Traitor Muslim Professor

Kent State University professor under FBI investigation for alleged ties to ISIS

BY CHRISTOPHER BRENNAN
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Updated: Wednesday, January 20, 2016

The FBI has been investigating a controversial Ohio professor for alleged involvement with Islamic State terrorists.

Students and colleagues of Kent State History academic Julio Pino have been interviewed after concerns that he could be recruiting pupils to join ISIS, an unnamed FBI agent told student paperKentWired.com.

The associate professor told the site that he does not support Islamic State and has never discussed the group in his classes.

Pino, who is teaching two classes this semester, generally focuses on Latin America and is currently working on a study of African Muslim slaves in Brazil during the 19th century.

He said that he has not been contacted by either the authorities or Kent State about the investigation against him, though an FBI spokeswoman confirmed it to the Daily News.

University spokesman Eric Mansfield said that the institution had been contacted and was fully cooperating with the feds.

A statement from Kent State added, “As this is an ongoing investigation, we will have no further comment. The FBI has assured Kent State that there is no threat to campus.”

The FBI’s investigation of the former Fulbright Scholar, which reportedly has lasted for more than a year and a half, is not the first time that he has come under scrutiny by law enforcement.

The Secret Service said in 2009 that it was looking into Pino “as an individual who came to our attention who needed to be interviewed,” according to the Akron Beacon Journal.

Facing another investigation, Pino told Kent Wired, “My current status is that I’m a citizen of the United States with all the rights and obligations that that entails. I follow the law.”

“I advocate that others do as well, and I ask others to respect my freedom of speech as I respect theirs.”

Pino, who has been at Kent State since 1992 and has tenure, previously made headlines nationwide for controversial opinions on the Middle East.

The pro-Palestine professor yelled “Death to Israel” during a speech by former Israeli diplomat Ishmael Khaldi in 2011, which led to public criticism from then-university president Lester Lefton.

In 2002, he wrote a eulogy for a teenage Palestinian suicide bomber published in the student newspaper.

Among those interviewed recently by investigators was Emily Mills, the Kent Wired's current editor.

The Professor’s Islamist Call to Battle

Posted by Cinnamon Stillwell on Mar 22nd, 2010 and filed under FrontPage.

Sherman Jackson, also known as Abdal Hakim Jackson, is a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan.

Jackson specializes in Islamic law and has written and spoken extensively on the subject. Soon after the

September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorist attacks, Jackson took the line popular among apologists, stating at a September 2001 University of Michigan Teach-in titled, “Terrorism: A Perversion of Islam,” that “the killing of innocent peoples is forbidden by the law of Islam and it has been from the beginning of Islam.”

But it turns out that not only is Jackson an apologist, he an outspoken proponent of the Islamist subversion of Western civilization.

Jackson made this abundantly clear at the Reviving the Islamic Spirit – 8th Convention in Toronto, Canada in December 2009, as a participant in the panel, “The New We: Muslims in Future of Western Society.” Jonathan Usher, who attended and wrote about the conference for Campus Watch, described Jackson’s speech as nothing less than “a call to battle.” As he put it, “It had little to do with peaceful co-existence with the West, but was an exhortation for Islam to dominate the West.” According to Usher, Jackson

…believes that the Muslim and Western worlds are in conflict and competition, and that only one can end up dominant. Put simply, he wants to replace Western culture with Muslim culture.

…Jackson expressed a desire to be included in American society—but not if any sort of cultural sacrifice were required. He said that adapting to Western culture would lead to being a Muslim in name only and advocated defining America by Muslim standards and imposing cultural and intellectual supremacy. He urged Muslims not to follow Western cultural authority, but rather to achieve their own cultural authority from the inside, as part of the system.

…Lastly, to cheers, he said that his primary commitment was to Allah, not to America.

Moreover, Jackson has a history of making such radical statements.

He co-authored a 2000 online book titled, American Public Policy and American-Muslim Politics and published by the Chicago-based International Strategy and Policy Institute, whose mission is to “promote the correct understanding of Islam and Muslims in the United States.” Jackson’s coauthors were DePaul University Director of Islamic World Studies Aminah Beverly McCloud and State University of New York at Binghamton professor and director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies Ali Mazrui. McCloud is a former board member of the Chicago branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and a follower of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, while Mazrui’s bio notes that he is “one of the first to try and link the treatment of Palestinians with South Africa’s apartheid” and has also “argued that sharia law is not incompatible with democracy and supported its introduction in some parts of northern Nigeria.”

