An interesting confrontation,this... between the Former Deputy Consul General at the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco and a tenured jihadi at Kent State in Ohio.
It occurred at an event co-sponsored by the undergraduate student government and entitled
“An Evening with Ishmael Khaldi.”
Khaldi is the aforementioned Israeli diplomat, a Bedouin Arab with an impressive career and the author of
A Shepherd’s Journey, which details his journey from a small village in the Galilee to the inner-circles of the Israeli Foreign Service.
The tenured radical is one Julio Cesar Pino, an Associate Professor of History at Kent State University on whom more later.
After Khaldi finished his talk, he opened the floor for a Q &A session, and Professor Pino rushed up to be the first in line. Khaldi had mentioned in his talk that Israel provides disaster aid all over the world, even in Muslim countries like Turkey, and Pino's opening remark was how Khaldi could justify speaking of foreign aid given from Israel to countries like Turkey, when that aid was financed by “blood money that came from the deaths of Palestinian children and babies.”
As Khaldi attempted to refute Pino's ridiculous statements, the crowd fell into an awkward silence:
It is not respectful to me here,” Khaldi said.
Pino responded by saying “your government killed people” and claimed Khaldi was not being respectful to him.
“I do respect you, but you are wrong,” Khaldi said. “It’s a lie.”
The exchange ended as Pino stormed out of the auditorium shouting “Death to Israel!”
One person in the crowd retaliated by shouting “Shame on you!”
After the altercation with Pino, Khaldi moved on to more questions, but he still referred back to his thoughts on the heckler.
“Let’s respect each other; it starts from there,” Khaldi said. “By the way, this is not respect.”
Khaldi said he thinks people misunderstand what’s happening with Israel, and it may explain some of Pino’s comments.
“Is this what that professor is telling you?” Khaldi said. “It is my responsibility to tell you the truth and build relationships.”
After the speech ended, the remaining students in the auditorium could be heard admonishing the professor’s behavior.
One student in attendance said, “I get it’s freedom of speech and all that, but that guy just makes us [the university] look bad.”
For those of you who don't know, most of Israel's Arabs are pretty well integrated into Israeli society.They serve as judges, Supreme Court Justices, businessmen, Knesset members, journalists, government ministry jobs and in pretty much any other position you could imagine.
This is particularly true of Israel's Druse, Bedouin and Circassian minorities, who insisted on serving in the IDF and being subject to the compulsory military service like everyone else from the beginning of Israel's statehood.
So much for the 'apartheid ' and 'ethnic cleansing' you hear so much about!
Julio Cesar Pino is another matter entirely. He's a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of History at Kent State University, specializing in Latin American History. He has always
endorsed a Marxist, anti-American point of view and was an agnostic until 2000, when he became a Muslim and quickly integrated a jihadi point of view into his belief system. Pino’s Muslim name is Assad Jibril Pino.
In an April 2002 guest column for the Kent State campus newspaper, Pino penned an effusive tribute to Ayat al-Akras, a teenage Palestinian suicide bomber who had murdered two Israelis at a Jerusalem supermarket on March 29. In that piece -- titled “Singing out Prayer for a Youth Martyr” -- Pino insisted that Akras was no terrorist but had “died a martyr’s death … in occupied Jerusalem, Palestine.” Pino also derided President Bush as a “numbskull,” and called for boycotts of all Israeli and American products.
In 2005 Pino wrote another lovely letter to the Kent State campus newspaper, this time applauding University of Colorado professor and academic plagiarist Ward Churchill for his “righteous obsession with European and American genocide and terrorism against peoples of color all over the world, from 1492 to 2001.” Pino also wrote that during the Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy had planned a “genocide against the Cuban people”; that President Bill Clinton had killed “more than 500,000 Iraqi children” by imposing sanctions against Saddam Hussein in Iraq; and that “cocaine cowboy” George W. Bush had “added an extra 100,000 corpses to the pile of brown colored [Iraqi] corpses.”
Pino has also been very public that he considers his role not that of a teacher but that an indoctrinator, who
refers to his students at Kent State as his "little jihadists" and his “beloved Taliban.”
Pino was also
a frequent contributor to the now defunct weblog
Global War, which described itself as "“jihadist news service” that provided “battle dispatches, training manuals, and jihad videos to our [Muslim] brothers worldwide.”
In one of his screeds for
Global War, was titled “Sister Detonates Herself to Eliminate Shia Traitors.” This piece was a love letter to a female suicide bomber who had killed 41 people in Iraq.
So his calling for genocide against an entire nation is not exactly new or out of character.
Pino's far from alone in Academia in taking a paycheck from a society he despises and is doing his best to destroy, one poisoned mind at a time. I'm sure the administration at Kent State if asked would mouth a lot of pious homilies about academic freedom, freedom of expression, a university as a home for diverse views...we've heard it all before. Besides, he's got tenure, something the university chose to grant him. So it is endorsing his views by protecting them.
But the fact is that you hear a lot of voices like Pino's and precious few from the other side. Does Kent State support calls for genocide? I have a feeling their reaction might be different if Pino was screaming something like 'death to blacks' or death to an African country. Some opinions ought to be beyond redemption in a free society, let alone given the shield of tenure.
The American university system is in dire need of major reform, and our society's survival may well hinge on it. Mark Steyn is entirely correct in his book,'The End Of America' in referring to this issue as the head of the snake.
-Selah-
( hat tip, Aussie Dave at
Israelly Cool for the starting point)
