Dean of Faculty Hess Responds to Frangieh Work (My Full Response To Come)

Dean Hess responds to my work on Bassam Frangieh

Eleven days after the second article on Bassam Frangieh's pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah views and 234 days since the first article and after several  Claremont McKenna's administration has finally responded to repeated requests for comment from alumni, faculty, parents, and students.

Sadly, it has chosen to do it only after numerous alumni have withheld donations -- harming our school and its reputation in the process. The statement will be forthcoming in a moment. It was, insofar as I can tell, released only to faculty members, but there are several downright distortions and CMC administration spin in that statement which I will detail in a subsequent article and must respond to. Alas, we've come to expect this kind of spin. Claremont McKenna's VP of Communications and Public Affairs Richard Rodner manipulated Wikipedia to delete substantive, thoroughly-researched criticism of Frangieh -- and then signed his username "Rrodner."

Oh, and did I mention there's still more to come?

Here's Dean Hess's statement:

From: "Hess, Gregory" ;gregory.hess@claremontmckenna.edu

Date: December 16, 2010 4:07:01 PM PST

To: "Hess, Gregory";gregory.hess@claremontmckenna.edu

Subject: Statement of Gregory Hess in Response to Student Articles

Dear Colleagues,

The following statement is in response to recent student articles and blog entries regarding Professor Bassam Frangieh, who is a Professor of Arabic in the Modern Languages Department and is chair of the interdisciplinary faculty committee that administers the Middle East Studies major at CMC.

The articles make a number of serious and wide-ranging accusations directed at Professor Frangieh and the College. The College has met with Professor Frangieh and reviewed the allegations raised in the articles. The College’s review found that Professor’s Frangieh’s political expressions fall within the framework of the appropriate exercise of his First Amendment rights. Similarly, Professor Frangieh’s academic scholarship, which focuses on Arabic language, literature, and culture, falls within the appropriate exercise of his academic freedom. Although the College recognizes that individuals may disagree with some of Professor Frangieh’s viewpoints, or may find them controversial, the College does not agree with the student’s opinion that Professor Frangieh supports terrorism. In addition, Professor Frangieh has specifically and emphatically denied that he supports terrorism, or any acts of terrorism by any organization. [CJ: There is no evidence in the public record that this is true.] 

The articles are also critical of the College’s hiring process and Professor Frangieh’s academic qualifications. Similar to our hiring process for all tenured appointments, the College’s hiring process was based on a comprehensive and deliberate national search, which included a thorough review of Professor Frangieh’s academic credentials and background. As part of this process, the College obtained numerous reference letters from scholars and administrators at a number of prestigious institutions, including Yale University. Those references include letters from scholars and administrators who praised Professor Frangieh’s academic balance and perspective on Middle East issues, and his ability and desire to work effectively with students from a range of religious and political backgrounds.

As an institution of higher education, Claremont McKenna College is committed to upholding the academic freedom and free speech rights of all members of our community. These freedoms are essential to the search for truth and the advancement of knowledge, which is the central aim of any institution of higher learning, and are of particular importance when dealing with controversial or unpopular matters. It is our hope and expectation that members of the CMC community and the public at large can discuss and debate controversial topics such as those related to the Middle East within the context of respectful debate and civil discourse. [CJ's note: How is Frangieh's calling for a boycott of all Israeli academics and institutions "respectful debate" or "civil discourse"?]

Sincerely,

Gregory D. Hess

Vice President for Academic Affairs; Dean of the Faculty

James G. Boswell Professor of Economics;  George R. Roberts Fellow

Claremont McKenna College

Bauer Center 500 E. Ninth Street

Claremont, CA 91711

(909) 621-8117 (office)

(909) 607-1212 (fax)

www.shadowfed.org

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE:  This message and any attachments may contain information from Claremont McKenna College that may be confidential and/or privileged.  If you are not the intended recipient, you may not read, copy, distribute, or use this information.  If you have receive this message in error, please notify the sender immediately by reply e-mail and delete this message. Thank you.

Holocaust Denier, Conspiracy Theorist, Terrorist Supporters Co-Sign Petition With Frangieh

The Claremont McKenna administration still hasn't spoken about this mounting story, which is rather troubling. Looks like they would prefer it to get more attention in America and around the world. I wonder, though, what will people think when they Google Claremont McKenna?

