ‘Arqaji, Husna’ Reza Makdashi, Anis Qasim, Fatima Sharaf al-Din, Ghada al-Yafi, Kamal Balata, Fadi Madi, Munthar Sulayman, Ziyad Hafith, ‘Ali Kaf, and Samah Idris
