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 monthâ¦[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 spokenâ¦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).
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.
In a reportedly packed auditorium (including members of the media, like NBC), Connecticut College President Katherine Bergeron said that she was "disappointed by the language" of Pessin's post, which "seemed to show poor judgment," and she praised "the valor of the students who responded to these incidents by exercising their own right of free speech with confidence and intellectual acuity." These statements by Bergeron continue to appear on the college's website, long after a Washington Post column exposed evidence strongly suggesting that the allegations against Pessin were politically motivated lies.
More absurdly, Bergeron promised to "review our social media policies to ensure they include appropriate advisory language about respectful expression," even as her administration continues to allow the school's student newspaper to host libels against Pessin alongside anti-Semitic diatribes about Zionists ruling the world. The administration also continues to display statements from scores of academic departments, school officials, student associations, and other college affiliates, denouncing Pessin on the official Connecticut College website. As of this writing, no other issue or speech is similarly scrutinized or condemned on the school's website.
In her remarks last March, Bergeron also promised to update the school's "protocol for bias incidents so that those who come forward under these circumstances are well served by the process."
Too bad her lofty commitments proved empty after the bias incidents against Jewish students at the school last December, when Conn Students in Solidarity with Palestine ("CSSP") placed posters around campus bashing Birthright, a program that helps young people travel to Israel. The CSSP posters call the program a form of "settler colonialism" and demonize Israel.
As Phyllis Chesler reported, the CSSP campaign "frightened and humiliatedâ¦Jewish students on campus who will soon be visiting Israel for the first time" but the administration's spineless response was merely to "recognize CSSP's right to share its perspective [and] the right of members of the community to express their disagreement with the posters' characterization of the Birthright program."
Anti-Israel sentiment is therefore welcome on bulletin boards throughout Connecticut College's campus, regardless of whether it is true. But the "poor judgment" Andrew Pessin showed in a Facebook post merits his absence from campus for at least a year.
It gets much worse. In her article attacking Pessin last March, Lamiya Khandaker admits that she was Pessin's student but "never felt victimized in class," even as she claims to "feel unsafe" because of a barely noticed Facebook post published six months earlier. Shockingly, Khandaker initiated a campus-wide campaign accusing Pessin of racism, even after he apologized for any misunderstanding, clarified that his post was intended only about Hamas and not all Palestinians, and deleted his post.
When the Washington Post revealed evidence that Khandaker's accusations against Pessin were likely factual distortions, the administration should have realized that Khandaker's op-ed probably violated the honor system at Connecticut College because: