Despite repeated calls for a statement from alumni, from faculty members, from parents, and from students, no one in Claremont McKenna’s administration has spoken out to my Big Peace article about Professor Bassam Frangieh’s support for terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah.
But Richard Rodner, Claremont McKenna’s vice president of public affairs and communications, deleted all mention of Frangieh’s support for terrorist groups from his Wikipedia page. (He used the rather obvious username of “rrodner” when making the deletions.)
This deletion should end all pretense that the college cares about supporting Bassam Frangieh’s “academic freedom” to support terrorist groups. Rodner didn’t respond to my request for statement, but a subsequent edit from Texas (IP address: 97.77.198.18 ) noted that the petition that Frangieh signed was signed by hundreds of other academics – as if that excuses their proposed boycott of all Israeli academics. (It would seem that calling for that boycott would be the very opposite of academic freedom, but that doesn’t seem to have occurred to our administrators or to those academics.)
Alas, to date, no one – not Pamela Gann, Claremont McKenna’s president, not Gregory D. Hess, its dean of faculty, not Hilary Appel, its assistant dean of faculty, has responded to my request for a statement.
It seems unlike that they ever will given how much Claremont McKenna has invested in the Middle Eastern program. After all, President Pamela Gann, journeyed to four Middle Eastern countries on a fact finding junket, where she, with Professor Frangieh and Ms. Aleta Wenger (Professor Frangieh’s wife and “executive director of international programs”) hobnobbed with royalty and the Middle East elite.
In any event, it turns out that Bassam Frangieh isn’t the only one in his family, or at Claremont’s campus, that has some odd views on politics in the Middle East. Meet his wife, Aleta Wenger.
Since her three-year stint in the Peace Corps in 1979, Wenger has lived all throughout the Arab world – Algeria, Tunisia, Jordan, Cairo, and Doha. In 1993, after she took the Foreign Service exam, Wenger went from Peace Corps veteran to the diplomatic corps. Today, she advises Claremont McKenna College students on scholarships to pursue the study of foreign policy and diplomacy.
But she isn’t the slightest bit diplomatic about what she thinks about America’s closest ally in the Middle East, Israel, writing often and ad nauseam on internet sites. A close examination of her online statements reveal that she has some rather confused views on the State of Israel for someone who has spent so much time in the Middle East.
In a July 20, 2010 New York Times article comment, she commended an American movement to do an end run on Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Here’s what she wrote:
I’m against the Israeli blockade of Gaza and do not believe for one minute that the Israelis are allowing in food and medicine, and other commodities, to the level needed by the civilian population. 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!!! [emphasis mine]
The running of the blockade is not so much about humanitarian supplies, as Greta Berlin, one of the organizers confessed, “is not about delivering humanitarian supplies, it’s about breaking Israel’s siege on 1.5 million Palestinians.” For its part, Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh said that it would refuse any aid from Israel-intercepted flotilla, telling the press that “We are not seeking to fill our (bellies), we are looking to break the Israeli siege on Gaza.” If we take Hamas seriously, then they are either deliberately starving their people – or the Israelis are correct – that the goods onboard the flotilla were already readily available in Gaza.
However the Gaza blockades looks, it looks like Aleta Wenger has a deep-seated suspicion of Israel. In an August 4, 2006 comment on Israel’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, she suspected the I.D.F. wanted to bomb a university:
I would like ABC to run a full story on the status of AUB [American University of Beirut], including the hospital, with a status report about the physical plant of the most renowned university in the Arab World. Has AUB also been bombed by the Israelis? Since they are now bombing Christian villages in the north of Lebanon, perhaps AUB is next in line. Shame on the Israelis and I welcome more balanced coverage from ABC on this war. [Emphasis mine]
Of course Hezbollah knew well that Israel would retaliate, which is why it deliberately fired missiles from the homes of Christian villagers. Their calculus worked a bit like this: if Israel destroys the home of the Christians, that’s a win. If the Christians flee and Lebanon becomes still more Muslim, that’s also a win as there is no love lost between Lebanon’s Maronite Christian and Shia Muslim communities after the 1980s civil war.
In the most recent war, The New York Times reported about those Christians and their ordeal at the hands of Hezbollah on July 28th, 2006. Here’s how one villager described it:
“Hezbollah came to Ain Ebel to shoot its rockets,” said Fayad Hanna Amar, a young Christian man, referring to his village. “They are shooting from between our houses.”
“Please,” he added, “write that in your newspaper.”
Israel, threatened with promised rocket attacks on Tel Aviv, had indeed bombed Christian suburbs of Beirut – but only because Hezbollah had made them into human shields.
Ms. Wenger’s one-sided “blame Israel first” mentality is similar to that of her husband, Bassam Frangieh, who in a series of statements and petitions, has made it known that he supports the terrorist groups, Hezbollah and Hamas. In 2006, Bassam Frangieh supported a petition that denounced Israel as a “Zionist killing machine” and praised Hezbollah as the true resistance army of Lebanon.
Today, Professor Frangieh directs the Middle East Studies program, which purports to teach the next generation of diplomats, while Wenger, an ex-diplomat, serves as the “executive director for international programs” at Claremont McKenna College, America’s best conservative liberal arts college. There she advises on numerous foreign studies fellowships, including several for the study of languages critical to national security.
She was quoted most recently in a press release, celebrating Claremont McKenna ranking as 10th for most Fulbrights awarded per capita of any college in America.
“We are also very proud that our graduates will play a role in promoting mutual understanding, a primary goal of the Fulbright Program,” she said.
Apparently the promotion of “mutual understanding” doesn’t extend to Israeli policy which she condemns in her comments, impugning the most sinister of motives to the most steadfast of America’s allies in the Middle East.
This one-sidedness could be tolerated in professors, whose classes students may elect to take or not take, but not in the campus advisor for the Fulbright Award. In her capacity as campus advisor, every student interested in that program must consult with Wenger during the application process. She also serves on the National Awards committee and the Off Campus Study Committee and as campus advisor to the Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Diversity fellowship and the Boren National Security Education Scholarship. Wenger’s one-sided views against Israel raise serious questions about her fitness to be a campus advisor for a scholarship critical to America’s national interest.
Unfortunately, these sorts of questions won’t be posed by Claremont McKenna’s president, Pamela Gann, who is presumably more intent to ignore the charges than to address them. That would be scandalous enough in its own right, but Richard Rodner’s deletion of those charges from the public through his Wikipedia edits, harms the public interest of knowing just what Bassam Frangieh’s views are on contentious topics, topics which will assuredly come up in his capacity running a proposed study abroad program in the Middle East.
Claremont McKenna’s administration it seems would prefer to borrow a page from the regimes with which its president consorts on her junket – Kuwait, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates – and censor the truth, rather than answer for it. This is all the more troubling as the ties between the Arab states and Claremont will grow stronger as Gann seeks to raise money for Claremont’s proposed satellite school in Jordan.
The truth about Bassam Frangieh and his views must win out and be exposed for all to see before the ground is broken for that project. Nothing less than the future of America’s Middle East diplomatic corps is at stake.
