Earlier today I opined about the story of Julio Pino, a professor of Latin American History at Kent State University and convert to Islam. At the time, I had some rhetorical questions about the story. Some odd things have happened that have me asking a new set of questions.
First, a little more background. Bill Sloat linked to KSU's press statement about the matter. It includes the following:
- When the issue came to our attention, we investigated the issue and found the following:
- n We have no evidence that this Web site is authored by Pino – that is not his picture on the site, and it contains no reference to him or to Kent State. In any case, there is no connection between this site and the university.
Which is what I noticed surfing through the site today. As it happens, I had lunch today with a fellow blogger and we got to speculating about how Pino got linked to the site in the first place. Red speculated that someone must have found a Pino-penned story or op-ed through a Google search and jumped to the conclusion that the whole thing was a Pino operation.
So I searched for Pino to try and figure it out. And at the same time I went back to the website itself. (The FireFox tabs are both a blessing and a curse to someone with ADD.) That's when the weirdness hit. When you plug in or click-through the link to the site -- globalwar.bloghi.com -- you get about a second of this:
Then this:
That's DefendAmerica.mil, the Department of Defence's news website for the Global War on Terror. No matter how I try to get to GlobalWar, it shifts over to DefendAmerica.
I did some more searching. Google is now lousy with right-wing blogs denouncing Pino, calling for his head, exhorting the villagers to take up pitchforks and torches and march up to the castle. About what you'd expect. I also noticed a bunch of blogs denouncing Pino on BlogHi.
As it turns out, blogHi is a free bloghosting service that appears to be based in Germany, though all the pages I found were written in English. Incidently, check out what's number one in their Most Popular Blogs tonight:
Not surprising, given the publicity. What's a little more surprising is that the next five blogHi blogs in the list have anti-Pino postings from last year. Apparently Lover of Angels, the screen name of Global War's proprietor was making quite a name for himself in the blogHi community. You can check out posts from Soccer Mom, MovingOut, and SmallDoseofReality. The last one is especially revelatory as it includes an extensive comments war between Lover of Angels and everyone else in which Lover is acting, well, quite unprofessorial. And frankly doesn't sound very authentically jihadi, either. All this leads up to a petition for Pino to be removed based on his work on Global war. Again, this was all happening in 2006
And I would also point out that someone took the trouble to reserve the domain juliopino at blogHi to construct a one-post satire site.
But in all that, I can't find an original piece of evidence saying that the real life Professor Julio Pino is the man behind the online entity Lover of Angels. All I find is a bunch of people on an obscure bloghost saying that it's so. And they might have been prompted to by whoever was running Lover of Angels. In his spit-flying comments to the Small Dose post, he refers to himself as a college professer and makes it clear he has done so in the past.
Even the page about Pino on David Horowitz's Discover the Networks -- a website that can make the mooniest bat look sane by comparison -- mentions nothing about the GlobalWar site. So did Pino get linked by anything other than the postings on blogHi?
Did anyone ask any questions about that? Like did they ask Prof. Pino if he was in fact Lover of Angels? Did they attempt to compare the rantings on Global War with Pino's writings which apparently run to the intemperate?
And did anyone think it odd that this guy:
Used as an avatar, this guy:
(Incidently, Little Green Footballs reports that the photo on the site is of a 9/11 highjacker of Flight 93.)
People are saying, over and over and over, that Pino was the guy behind the site. Where does that come from? And by the way, who has hijacked the site now? This time, I'm not just asking rhetorically. I have emails out. Let you know if I find out anything.
7 comments:
I have more on this story here:
http://markedmanner.blogspot.com/2007/02/julio-pino-teaching-jihad-at-kent-state.html
Take a look at everything before you make up your mind.
Absolutely, MM. And I have no problem saying that his views are appalling whatever his link to the site may or may not be. But I'd like to see what evidence Mike Adams has of Pino being Lover of Angels. Right now Adams has demonstrated that Pino has failed to refute his accusations. As an attorney, I like to see a prima facie case first.
I see that Marked Manner got here before I did..
Personally, I thought that the ABJ piece was instructive, in that the only think that was really denied was 'ownership' of the global war site, and Dr.Pino's role described as a submitter of articles.
And granted, there's a big difference between writing the content of a site, and simply suggesting some sources of material to the site 'owner'.
I'm thinking about revisiting this piece - there's a ton of issues, competing interests, etc., here that are probably lost in shuffle, due to the nature of the site being one long incitment to violence.
If you read the KSU student newspaper, pino's department head John Jameson admitted pino's involvement.
Keep an eye out for a detailed article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer this coming Sunday.
jpn:
If you had read the previous post, referenced in this one, you would have known that I acknowledge that and say that any involvement is bad.
But all of that might shake your apparent belief that liberals will all give this guy a pass, and we can't have that.
please check out my blog. elmersbro.bloghi.com and search for info on pino. I collected screen shots where he used KSU's IP address at the history dept., had personal email contact with the doctor where he used his KSU email address and where he left comments about knowing when the next martyrdom action would occur. This isn't a right wing hit job. It appears that this man has been using KSU resources to write his blog. He never denied in any of my contacts with him that he is indeed Dr. Pino and at the start used his university picture as an avatar.
I actually had him as a professor and none of this news surprised me, only that Kent State claims that no complaints have been filed against him, since several students in my class filed some. I was always amazed that this man had gotten hired and received tenure since he taught about America's imperialist policies and why Israel was an illegal state during a modern American history class, none of which was in the syllabus
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