Doesn't our reputation suffer when we have someone who directs a department supporting atrocious views and an administration's VP censoring Wikipedia rather than responding to those views? The charges that I'm quoting out of context are starting to disappear. I guess people figure out that I'm not.
 
And we haven't even really gotten started on this story. They'll be more to come.

Anyways, here's today's Big Peace story about the unsavory characters who signed the pro-Hezbollah petition with Frangieh.

 

At Claremont McKenna, America’s best conservative liberal arts college, President Pamela Gann’s administration still hasn’t issued a statement on the views of Bassam Frangieh, its Hezbollah-and-Hamas-supporting Middle East Studies director, despite repeated requests from alumni, students, and faculty.

With his wife, Aleta Wenger, “executive director of international programs” and herself a one-sided Israel critic, Frangieh will be running a program to train the next generation of Middle East diplomats in a satellite campus in Jordan with allegedly Kuwaiti money.
Unfortunately, rather than reply, Claremont McKenna’s Richard Rodner, Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs, has taken to Wikipedia manipulations deleting all criticism of him from his Wikipedia page. I documented that here. (He actually signed the edit as “Rrodner”.)

Alas, one of the subsequent edits to the Wikipedia page pointed out that Bassam Frangieh is one of 400+ professors and academics who signed a 2006 petition that called Israel a “Zionist killing machine”, promised to boycott Israel and Israeli academics, and supported Hezbollah as the true army of Lebanon. (Presumably, the numbers of other professors who affixed their signatures to the petition makes that support O.K.)

On the face of it, this argument is rather specious. It implies that truth is about consensus rather than well, what is true – as if the number of people that sign your petition indicates the moral righteousness of it.
But hey, if this is the argument that Frangieh’s defenders want to use, they had better claim the most “well known” names on the petition. After all, the preface to the pro-Hezbollah petition celebrated the signatories of several “well known” names in Middle East Studies. So just who are the names that have signed the famous petition with Bassam Frangieh, the director of a diplomatic program at America’s top liberal arts college?

They are as follows: Tariq Ali, Virginia Tilley, Mona Baker, Omar Barghouti, Haim Bresheeth, and Norman Finkelstein. I have chosen to limit my research to these six, though I would imagine that there are more odious individuals among the other signatories, but the “well known” names were the draw for many other signatories so I will focus on each of them in turn. In reality, it’s a “Who’s Who” of the anti-Israel movement and Bassam Frangieh, who signed that same petition, is in good company – if by good company you mean anti-Israel, pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah, Holocaust-conspiracy theory company.
First, there’s Tariq Ali. Mr. Ali is an actual communist whose anti-American views were in full display when, he wrote that Americans had brought 9-11 on themselves.

For the past sixty years and more the United States has toppled democratic leaders, bombed countries in three continents and used nuclear weapons against Japanese civilians, but it never knew what it felt like to have its own cities under attack. Now they [sic] know.

In Iraq, Ali supports “the resistance” and has called for the killing of American forces there. “The invaders of Iraq will eventually be harried out of the country by a growing national reaction to the occupation regime they install,” he wrote. In that article, he hoped that America’s “collaborators may meet the fate of Nuri Said before them” which recalled the dragging of former British-installed Iraqi P.M. who was savagely dragged through the streets.

He said that the 2005 attacks on London commuters were a result of how the West had mistreated Muslims. He wrote,

The principal cause of this violence is the violence that is being inflicted on the people of the Muslim world. … And unless this is recognized the horrors will continue. … The real solution lies in immediately ending the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.

Next, there’s Virginia Tilley, who actually wrote a book titled, The One State Solution, that called for Israel to cease being a Jewish state. That’s a political non-started, but relevant as Frangieh has brought to campus speakers who oppose the very notion of a two-state solution, like PLO member Sari Nusseinbeh, who is for it, then against it, and then for it again. He was against it when Frangieh brought him to campus.
After that, we have Mona Baker actually dismissed two Israeli academics as part of a 2002 planned boycott. Baker received a lot of controversy when she removed two Israeli academics from the editorial boards of two journals she edited for the simple reason that they were Israeli. She told them that while she respected them personally, but that she “did not wish to continue an official association with any Israeli under the present circumstances.”

