An Ohio university banned a professor accused of sympathizing with the Islamic State and attempting to recruit students for the group, after he allegedly lied to the FBI, according to a Tuesday report.
Kent State University suspended and kicked history professor Julio Pino off campus after the FBI claimed the professor lied regarding a conversation in which he encouraged a friend to commit terrorism, reported Fox News.
Authorities arrested Pino’s friend, identified as J.E., after the man had threatened the judge involved in his child custody case. J.E. subsequently chatted with Pinto on Facebook regarding how he would murder people if his parental rights were revoked.
“I will kill 100s of people if they take my rights as a father away!” J.E. told Pino on September 11, 2015, according to The Washington Post. “Hell, 10000’s! … It’s time for Men to act like men again … See the thing I’ve got on my side is God. That allows me certain rights. One of those rights is to strike down evil with furious vengeance!…People don’t even know how crazy I am yet! That’s because no ones ever tried to take my [relative]. They’re about to meet to [the] Monster they’ve created.”
The professor then allegedly told J.E. to “devour them,” to which the man said, “Thank you! I will!”
Pino denied having this conversation to the FBI and said he had “never heard of [J.E. or] maybe I heard of him through the news.”
“It is certainly possible that he could have heard of me and made up this conversation, invented it,” he later claimed.
“I f***ing love Julio Pino, even if he does eventually do something that most consider horrible,” J.E. said in January 2016 after he began making threats against his judge. “I’ll still love him because I know him in a deeper way than most of you even could.”
Kent State suspended Pino and banned him from stepping foot on campus after the Department of Justice filed charges against the professor on Monday. Pino has made waves for more than that one exchange.
“Sheik Osama (May Allah be Pleased with Him) was the greatest, and deserves praise for kicking off this jihad … The brave warriors of [Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] and the Nusraf Jabbat should join #Islamic State,” he said on Facebook in May 2015, according to Canary Mission.
A year before that, he posted a photo of himself in front of the U.S. Capitol with the caption “I told [9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah] to head for the Capitol, but did he listen? No!” Pino described another photo of the Capitol with: “I come to bury D.C., not to praise it.”
“Death to Israel!” the professor shouted at former Israel Consulate deputy consul general Ishmael Khaldi during a 2011 lecture by the former official at Kent State.
Kent State has called Pino’s remarks “reprehensible and counter to our core values of civil discourse and respect” but asserted they constituted free speech and that tenure protected the professor. Only 17 percent of Pino’s reviewers on Rate My Professor indicate they would take a class with the professor again.
The professor plans to retire at the close of the spring 2018 semester, said Pino’s lawyer, Warner Mendenhall.
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