In the chapter, “Muslims, Islamic Law and Public Policy in the United States,” Jackson cites the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s influential theories about altering societies not through politics, but through cultural and educational institutions. Jackson proposes that American Muslims approach the “difficult task of penetrating, appropriating and redirecting American culture” in order to “influence the legal order in America.” As he puts it:

…it should be understood that once this is done, there are no Constitutional impediments to having these laws applied in the public domain. Muslims must be vocal and confident in articulating the public utility underlying the rules on things like riba [usury], adultery, theft, drinking, contracts, pre-marital sex, child-custody and even polygyny. This should all be done, however, in the context of an open acceptance of American custom (urf) as a legally valid source in areas where the shari’ah admits the reliance upon custom.

As for the gradual acceptance of the more horrifying aspects of Sharia law, Jackson notes that “it would be foolish to deny that the prospects for American acceptance of such institutions as stoning, or flogging or amputation are virtually nil, at least for the foreseeable future.” But he concludes on a note only an Islamist could find comforting:

…notions of what is cruel and unusual, of what is barbaric, of what is draconian (which is the real basis upon which America rejects these punishments) are a function of culture, not law. It is only through changes in American culture that American attitudes towards such things are likely to change. Thus, in the end, as in the beginning, we are brought face to face with the inextricable connection between American culture and Muslim self-determination. May God grant us the courage and the vision to rise to the task before us.

This call to gradually replace the liberties enshrined in the U.S. Constitution with seventh century notions of justice is both frightening and morally repugnant.

Despite a record of expressing such extreme views, Jackson has made a name for himself as a moderate and a reformer. His success in this charade stems in part from his willingness to break from his peers and publicly discuss Islamic terrorism, its theological underpinnings, and the need for related reform. An article in the Wesleyan Argus quoted a November 2007 Jackson speech on “Jihad, Terrorism, and Modern Violence” at Wesleyan University:

‘Muslims in the West must be active and vocal in their condemnation of current violations of hirabah,’ he insisted, referring to the Sharia law that outlaws any act of publicly directed violence that spreads fear and helplessness. According to Jackson, hirabah more than covers today’s conception of terrorism. He discussed the moderate Muslim unwillingness to publicly decry acts of terrorism and attributed it to the desire to not be seen as ‘Uncle Toms.’

But Patrick Poole, writing for the American Thinker in September 2007, calls Jackson’s reasoning and motives into question. He describes Jackson as one of the earliest proponents of the “Islamic lexicon” and, in particular, an advocate for replacing the term jihad with hirabah in discussing Islamic terrorism. Poole and other skeptics allege that, in practice, this is nothing more than a semantic sleight of hand that serves to obscure the legitimization of terrorism within Islam and to further the Muslim Brotherhood’s civilization-jihadist process.

Poole notes that Jim Guirard of the Truespeak Institute is the “foremost advocate for this approach,” and that Sherman Jackson is among the scholars he relies upon for his findings. Poole points to an unclassified memo from Pentagon Joint Staff analyst Stephen Coughlin in which Jackson is cited as one of Guirard’s contributors, along with fellow Middle East studies professors John Esposito of Georgetown University and Muqtedar Khan of the University of Delaware. Summarizing Coughlin’s findings, Poole concludes that,

…as Walid Phares and Stephen Coughlin have already revealed, many of the Western Muslim advocates of this new approach are directly tied to known Muslim Brotherhood front groups operating in the US. As Coughlin itemizes, Sherman Jackson is a “trustee” to the North American Islamic Trust, and affiliated with the Islamic Society of North America and the Muslim Student Association, the first two of which were named as unindicted co-conspirators in the current Holy Land Foundation terror financing federal trial underway in Dallas, and the last was the original organizational wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in America. The hiraba-jihad terminology has also been endorsed by the Wahhabist Council for Islamic Education and the extremist mouthpiece Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), also named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial. That is telling in and of itself.

Jackson is also considered an expert on the intersection of Islam and African-Americans (he is himself an African-American convert to Islam). His 2005 book on the subject, Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Towards the Third Resurrection, was reviewed favorably by radical Islam apologist John Esposito, James H. Cone (the originator of black liberation theology and stated inspiration for controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright, President Obama’s former “spiritual mentor” in Chicago), and DePaul professor Aminah Beverly McCloud. Beyond McCloud’s aforementioned affiliation with CAIR and the Nation of Islam, she played a pivotal role in influencing Washington, D.C. PBS station WETA’s decision to cancel its airing of the laudable documentary on moderate Muslims, Islam vs. Islamists, in early 2007.

Jackson’s career may be peppered with associations and endorsements from some of the worst apologists and radicals from the field of Middle East studies—and his involvement in the obfuscating “truespeak” movement points to even more troublesome ties with Muslim Brotherhood front groups—but, ultimately, it is his own words that prove the most damning. His stated agenda clearly has nothing to do with moderation or reform; it is quite simply that of an Islamist.

“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American... There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag.... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”