For that effort, she was heavily criticized in academia. Harvard Professor Stephen Greenblatt, president of the Modern Language Association of America, called the firings “repellent”, “dangerous” and “morally bankrupt”. For his part, Tony Blair promised to “do anything necessary” to stop boycott of Israeli scholars. Feminist professor, Judith Butler of Berkley, meanwhile wrote that Baker “engaged established anti-Semitic stereotypes.”

As we have and have had, Israeli academics and students, it seems more than fair to ask Frangieh, who signed a petition calling for all Israeli academics and institutions to be boycotted, continues to support those views, given his associations and signed support of boycotts in the past.

Moving on, Omar Barghouti is a founding member of Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. Apparently, though, Barghouti doesn’t practice what he preaches. After graduating from Columbia, he is a pursuing a Masters at Tel Aviv University. Despite a petition that got thousands of signatures to remove him as a student, Tel Aviv University actually refused to, citing his academic freedom and Israel’s openness, but he turned around and criticized Tel Aviv University for not punishing him. Yes, really. Still he accuses Israel of perpetrating an “act of genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza.

Haim Bresheeth is an Israeli filmmaker who wants to boycott Israel. In one of the more crazy conspiracy theories I’ve read (at least this week), Bresheeth famously argued that “Zionists” were in league with the Nazis in a March 1989 a now-defunct magazine called Return.

Sound familiar? Frangieh himself once signed a petition that said that a “Zionist plot” was to blame for a U.S. Senate resolution that sought to partition Iraq into three autonomous regions. (I guess the Zionists are rather busy, huh?) This focus on “Zionist plots” is what anti-Semitic groups do the world over, but apparently, it’s OK at Claremont.

Finally, my personal favorite (for sheer nuttiness) is Norman Finkelstein, who has been described by the Anti-Defamation League as an “obsessive anti-Zionist” filled with “vitriolic hatred of Zionism and Israel.” He was actually banned from Israel for 10 years because of his ties with Hezbollah (there’s that organization again!) In all seriousness, Finkelstein has argued that Hamas, which is committed to the destruction of Israel and the murder of its civilians, was on a “peace offensive” prior to the 2008 war.

So what does this have to do with Bassam Frangieh and Claremont McKenna? Well, if his defenders insist on claiming how many professors are on this list, I’d love to hear them defend the “well known” names on this petition. A man is known by the company he keeps and Bassam Frangieh certainly keeps interesting company when he signs petitions.

But does Claremont McKenna, one of America’s best colleges, want to be known as a school that keeps company with a professor who signs these sorts of petitions?

We won’t know until they release a statement. Will they?

Campus Safety: "In And Out" Indeed

 Lots of friends have had bikes stolen -- where one friend reports that all of her workstudy earnings for the entire semester are going to the bike shop because a Beach cruiser she borrowed was stolen  -- but campus safety hasn't beefed up security. They are, as you shall see, making it an all you can eat, In N Out buffet on campus.

We've had actual invasions into dorm rooms this semester and someone was held at gun point up at Pomona College last year, in 2008 a CMC RA was stabbed, and a year before that a Pomona college girl was robbed at gun point in her dorm room. And lest, we forget,  in 2002, a gun man took refuge on Pitzer's campus. 

But our campus security spends more time going after people with BB guns than keeping us safe. 

 A few years ago an empty shelling casing was found on the ground at Pitzer College and the campus flipped out, prompting a campus wide email. 

Want to see just how pathetic we've become? Take a look at the Claremont College's April 2007 Crime and Incident Report. [The emphasis, as always, is mine.]

A student reported a male pointed a gun at her as she walked by a group in a parking lot. Campus Safety and Claremont Police officers responded, and located a group of students filming a class project with unloaded BB guns. The reporting student declined to file charges, and the students were given a warning and banned from the campus. The guns were confiscated.

That's right. They found out that the BB guns were unloaded and they still confiscated them.

.... but if you want campus safety, here's where you can find them: In N Out.