Watchdog report prompts Kent State prof’s resignation from journal

By Daniel Mael | Watchdog.org

A Kent State University professor has resigned from the editorial board of an academic journal following Watchdog’s publication of a letter in which he accused pro-Israel academics of being “directly responsible for the murder of over 1,400 Palestinian children, women and elderly civilians.”

In an unsolicited Nov. 2 email to Watchdog.org (full text below), associate professor Julio Pino, also known by his Muslim name Assad Jibril Pino, said his fellow editors at Latin American Perspectives have demanded that he apologize and publicly retract his remarks, published in Watchdog’s Aug. 6 and Aug. 13 articles.

In response, Pino attacked the journal and resigned.

“I apologize for not recognizing earlier that there is but one path to liberation – daily blows against the empire,” Pino wrote, adding that he was sorry “for having served on the same editorial board with Yankee stooges and frightened, flinching pussycats.”

Most of his colleagues, he wrote, “study Latin America for the same reason [Adolf] Eichmann learned Hebrew: to better serve a ravenous, rapacious empire – in this case, the Washington-Tel Aviv Axis.”

Pino’s earlier comments – he called for “jihad” and declared Israel “the spiritual heir to Nazism” – have already earned him an unsigned condemnation on the Kent State University website. (You can read the text of the condemnation here.)

When asked in August for further comment on Pino’s open letter, Kent State spokesman Bob Burford told Watchdog, “That is all we have to release at this time.”

Kent State University is a public university that receives more than $137 million in state funds.

Neither the university nor Latin American Perspectives was available for comment.

Full text of his letter:

Dear Watchdog.org:

The editorial board of Latin American Perspectives, (LAP) a journal of Latin American studies on which I serve as Participating Editor, has asked me to write you a letter of “apology and retraction” regarding my “Open Letter to Academic Friends of Israel” reproduced in part by Watchdog.org in August of this year. Here is my reply, which I kindly request you publish:

You heard the screams, my fellow editors of Latin American Perspectives. You saw the anguish in the baby girl’s face. You witnessed the phosphorous bombs fall on Gaza, spelling out “shalom and napalm from the Israelis” across the sky. Yet, with these horrors blasted around the world via television, radio, telephone and social media you took me, not the war criminals, to task for condemning academic collaboration with apartheid Israel and its bestial passions.

You dare tell me the mission of the journal is to explore capitalism and the methodology of the liberation of Latin America from capital. I say most of you study Latin America for the same reason Eichmann learned Hebrew; to better serve a ravenous, rapacious empire ­– in this case, the Washington-Tel Aviv Axis. Latin America is not an island, and the horrors perpetrated every day by the empire in Bogota, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires ­– murder by capital ­– are a mirror image of the Zionist Buchenwalds in Gaza and the West Bank. You claim the mantle of anti-imperialism? Be wise, remember and recite the words of Che’: “if you are capable of trembling of indignation each time that an injustice is committed in the world, we are comrades.”

I will make contrition, if that be your wish.

I apologize for not recognizing earlier that there is but one path to liberation—daily blows against the empire. Mea culpa for thinking that soi dissant Marxists believed justice extends to the Palestinians too. Mea maxima culpa for having served on the same editorial board with Yankee stooges and frightened, flinching pussycats.

Fortunately, peace descends upon those who follow the path of righteous guidance. In the streets of Brazil they marched for Palestine and died, symbolically, to show that liberty prevails. In the parliament of Colombia they wore the kaffiyeh and stood up for Gaza. And in Cuba Fidel, with his customary acumen and blistering honesty, labeled the fifty-one days of Israeli terrorism “a new holocaust.”

I stand brazo-a-brazo with these brave fighters and hereby resign all of my offices and titles with Latin American Perspectives.

Patria o muerte, venceremos!

“And Allah has promised you one of the two great things, victory or martyrdom.”

Julio Cesar Pino / Assad Jibril Pino