First this piece at Front Page Mag, then one by the JPost under the fold.
Over six months after Pessin’s Facebook post critiquing Hamas, the student newspaper at Connecticut College launched a surprise character assassination by publishing three editorials condemning Pessin (including on the front page), without giving him a chance to defend himself against libelous accusations of racism.
A TALE OF TWO PROFESSORS
How Connecticut College treats a pro-Israel professor — and how Kent treats a pro-Islamist one.
To understand just how depraved today’s college campuses are, compare the treatment of two professors – one defending a Western, pro-American democracy (Israel) and the other suspected of supporting this century’s most gruesome Islamist terror organization, the Islamic State (“ISIS”).
Julio Pino, an associate history professor at Kent State University, is currently under investigation by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security for potential ties to ISIS.
Pino’s jihadist leanings include possible threats against the U.S. government and virulently anti-Israel rants. In 2002, he praised a teenage Palestinian suicide bomber who had killed two people in Jerusalem, saying that the teen had “died a martyr’s death in occupied Jerusalem, Palestine.”
In a 2014 open letter to “academic friends of Israel,” Pino published an unhinged and anti-Semitic invective:“I hold you directly responsible for the murder of over 1,400 Palestinian children, women and elderly civilians over the past month…[w]hile The Chosen drain the blood of innocents without apologies you hide behind the mask of academic objectivity, nobility of research and the reward of teaching to foreign youth – in a segregated university, of course.” Pino closed the letter with: “Jihad until victory!”
Despite decades of hateful and extremist statements, Kent State reportedly gave Pino multiple awards, including the Faculty Excellence Award in 2010, 2003, 2000 and 1996, along with the Professional Excellence Award in 1999 and 1997.
The Kent Stater, the university’s student newspaper, provided him with a video platform to defend himself, and the editorial board wrote that “it is too soon to make a judgment on the investigation, both from the FBI and public perspective.” When asked about the allegations against Pino, the editor of the paper, Emily Mills,reportedly replied: “He’s very well spoken…He expresses his viewpoints, which he has every right to do.”
Kent State remains comfortable with him in the classroom despite his Islamist rhetoric and now a federal investigation.
Contrast Pino’s treatment with how Connecticut College has persecuted professor Andrew Pessin for defending Israel in its 2014 war with Hamas (a State Department-designated terrorist organization).
More here. H/T: ChanahS.
Pessin affair exposes Connecticut College anti-Semitism
The most heavily Jewish US college and other facts about Jews at American colleges Why college students who fight for social justice should support Israel
It started with an August 2014 Facebook post written as Israel and Hamas fought their latest war.
STUDENTS WALK on the campus of a university in Connecticut. (photo credit:REUTERS)
A pro-Israel professor won’t be on campus at Connecticut College when classes start Monday, missing the second straight semester since his 2014 Facebook post criticizing Hamas led to death threats and ostracism.
Andrew Pessin “requested and received a sabbatical for the Spring semester to continue his studies in Jewish philosophy and Israel studies,” Connecticut College spokeswoman Pamela Serfes said in an email last week. “He has been and continues to be a valued member of the Connecticut College faculty.”
The vague and misleading statement glosses over the intensity of the campaign against Pessin. He first took a medical leave last spring as a smear campaign against him peaked. The controversy exposed an administration unwilling to enforce its own honor code to protect a professor against anti-Israel activists and a student journalist responsible for covering the very controversy she had joined.
It started with an August 2014 Facebook post written as Israel and Hamas fought their latest war, in which Pessin referred to Hamas as “a rabid pit bull chained in a cage, regularly making mass efforts to escape.”
It wasn’t until March that the comment suddenly resurfaced to ignite a campus firestorm. On March 2, three editorials condemning Pessin were published in the print and online editions of Connecticut College’s student newspaper, College Voice. The op-eds, which started on the front page and covered all of page three and part of page four, accused Pessin of racism and comparing Palestinians to rabid dogs.
Not so, the professor insisted. He was talking about the Hamas terrorists who govern the territory, but the Voice reportedly didn’t bother to give him a chance to present his side.
Pessin, a heretofore popular philosophy professor, stood accused of peddling “hate speech.”
