Bassam Frangieh, Claremont McKenna College’s resident Hamas, Hezbollah and Saddam Hussein-supporting head of Arabic and Middle East Studies, trains the next generation of Arabic diplomats at one of America’s top colleges. We’ve already exposed his anti-Israel views, but today, we’ll expose his anti-American ones.
I’ve already asked why Kuwait’s government is funding a pro-Saddam Hussein professor on junkets to the Middle East; why the college’s PR director, Richard Rodner, is covering up the pro-terrorism views of a professor ostensibly brought to teach future diplomats by deleting from his Wikipedia page; and why, for that matter, future diplomats are being taught by an avowed supporter of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Saddam Hussein.To date, I’ve heard nothing back. Instead, the college released a toothless response, which I then proceeded to gut.
Today, we’re going to ask a more basic question in the hopes that we will get something of a response: Why is Bassam Frangieh in America if he hates it so much? It can’t be the six figure salary he and his wife – herself also something of an anti-Israel bigot and running all international programming at CMC – each receive, for men work for more than pay.
Take a gander at an interview he gave in 2006 that I had professionally translated from Arabic. In it, Professor Frangieh answers a basic question of his own: Why do you stay in America?
“Life in America has no taste and no life. It is suffocating, but one does not know that he is suffocating, for the suffocation comes by degrees. It’s like the frog who is initially placed in a large bowl of lukewarm water, then starts to feel uncomfortable but does not know why. Then they start heating up the water little by little. You adapt to the increasing temperature, then they continue to increase the temperature gradually until you slowly suffocate.America does not have intimate relationships. Expedience is everything. It has no purity. Everything is superficial, artificial, material. Either the man suffocates, or he turns into a machine—a machine which loses its ability to discern that it is a machine. You stop thinking, and you go places you do not know in convoys of bigger machines. I am amazed by those who have a place to go and yet stay here. If I had a place, I would go there and stay there happily, and would not stay one more day here. "[Emphasis added]
America, he tells us, does not have intimate relationships, but Claremont McKenna’s PR stresses Frangieh’s “intimate” relationships with students in promotional material. Is that intimacy false? Is Professor Frangieh really as duplicitous as he appears?
Now that his views are known, perhaps Claremont McKenna’s alumni – and the friends of real peace in the Middle East – can pay to have him leave. Lebanon’s government was just toppled by Hezbollah without firing a shot, putting the lie to the canard that political wings don’t seek the same thing military wings do – civic disruption. Frangieh once signed a pro-Hezbollah petition whose flyer advertised, “Boycott Israel… We are all Hezbollah now.”
Maybe now he can go live in the Hell his beloved Hezbollah seeks to bring about in Lebanon? By all means, Claremont McKenna alumni should say: “Here’s your ticket.”
